Hater's Delight – April 2023

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April is a useless month for useless people. You’ve got Easter (I guess), taxes, and a holiday for stoners, all of which combine with some of the year’s most temperamental weather to make for an absolutely miserable stretch of 30 days. At least spring will be here soon, and we can all be unhappy in slightly warmer weather. 

If you’re just now joining us for the first time, Hater’s Delight is a monthly micro-review column brought to you by our team of Swim Into The Sound writers and a guest or two. This is a space where we can vent about the things online and in music that have gotten under our skin this past month. Each writer gets a paragraph to bitch about their chosen topic, then once we expel the Haterade from our systems, we all go back to loving music and enjoying art. Speaking of which, if you’re more in the mood for some positivity, here’s a playlist of all this month’s new releases that I enjoyed (or at least found notable) to help you keep up on everything that’s happened in April. 

Without further ado, let’s get all our complaints about April out before we flip the calendars over. 

BOYGENIUS

Each of these artists makes decent-to-middling pop-rock on their own time (Dacus decent, Baker between, Bridgers middling); that they must also fill my social media feed as a unit is frankly a waste of both my time as a viewer and your time as a poster. With such a massive profile (and a guaranteed sold-out arena tour arranged by their "not-so" major record label with ex-indie cred), the discourse is superfluous. "The Record" was never going to be a "flop." The stans (their parents?) will sell the vinyl out, sell the t-shirt out, sell the shows out, etc., regardless of lyrical fumbles, repetitive themes, poorly sequenced tracks, or cloyingly sweet marketing. There is no worthwhile angle regarding this fucking band. You can listen to it, but I wanna fucking talk about something else. (People who talked about it well: Miranda Reinert, as always, and SITS’ own Grace Robins-Somerville.)

SUB-HATE:
To the writer who dissed “Girls” by The Dare last month: I hope you never feel the loving touch of a woman. Song rocks – officially signed and endorsed by a lesbian.

Mikey Montoni – @dumpsterbassist 


Trippin’ On The Name Of A Metal Fest

Let me preface this by saying that I love the Texas band Power Trip just like any other hesher. Riley Gale (RIP) was undeniably one of the most iconic frontmen of his era. The remaining members of Power Trip have been fairly quiet since Riley’s passing, other than the exciting new band Fugitive featuring guitarist Blake Ibanez. But the band has had quite a bit of coverage in the first weeks of April. They announced the physical release of their Live In Seattle album, to many fans’ underwhelm, and simply tweeted out “no” in response to the Power Trip festival announcement featuring AC/DC, Guns N’ Roses, Iron Maiden, Metallica, Ozzy Osbourne, and Tool. Many Power Trip band diehards came to the band’s defense, but let’s take this seriously for a moment. The likely realities of the situation are: 1) the people who put this thing together have never heard of Power Trip, the band. 2) Other than being a common idiom where they got their name, “Power Trip” has been used in heavy music for decades before the band you know the most. Cleveland metal outfit Chimaira released a song called “Power Trip” in 2004, stoner rock luminaries Monster Magnet had their Powertrip album in 1998, and there was even an ‘80s band in Power Trip’s exact subgenre (“crossover,” combining elements of hardcore punk and thrash metal) called Powertrip featuring members of underground LA punk bands Angry Samoans and Würm. So, to the hardcore kids that not only wouldn’t go to the Power Trip festival anyway, but likely couldn’t afford it either, there’s nothing to trip about here. 

SUB-HATE:
Hardcore bands, let’s retire the tradition of one-word band names. It was easier in the ‘80s and ‘90s when you just banked on someone else not having your name idea. Now you can very easily do a Google or Discogs search. California band Fury is the 28th known artist with that name, for fuck’s sake. Find something that stands out. 

Logan Archer Mounts – @VERTICALCOFFIN


People on Music Twitter Pretending to Hate Music Twitter Discourse

Like everyone else who contributes to this column and everyone who reads it (yes, that includes you), I spend a lot of time (definitely too much time) talking about music on Twitter. There’s this pattern– especially in online forums that are simultaneously fragmented and insular –of everyone getting thrown into a tizzy over a bad-faith comment, a bad-faith reading of a good-faith comment, a divisive issue, an actually-not-that-divisive issue, a hot take, a cold take, a lukewarm take, etc; talking it to death, and then complaining about the people who are talking it to death. And don’t get me wrong, I’ve read enough insipid online music drama to turn my brain into a slushie, but don’t pretend to hate the discourse while you eat it up like the little piggy that you are. Or, in between two stupid discourse cycles, complain about how Twitter is “boring now,” barely betraying your need for more ragebait. Either admit to yourself that part of you likes getting mad online (again, why do you think this column exists?) or take a walk outside without your phone for a few minutes (ever the multitude-container, I did BOTH of these things just today and I feel FUCKING GREAT). 

Bottom Line: Don’t go to the circus for news and get mad when you hear it from clowns. You love this shit. 

Grace Robins-Somerville – @grace_roso


The Big Re-Do

If you were to ask me what my favorite Drive-By Truckers song is, I’m sure I’d have different answers depending on my mood or the season, but usually, I say “Puttin’ People on The Moon” from their opus, The Dirty South. Hood’s raspy voice and strong storytelling portray a character driven to crime by a hostile political hellscape. The song felt powerful in 2004 but feels even more necessary 20 years later. Now, Drive-By Truckers are reissuing a “director’s cut” of The Dirty South, with additional songs left off the record and some new recordings. This brings me to my issue—they have re-recorded the vocals of “Puttin’ People on The Moon,” and they’ve made it worse.

Don’t get me wrong, every artist has the right to do whatever they want with their work, but DBT are calling this version of “Puttin’ People on The Moon” definitive? Hood’s vocal take 20 years ago is nasally and raspy, yet full of desperation, anger, and anxiety. He is fully embodying the character he is portraying. Though Hood’s voice is still strong two decades later, there is no improvement found on this reworked version. If anything, the confident and cleaner vocal take (still raspy, less nasally) softens the blow of the song’s message. All this is to say I don’t think I can justify the $46 for the director’s cut of one of my favorite albums. I’m reminded of the 1990s George Lucas Star Wars edits or Donnie Darkos’ director’s cut. You’ve maybe added some deleted scenes, but you’ve touched up the practical effects with CGI, and it sticks out like a sore thumb. 

Russ Finn – @RussFinn


Closing songs as singles 

You want to know what I do whenever I start a new book? First, I find a nice, quiet place where I can read undisturbed. Then I sit down, crack the book open, and read the very last chapter. Just kidding, I don’t do that because I’m not a fucking psychopath. Why, then, are some bands so insistent on releasing the final song from their album as a single? It happened a few times this month, including one of my all-time favorite bands (who will remain unnamed), and the song wasn’t even that good! I mean, theoretically, shouldn’t the last song be a sort of big, anthemic closer that sends off the whole release? A summation of every track that came before it? Your big final number? Why would you want to drop that song weeks before people can hear it as intended? Obviously, not every album is a sequential story that you can “spoil” the same way you would with a book, but I don’t understand the logic of releasing a song like that by itself. The artist likely spent months creating, recording, and sequencing these songs, so why give away your final curtain call before people have even had a chance to enjoy the whole thing? This is really only a problem for dorks like me who keep up with singles as bands release them, but even for a casual fan, there’s gotta be some sense of letdown if you get to the end of your favorite artist’s new album and your first reaction is “I’ve already heard this one.” Let’s plan out our singles a little better, people. 

Taylor Grimes – @GeorgeTaylorG


Expecting Anything Of A Band

Frank Ocean – Have you heard of this guy? He had a whole ice rink, and some other stuff happened during his performance at some festival in Indio, CA, a few weeks back. A lot of people got very upset that Frank Ocean’s whole Coachella performance was slapdash and “not what [they] paid for.” Bro, you paid for a weekend of debauchery under the guise of attending a music festival! Did you think everything was going to go exactly to plan? What happens when something else in your life goes a little haywire? Do you check the receipt and ask to speak to the manager? Even worse than that, I saw complaints that Frank didn’t play specific songs! *whiny suburban music nerd voice* “Oh man, can you believe he didn’t play (deep unreleased cut from the Nostalgia Ultra era that I found on Tumblr in 2012)??” YES. YES, I CAN. He probably doesn’t remember the lyrics to a song that he threw aside 11 years ago. This isn’t your show, and you are NOT the main character for every event you pay money to see! Every time you pay for a ticket to a show, you are rolling the dice that something could go poorly. The smoke alarm could get set off by a fog machine, your favorite artist could get food poisoning, you could get an imposter instead of MF DOOM. All of these things are possible, and you hope they don’t happen, but sometimes it does not meet your expectations. Doesn’t that make the story a little more fun to you? It is more interesting to say, “I was at the Snowing reunion show where John Galm got pissed and spiked his bass into the ground,” than, “Oh yeah, I saw Snowing one time. Pretty good band!” Buy the ticket, enjoy the ride.

Jay Papandreas  – @listenupnerds

Ness Lake – i lean in to hear you sing / bl0ss0m | Single Premiere

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SELF-released

Like many people, the first time I went to New York was an event. Not only was I going to visit the greatest city in the world for the first time at the ripe age of 28, but I was also going to visit my long-distance girlfriend and meet her family. It was a lot to take in, prep for, and look forward to. At the time, I was fresh off a Succession binge and even had my own little dorky playlist of New York-themed songs to hype myself up for the journey. I had no idea what to expect, but the trip went swimmingly. My girlfriend, a NY native, took me all over Brooklyn and Manhattan; I saw Coney Island, walked across the Brooklyn Bridge, and ate some of the best meals I’ve ever had in my life. One night I also had a drug-induced panic attack.

In a classic case of not knowing my limits, one night, I found myself wide awake at 3 am, petrified with fear, staring at the ceiling of our Air BnB as she slept soundly beside me. Physically everything was perfect and still, but the inside of my head was a panicky horror movie where I was continually experiencing my own death. Eventually, my restlessness woke her up, and I had to explain what was going on. In a moment of complete compassion and love, she put on some Yo La Tengo and sleepily talked me through another hour or so of Generally Bad Vibes until we both passed out in the early hours of the morning. 

This was a formative experience for me and not something I ever want to put myself or my partner through ever again. It was also a pivotal moment in my relationship – this person I’d only known for a few months was sweet and caring enough to talk me through this experience. It was love. 

The newest songs from Ness Lake stem from a similar brush with the psyche that bandleader Chandler Lach experienced at the end of 2021. After experiencing the intense realization that all relationships ultimately end in either breakups or death, Lach began reflecting on the series of failed relationships that led him to this point in his life. 

Anyone that’s had even one relationship gone south can likely relate to concluding that they are the problem. Of course, every relationship (should be) 50/50, and the weight can never entirely be placed upon one person’s shoulders, but still, when one finds themselves looking back at a string of bad breakups and failed partnerships, it’s hard not to think that you are the common denominator. As Lach puts it, he grew to expect every relationship to fail and learned to avoid vulnerability in the process. 

His solution? Lean in. 

“i lean in to hear you sing” is the title track, lead single, and mantra-like sentiment that Lach has been returning to ever since that panic attack he experienced two years ago. In the wake of these personal realizations (and the dissolution of yet another relationship), he arrived at the conclusion that “leaning in” and committing is the answer. 

It’s easy to avoid intimacy, love, or a real relationship when you’re sure it’s going to fail from the outset. It’s also easy to find yourself in a “relationship” that is more emulation than truthfully sharing yourself with another person. You can feel like you’re getting all the benefits of a relationship on paper, but it’s merely a superficial checking of boxes that robs you of genuine connection. 

“i lean in to hear you sing” is a melodic and earwormy bedroom emo song with a chorus that has embedded itself deep in my brain after only a few listens. First laid out in a demo two years ago, the mind behind Ness Lake spent the intervening time returning to his own words and bringing them to life through multiple iterations, eventually culminating in this final version of the song. 

According to Lach, he and Marco Aziel (of Kiss Your Friends) spent about two years wringing the best out of these songs, thinking through every single aspect of the music, and figuring out how these sentiments could come to life visually. The music video is a kaleidoscopic swirl of colors pulled directly off the album art, all pulsating in time with the music as hand-written MS Paint lyrics guide the viewer past 3D Blender models and home video footage.

The second part of the band’s new double single is “bl0ss0m,” a tune that first appeared on an EP called marry the moon in 2021. While the first version of this song was a shaky and inward acoustic track, the newer rendition is considered and confident with electronic elements that sputter to life over the course of its three minutes. When compared to its original incarnation, “bl0ss0m” ends up being a perfect showcase for the artistic and personal growth that its creator has undergone in the intervening years. 

Similarly concerned with love and connection as its counterpart, “bl0ss0m” is about how you have to work for the beauty and love you find in your life. In Lach’s words, “If the conditions aren’t right, you have to be prepared for things to die.” Again, this song strikes upon the notion that your relationships have to be an intentional endeavor. In this way, both “i lean in to hear you sing” and “bl0ss0m” are perfect companions.  

Together these two tracks make an exciting update from Ness Lake and provide a perfect amuse-bouche for the project’s upcoming 14th album, which releases in-full next week on May 4th. Both “i lean in to hear you sing” and “bl0ss0m” will be available on all streaming services tomorrow.

 
 

Jesus Piece – ...So Unknown | Album Review

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Century Media Records

There’s a spotlight on hardcore these days that is undeniable. Even if you’re only passively following the genre, it’s hard to avoid the hype. What’s interesting about this broader attention is that, historically, heavier music has been a much more underground style and therefore hasn’t typically attracted as many open eyes and ears. Nowadays, mostly thanks to TikTok and other social media, people don’t have to try as hard to discover art that falls outside the usual commercial guidelines of what is consumable and proven to sell to the masses. The combination of the “Turnstile Effect” and social media algorithms means that people who never would’ve previously considered engaging with the scene now have a foot in the door. To top it all off, there’s a virtually endless stream of live footage exposing countless bands to new audiences, maybe even more than the albums those bands release. All of this feels considered, understood, and taken into account on Jesus Piece’s heavy and determined second LP …So Unknown.

From the second the record starts, there is no breathing room. “In Constraints” kicks things off with vocalist Aaron Heard roaring the opening lines by himself for a matter of seconds before the full band stampedes in behind him, and things don’t let up once from there. Track after track, we’re beaten, pummeled, battered, and bruised by crushing riffs, thunderous drums, harrowing growls, and screams spitting pissed-off anthems of exhaustion and fighting through malaise. In all honesty, the relentlessness of it all washed over me with little effect the first few times I sat with the album. It goes hard. It goes very hard, but it didn’t connect much deeper for me at first. However, I know myself well enough to know I can be a hard sell. I have a joke amongst my friends where I claim that I don’t like movies anymore due to how picky and over convention I am. I didn’t dislike this record by any means, but something felt a bit distant. It wasn’t until I threw the album on while working out that things began to click for me a bit more.

What is apparent on …So Unknown is that Jesus Piece have written a conscious and active album that speaks directly to the crowds they’re playing to and will be playing to in the future. These crowds will range from the TikTok kids who are there because they saw a wild video online and want to experience it for themselves to 30-somethings like me who’ve always had a foot in the scene. I’m not going to front and say I throwdown in the pit. I can’t lie and claim I have a history of doing so whatsoever. I’ve been going to heavy shows since I was 14, but even in my younger days, I always admired them at arm’s length. I like a rowdy audience and a good crowd surf as much as the next guy, but the inherent violence that comes with a proper pit isn’t something I’ve felt compelled to experience firsthand. I’m content as a present observer. These songs weren’t written for me. They’re first and foremost written for the band members to expel and push themselves to darker and heavier depths, but they’re also clearly written to pop the fuck off live. These songs were written to soundtrack bodies in motion.

“FTBS” may be the best example of this, with its driving pace and call to “fuck the bullshit” if you don’t like what you’re hearing. Or take a song like “Fear of Failure,” whose sinister opening riff moves effortlessly into the crushing, doom-paced breakdown of the ending. There’s not a complacent moment on the record. Jesus Piece see what’s in front of them and are attacking it head-on. Every song needs to hit, so every song hits. The only real instance of any kind of reprieve is found in “Silver Lining,” a track that finds Heard ruminating on the deep love he has for his child. Even so, it would still be the hardest track on a lesser band’s album. 

I truly feel that any song from …So Unknown could’ve been a single, and that feels by design. There are countless Finn McKenty-types who will wax poetic about how “the album” is dead and the algorithm is capital G God these days but as much as I hate to admit it, they have a point. As a musician myself, I understand the reality of releasing music in 2023. Singles are king, but albums still matter, and it’s comforting to see a band understand and appreciate this. …So Unknown offers a tight 28 minutes of hardcore, and while it can feel a bit one note at times, it really grew on me even in the short time I’ve spent with it, and I am glad I gave it the time and space to do so. Putting this record into the context of physical movement really amplified my experience and has made me eager to witness it the way it was intended - in a room surrounded by a few hundred people all climbing over each other and screaming, “FUCK THE BULLSHIT!”

Christian Perez is a member of the band Clot and is always trying his best to exist gently.

Fauxchella: The Only Music Festival That Matters – An Interview with Conor Alan of The Summit Shack

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If you’re a big enough music geek, you probably have a favorite music festival. Maybe you long for the bygone days of Warped Tour and its sweaty Monster-scented mosh pits. Maybe you’re a Chicagoan who is lucky enough to take their pick from Lollapalooza, Pitchfork Music Festival, and Riot Fest. Maybe you just have an affinity for whatever happens to come close enough to you. For my money, there’s no better music festival on Earth than Fauxchella.

Fauxchella is DIY music’s response to California’s biggest and most insufferable music festival institution. It’s kinda like that infamous pic of the crowd surfer from Title Fight’s 2015 Coachella set, but if every attendee was that crowd surfer. Taking place in the exotic, 30k-population college town of Bowling Green, Ohio, Fauxchella is decidedly smaller and much more exciting than the quarter-million-attendee festival from which it gets its jokey name. Centered primarily around emo and indie rock bands based out of the Midwest, Fauxchella is organized by the Summit Shack, a DIY venue that bills itself on Twitter as a “premier, high-end, all-media entertainment conglomerate (aka friends with a garage).”

The Summit Shack first opened its doors in 2017 as a house venue run by several members of the emo band American Spirits. After putting out a couple of EPs and farewell singles, American Spirits called it quits in 2019, yet Summit Shack remained. Select members of the group went on to found the awesome (and far less emo) band Half Kidding whose 2022 album, Bonk, is both underrated and underappreciated in the larger DIY music scene. 

The Summit Shack has been hosting incredible shows out of their garage venue for over half a decade, but the festivals are a different beast entirely. The first Fauxchella took place in 2017, billing itself as a day of “cookouts, comedy, and live music,” boasting a modest 12 acts ranging from musicians and standups to DJ sets. The second iteration occurred in 2018 and doubled the lineup to 12 bands, four DJs, and seven comedy sets. While still mostly contained to Ohio, this sequel also boasted a more prominent lineup that included the likes of Heart Attack Man and Sonder Bombs, increasing the show’s draw and star power from its first hyper-local incarnation.

The third Fauxchella took place in 2019, and this is when things really started to get wild. This was also the first Summit Shack event that I attended, having just moved out to Detroit the year prior. Fauxchella III had a lineup of Charmer, Origami Angel, and Stars Hollow, just to name a few. Little did I know it at the time, but these were all bands that would go on to define the next few years of my life and eventually become synonymous with the “5th Wave Emo” sound. 

With a 21-band lineup, a two-stage setup, a pre-show celebration the night before, and a post-show afterparty, Fauxhella III was a genuine event. I crossed state lines and got an AirBnb just for this show, it was that unmissable. At the festival, the energy was infectious; every band cranked out one incredible set after the other, all attempting to keep the energy from the previous act going. Quite honestly, it blew my fucking mind. Coming from the West Coast, witnessing this kind of Midwestern camaraderie and do-it-yourself ethos felt revelatory. It affirmed that I was in the right place and that these were my people. 

Around the same time in 2019, Summit Shack joined forces with Loonbase Studios, a DIY video production company dedicated to filming and documenting these shows. As a result, several of the sets from Fauxhella III (and each subsequent fest) exist online for all to see. This kind of documentation is rare for music of this scale, and a beyond-worthy effort to capture a moment in a specific music scene.

2019 wound up being a banner year for the Shack. In June, the venue hosted Swordfest, featuring a nine-band bill including Pool Kids, Mover Shaker, and more. In September, they put on DIY Prom, a 24-band affair that encouraged Midwest emo kids to recreate the prom they never had. These bigger, more festival-like lineups became buzzy events for Summit Shack, acting as big, scene-wide celebrations that drew fans (and bands) from all over the Midwest and East Coast. These fests became tentpole events that existed between strings of ongoing local shows that Summit Shack continued to host out of their garage. For a while, Summit Shack almost single-handedly made it feel like Bowling Green was the Place To Be if you were tapped into the Michigan/Ohio music scene.

As you could imagine, 2020 wasn’t kind to touring music or the Summit Shack. Aside from “Snowchella,” which happened in January, Summit Shack essentially went into hibernation when it came to routing touring bands or hosting these larger fests. The Ill-fated “Fourchella” was set to happen in April 2020 and fell apart for reasons that should be obvious. Not content to let COVID ruin their efforts, Summit Shack instead conceived of “Minechella,” a Minecraft-based celebration featuring a smattering of bands, including one set immortalized on the Origami Angel Broke Minecraft EP.

By 2022 things were once again full-steam ahead as Fauchella V happened in July with a staggering 33 bands, including personal faves Ben Quad, Carpool, Summerbruise, Riley, Seaholm, and Equipment. As with lots of these lineups, I suppose your mileage may vary depending on how much you’re tapped into the Midwest emo scene, but for a hyper-online fifth-wave fuck like myself, these lineups are pulled straight out of my Spotify playlists and last.fm grids. Always a nice mix of bands I already love and a handful that I’m about to love, Summit Shack continues to kill it with stellar shows that showcase the best our DIY community has to offer. 

This brings us to 2023. 

If I could describe to you the joy I saw looking over an early iteration of the Fauchella VI lineup, you could bottle that up and sell it for millions on the internet. Honestly, I don’t even know where to start with this lineup.

First off, you’ve got the aforementioned Ben Quad, aka purveyors of the Emo Album of the Year for 2022. You’ve got Equipment and Saturdays at Your Place who have each released two of the most exciting EPs of 2023 so far. You’ve got kids pushing the boundaries in fun and exciting ways like Newgrounds Death Rugby, Hey, IlY, and Cheem. You’ve got the Minneapolis legends NATL PARK SRVC and Dad Bod. You’ve got some of my personal album-of-the-year regulars with Carpool, Summerbruise, and Short Fictions. You’ve got bands that weirdly feel like “legacy” acts in relation to some of these, with fifth-wave groups like Dikembe, Charmer, and Michael Cera Palin. There are tap-happy rippers like Riley, Kerosene Heights, and Aren’t We Amphibians. You’ve got some certified ass-beaters like California Cousins, Arcadia Grey, and Smoke Detector. You’ve got local legends like Teamonade, Ellie Hart, and Half Kidding (the band, for all intents and purposes, hosting the event). 

If that sounds a little overwhelming, that’s because it is. It’s a 60+ band bill stretched over an epic three-day weekend from Friday to Sunday, all crammed into Howards Club H, the local 200-cap dive bar. 

Practically all of these bands have released something over the past three years. Some of them focused on tightening their screws and honing in on the things that make them different from their peers, others took wildly exciting diversions into exciting new territories. It’s easy to make jokes about Fauxchella being “Emo Twitter Fest,” but the talent packed into this lineup is far too diverse and exciting to be summed up in such a diminutive way. 

While some of these bands are several albums or EPs deep into their career, others have only made their presence known within the last six months or have a few public songs to their name. Regardless, I’d say many of these bands released career-defining work over the past year or so. Lots of these bands could fit under the sweeping distinction of “Emo” or “5th Wave,” but those terms have been made flexible enough to fit almost all of these bands. 

It’s an exciting time to be an emo fan. Bands of this scale move quickly and can pivot on a dime, but as someone who’s had nothing better to do than sit inside his apartment and buy things on Bandcamp Fridays for the past few years, this feels like an explosively exciting synthesis of a moment-in-time, all caught in a room in Bowling Green Ohio. What the fuck. 

While this lineup might seem pulled straight out of Spotify’s The Sound of 5th Wave Emo playlist, there are very many people behind this. One of the key figures behind the Summit Shack is Conor Alan, the drummer for American Spirits, Half Kidding, and resident of the Summit Shack. I sat down with Conor over Zoom to get a better idea of the Shack's history and how Fauxchella has evolved each time since its first incarnation six years ago. 

SWIM: First off, I’m curious, when you meet someone in the music scene, how do you articulate the Summit Shack to people? What do you lead with? Because you’re also in a band, you organize this whole fest, but you’re also doing regular shows out of the Shack. So how do you describe all of that succinctly to anyone? 

SHACK: I guess it depends on the context, but if I’m just vaguely describing the Shack, I call it a fest and video crew. The Twitter bio, which is more of a bit than anything else, is from Parks and Recreation: Entertainment 720, “premier high-end all-media entertainment conglomerate,” which, all jokes aside, isn’t too far off. The “premier high end” is a little subjective, but “all-media entertainment conglomerate” seems pretty succinct.

SWIM: I think that’s part of what attracts me to all of this. For the scale you guys are working on, it one hundred percent is, right? There are very few people documenting this type of music with as much production as you guys do. 

I’m super eager to hear you describe the inception of all this because you guys first wound up on my radar in 2019, which was a couple years into this, and I think comparing every Fauxchella to each other is pretty fascinating. But going chronologically, we can lay out how everything has grown, so if you wanna go all the way back to the beginning in your own words, I’d love to hear that.

SHACK: So basically, it would’ve been March 2017 when the first idea for it all sprouted. I had graduated college in the winter and had qualms about what I wanted to do with either my job or my hobbies. 

I took a trip to Los Angeles to visit with my friend Izzy for four days, and then I spent four days in San Diego with some family members. Just something about being in LA… like there wasn’t even a pivotal thing that I saw. It was more just the energy of everyone there.

I just kind of walked around LA cause Izzy had to work all day, so I was just killing time on my own and got to explore the city. When I had gotten back home, I realized there are so many musicians, graphic designers, rappers, producers, and DJs in Bowling Green, but there’s no collective that catalogs them all. I wanted to make it so that if you need a graphic designer or a song for something, you can reach out to this group, and they’ll have access to somebody. Just trying to make it so everybody could collaborate easier.

Once I got back to BG, I went to a DJ show at my friend Ashley’s house and ended up talking with Trey and Bails, who I had recently been introduced to through Dillon, who was the guitarist for American Spirits. Dillon’s friend was working on a mockumentary project about a music group, and she didn’t have a band to do it on, so we started American Spirits as a bit.

So me talking to Trey and Bails at that DJ show combined with the fact that we were starting up the joke band and actually jamming and having fun. We didn’t have any real intentions behind it. Eventually, we conceptualized Same Co., which is the Same Collective. Our motto was, “We are all the same.” It was just a perfect example of too many cooks in the kitchen cause we had anywhere from eight to 20 people all directly contributing to the creative direction of things. None of us had any clue what we were doing. Eventually, we just thought, okay, how do we turn this into something similar with a more direct goal? 

We had done a few ciphers where we would put on beats and have groups of people freestyle over them. Just kind of hanging out. Eventually, we decided that we would start doing shows out of the garage. We had originally cleared out the garage for Same Co. as a collective space, but it ended up being turned into a venue, quote-unquote, cause I dunno if you could quite call it that at the beginning.

Dillon was really the person who spearheaded both American Spirits and Summit Shack in the beginning. The first show out of the Shack was August 2nd, 2017, it was Awesome Job!, an amazing band from Toledo that’s not playing anymore, but they’re all in other projects. Then the first Fauxchella happened on August 11th.

Fauxchella Poster

SWIM: I love that the first Fauxchella felt hyper-local, where it’s basically all Bowling Green people. The fact that you guys had DJs and comedians in there made it feel like the scope was already wider than just “DIY Music,” even if it was all just acts from nearby.

SHACK: I’m trying to find when we transitioned from Same Co. into the Summit Shack, which was originally gonna be called The Leaky Tarp, but then Ian talked us out of it and came up with Summit Shack. Way better. Leaky Tarp just says all sorts of negative connotations. Who wants to go to a place with a leaky tarp? But one of the first shows we had rained a lot, so we had set up tarps and stuff to try and keep people dry. 

SWIM: Humble beginnings. 

SHACK: Yeah, yeah, and then Ian changed it to the Summit Shack, which was the best decision anyone made cause I really do love the name.

But what started as an idea for a collective turned into an event space turned into us throwing a joke festival, you know… Fauxchella, we didn’t think we were ever gonna do another one. We were just kind of flying by the seat of our pants.

SWIM: So you had no expectations, but then you did all these shows where touring bands started routing through. Was it hard to convince people to come to Bowling Green? Because you’re between Detroit and Cleveland, and you’re kind of smack dab in the middle of all these other bigger cities. So what was the process like for getting bands to stop there?

SHACK: November 2017 was the first show we had with a band from more than an hour away. American Spirits had started playing out and doing more shows cause we realized it was less of a bit and more, “Hey, this is actually pretty fun being in a band and actually playing gigs.” So we started doing more gigs and then started meeting more bands from out of town and more musicians in general. 

The first real out-of-town band that we had play was The Sonder Bombs in November 2017. They came and played their first out-of-town show as well; that was the first time they played out of Cleveland. And then February 2018, we did the American Spirits EP release show. The Shack is definitely less American Spirits now than it was back then, but in the beginning they really were operating side by side.

In February 2018, we had some bands from Columbus come, and then just slowly started having more and more bands. We had Equipment play their first show at the Shack in March 2018 with a band from Michigan cause they had a tour that fell through.

Then in April 2018, Dillon had planned this gigantic show, essentially a reprisal of Fauxchella. We had the Sonder Bombs and Heart Attack Man come and play. If you look at the poster for it, I believe it says, “Melted Purple,” which dissolved but was basically the first Teamonade set that ever happened. 

SWIM: Oh, whoa, that’s cool.

SHACK: Dolphin Coffin is the band Secret Space. They were unable to advertise cuz they were still signed and touring at the time, so they played a secret set. They were kind of like the Toledo sweethearts that were a step below Citizen in a way. They did a bunch of tours with Turnover and bands like that. 

But Fauxchella II happened at the Shack. We fenced off the whole yard cause we knew Heart Attack Man was a big band, and I had no idea. At this point, I was not necessarily out of the loop (because everything was still happening at my house), but I was mainly spearheading the DJs and the comedians. 

Fauxchella II Poster

Dillon and Bails were really into Microwave, Prince Daddy, Oso Oso, those kinds of bands, so they were the ones who were super into that genre of music. I was coming out of being super into electronica, so I was still spearheading that side of things.

Fauxchella II was the last one we did at the house, and it was pretty much Dillon still kind of leading everything. Dillon was doing the Spirits booking and the Shack booking. I was just more like, ‘Yeah, I’m cool with this happening at my house, and I’m cool with being in a band.’

SWIM: You had told me that before Fauxchella II, you had kinda gone around the neighborhood warning people, “Hey, we’re going to play this show.” What was the response to that? What was that process like?

SHACK: I wrote a page-long letter that I handed out to each house in every direction three houses out. So the next-door neighbors, the next-door neighbors to them, and the next-door neighbors to them all got a letter saying, “Hey, we’re hosting this little mini-festival that we’re doing at the house on this date.” At this point, we’d also been kind of ramping up and doing more shows throughout the week. But we gave everyone this paper saying here’s all of our contact information, here are all of our phone numbers, here’s all our names and everything like that. Then said if there are ever any issues, please call or text one of us.

SWIM: Not 911. 

SHACK: Yeah, exactly. It was a one-page letter that essentially boiled down to, “Please don’t call the cops.” But the neighbors were all super cool, besides a few sound complaints here and there throughout the years. I got a civil citation for “rambunctious behavior,” a noise complaint, what have you. I was in the blotter. I screenshotted it and posted it on Twitter, people thought it was funny. 

Various noise complaints

SHACK: Fauxchella II was really where we got on the map for a lot of people because of Heart Attack Man.

SWIM: Looking at it now, even just them and Sonder Bombs, that is already huge. And then with Fauxchella III, it just feels like it’s always been exponential. The first one was so local, then you guys stayed Ohio-based but got these bigger bands that were about to release really significant albums onto stuff like Gami and all that, which is like its own world. It’s pretty crazy to look back on a lot of those lineups. So you guys had, what, a year between that and Fauxchella III? So what was the intervening year like from April to April?

SHACK: Looking back at the Facebook Events, we were doing one, maybe two shows a month, and then Fauxchella hit, and then in May 2018, we did three shows, all out-of-town bands. June 2018, we only did two, but multiple Michigan and farther-out Ohio bands. July 2018, we only did one show, but it was kind of like a pivotal moment. We hadn’t really been taking donations super well at these shows because we didn’t know DIY ethos.

July 2018, Taking Meds and Expert Timing played the Shack on a Tuesday. I had no idea what I was getting into with either band, and now I am absolutely infatuated with both. They were from Florida and like New York, and it was really the first time that we booked bands from not in our region. And not only did we book them, but they reached out to us.

They played with American Spirits cause we’re putting ourselves on shows just cause it’s our house. There was also this band Mecha G, which was like a live-action Godzilla roleplay band. They played songs and did sketches that told the story of Godzilla. They had a fight, and one of the dudes got his face busted open and was bleeding everywhere cause they were wrestling. It was a fever dream in the best possible way. That was definitely a turning point for working with out-of-town bands.

At this point, Dillon had kind of taken a step back from doing Shack stuff and American Spirits booking. But I was just like, “This is fun. I like doing shows at my house. I like being in a band. I wouldn’t mind continuing to do this.” So I was like if Dillon’s not gonna do the booking, I guess I will. The summer of 2018 and fall of 2018 is when I started to weasel my way into the booking world.

I immediately booked a DJ show for my birthday and had a cool band called Hello Luna come through and Two Hand Fools, which is members of Heart Attack Man. We did like a huge benefit show at the house. We did a rap show. Then November 2018, we did Short Fictions and Equipment with Outside and American Spirits. That was my first time meeting Alex Martin, who gave me a whole blast into what it means to be doing shit like that.

SWIM: I love Alex, I’m sure that’s a good inflection point, too. Sounds like that meeting imparted a lot of knowledge about how this booking stuff works.

SHACK: Yeah. Alex was doing it a lot at the time. Then Alex started sending me bands. December 2018, a month after Short Fictions, Origami Angel played their first show at the Shack, and it ended up being in the living room. It was Saturday, December 29th, and it was -10° outside, so we couldn’t do the show in the garage. We ended up doing it in the living room, and the PA system broke, which created the never-ending self-fulfilling prophecy that something will go wrong at a Gami Shack show.

Around the same time, in December of 2018 is when the Shack got on Twitter.

SWIM: …And that’s its own world of emo bands and interactions. It’s kinda self-contained in a weird way, but also a networking thing too. Is that when you guys started to conceive of doing Fauxchella again? 

SHACK: Yeah, it was basically just like, okay, well, what if we did another Fauxchella? How would we do this? This is when I started going to a lot of shows. I went to go see Charmer perform, and I was looking at the bands that Origami Angel was doing stuff with, and I was made privy to Stars Hollow. We had done some shows in Michigan, so I became privy to the Seaholm folks and started getting my feet wet in the Michigan scene meeting all the people up there.

February 2019 has one of my favorite stacked bills, Future Teens, World’s Greatest Dad, Teamonade, Spirits, and Kiddo. Just kind of solidifying that we’re working with like actual good touring bands. 

Fauxchella III Poster

SHACK: April 2019, we did Fauxchella III. We did a pre-party the day before that was kind of keeping the tradition of Ohio bands; it had Waving back when they were still called Waving & Waving Goodbye. Shitty Neighbors, which is the Little Elephant people. Biiitchseat, that’s when we first met Biitchseat. Discount Nostalgia who are like a classic BG band. Ship & Sail from Michigan.

The following day was when we had Shortly, Charmer, Stars Hollow, Forest Green, Sonder Bombs, Origami Angel, Teamonade, Snarls, Equipment, American Spirits, Absinthe Father, Seaholm, Baseball Dad like…

SWIM: Crazy.

SHACK: Yeah. I’m actually taking it in cause I’m establishing the timeline for myself too, and I don’t understand how I got all these bands to play. 

SWIM: Well, partly it’s probably just messaging people and being like, “Hey, this is happening on this day, do you wanna play?” At a certain point, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of people that then are like, “Oh, all these other bands are playing? Yes.” I’m sure that it’s just shooting your shot a lot-

SHACK: That’s literally all it’s ever been. It’s funny because, on the E Word podcast when American Spirits were on the Freshman Class, they referred to Fauxchella as “Emo Twitter Fest,” and by God, how right they were because I’m pretty sure I DM’d all these bands on Twitter. I’m pretty sure that’s how I handled most of the booking, and still do a lot of the booking, is through Twitter, which I’m sure some people fucking hate.

SWIM: I remember talking to Haley Butters from Absinthe Father after their set at Fauxchella III, and at that point, This Band Fucks was still a thing on Twitter. And I was like, “Yo, love the music, love This Band Fucks,” and Haley told me, ‘If I were to make a fest, this would be the lineup of the This Band Fucks-approved bands.’”

It’s interesting to see how that stuff solidifies over time too, and what sticks around long enough, like Gami where they’ve put out multiple EPs and albums and then become symbolic of a larger thing like fifth-wave or whatever. 

SHACK: Crazy ass lineup. Yeah, it was Twitter Fest through and through, and there are tons of Easter eggs on the poster. Like there are members of every single band from the Summit Stage hidden in the background.

SWIM: Who does the posters? Because it looks the same as Fauxchella II. 

SHACK: Taylor Wilkes did a lot of the OG Fauxchella posters. When we did Fauxchella II, we had the people from Lord Whorfin and No Culture, who were doing their own music documentation live session kind of thing down in Columbus, come up and film Fauxchella II. We didn’t even do that in-house at all at the beginning.

LOONBASE LOGO BY Taylor Wilkes

SWIM: Was that what led to Loonbase then? Were you guys like, “Oh, we could buy some video equipment and do this”?

SHACK: ​​Trey (vocalist for American Spirits) and Kate (vocalist for Half Kidding) had always been into photography and videography and, through Bowling Green, had made really good friends with Matthew Rao, Chance Duffy, and Taylor Wilkes, funnily enough, who I met seven years prior when I was working in Insomnia Cookies. It's just really weird. BG’s a small town.

SWIM: I remember going to Fauxchella III and seeing the cameras and stuff, and this already felt very established. You guys are filming all of this stuff, and in my mind, that was synonymous, just because that was my first Fauxchella, too. I was like, “Oh, okay, obviously this is a longstanding thing. They’re on the third one, and they’ve got this whole video thing going on.” So just coming from the outside, it felt like this was a legit operation.

SHACK: I guess that might be how we fooled people, that it looked official. The first Shack video that came out of Summit Shack and Loonbase Studios was Cliff Notes Episode One with Former Critics. This got put out on June 1st, 2019. So we must have done the Fest filming first and then forayed into doing video stuff for touring bands. Cuz we originally started with like the interview sessions, and then the Fauxchella III videos started coming out right after that. So, yeah, Fauxchella III was really when we merged with them fully.

SHACK: When we made the switch from II to III and all these bands started saying yes, I was like, ‘We can’t do this at the house.’ That’s when we made the switch to Howard’s and started that relationship.

SWIM: So Fauxchella III is kind of this huge point where it was a lot bigger bands, and you guys realized you had to go somewhere else. What was that process like for getting to Howard’s?

SHACK: There are really only two or three venues in BG that ever really had a history of doing shows besides the random house spots; it was Howard’s and Clazel. Clazel was more of a nightclub kind of vibe, same with Liquid. But it just made the most sense to do Howard’s because it was a dive bar. We’re fresh outta college, throwing house shows, you know what I mean? So, yeah, a dingy dive bar is fucking perfect.

SWIM: Yeah. You got pizza right across the street, it’s the best.

SHACK: Yeah, it was close to the house; it just made the most sense, given the limited options we had. We reached out to Steve, who’s the owner and the sound person usually, and he was super down for the idea. The weirdest part about Fauxchella III is that even being at Howard’s and having all these up-and-coming bands on it — the whole thing was still free admission. Fauxchella III didn’t cost anything.

There was a whole discussion about the switch cause we loved doing shows at the house. We hadn’t done any shows at Howard’s yet. It was tough for all of us to kind of reconcile losing that because it was all we knew. Moving the festival to Howard’s was, in a way, losing some of what made Fauxchella Fauxchella.

The garage can realistically only fit 60 people max, and that’s sardines. That’s why I got really good at listening to bands from outside the garage. If the show was small enough that I could go watch the band, I would, but in a lot of cases, I’d open the door, look inside, see hell, and just be like, “I’m cool out here.”

It's kind of wild ‘cause the Shack is so small; it’s just a two-car garage. That’s it. We’re really not working with any space. But, man, it didn’t take much for the shows to feel huge. I think that’s what played into a lot of the notoriety of the Shack and the crazy shows, it’s ‘cause the space was so small. If those shows had taken place at Howard’s, they wouldn’t feel packed at all.

We had some of the best people come into the gigs, you know what I mean? The first era of the Shack as it evolved was just mint. And it was honestly mint up until COVID. I’m sure you’ve seen PUG Fest, right? 

SWIM: Yes, yes. I’m hoping to be there this summer!

SHACK: I guess PUG Fest is essentially DIY Burning Man 3. Mica from Something Missing came down and played a Shack show when they were still a teenager. They recently graduated college and apparently started DIY Burning Man because of the Shack.

SWIM: Oh, that’s so cool.

SHACK: PUG Fest is working with a way bigger venue that’s 800-900-cap and can work with way bigger bands. The fact that something like that started because of what the Shack did is mind-blowing. Cause again, I still have no fucking clue what I’m doing. I find bands I think are cool, I find people that I think are cool, and I smash ’em together and see what happens.

SWIM: It’s something you can really only see in retrospect, too. Who would’ve guessed that mashing those random people and bands together led to so many fucking cool shows and music? 

You don’t really see all that shit until years down the line, and you’re looking back. Looking at all these shows, even on the Facebook Events page, you can kind of see how one thing led to the next. Speaking of which, what came after Fauxchella III?

SHACK: Oh God. Yeah. We went fucking ham after Fauxchella III. Holy shit. I can’t believe my roommates were cool with all this. So, yeah, after Fauxchella III, I was jazzed. We made the switch to Howard’s, and we were really sour about it, but it really came to fruition pretty well. So I decided to book eight shows in May. The skyrocket is insane, and they were all at the house, which is wacky to think about.

There were seven shows in June, and then there was Sword Fest. Jack (of Mover Shaker) called me and was just like, “Hey, I’ve got Pool Kids, Mover Shaker, and ****** for this random Wednesday in June,” and I was like, I already have four touring bands, but I would do it if you can convince everyone else to do it. For some god-forsaken reason, everybody was down. 

SWORDFEST POSTER

We booked and promoted it relatively quickly; we had like a month, I think. Probably still our coolest promotional thing that we did was the video with the fake Final Fantasy RPG, but putting stupid DIY jokes as the moves and stuff like that. I still think that we peaked in terms of promotional ability right there.

So Fauxchella III hits, and I start booking a stupid volume of shows at the house. Then Sword Fest hits, which just kind of fell into our lap. Then right after Sword Fest, we took the Shack team with Equipment and American Spirits to New Jersey and helped L.E.A.D. DIY throw Strobeless. 

Ellie Hart was like, “What if we did a fest in Jersey?” And I was like, “Okay, hell yeah.” And then Ellie and Hannah did most of the work. They had a dope team of people in New Jersey that I had the pleasure of meeting and liked working alongside to help throw the show. Yeah, the lineup was actually kind of crazy as well. 

L.E.A.D. DIY Strobeless POSTER

Then, from Sword Fest and Strobleless, I was just like, ‘Well, we might as well do a fest in the fall.’ You know? We did one in the spring, and we did one in the summer, what if we did Fallchella?

We joke tweeted about DIY prom, and people really latched onto it for some reason. So I was like, fuck it, I guess it’s DIY Prom — fuck Fallchella.

SWIM: It’s hard to describe from my perspective. I keep coming back to 2019 because I just went to this random festival in April, cause I was like, “Oh, I like Origami Angel.” And then to follow Summit Shack over the course of that year, and, holy shit, you guys just keep doing all of these gatherings. I was like, damn, the Midwest is fucking cool. 

SHACK: Somewhere in the middle of that, we did our two-year anniversary show with Barely Civil, The Weak Days, Teamonade, American Spirits, and Mess. 

Then in September, we didn’t do any shows except for DIY Prom, which was 24 bands and six comedians. And this was also American Spirits’ last show.

SWIM: Oh yeah, you guys capped it off! I just remember everyone chanting your name cause it was like, “You fucking did this Conor.” You guys had just finished playing your last set, and it was just very heartwarming.

SHACK: I’m pretty sure I visibly broke down on stage. It was very touching.

DIY Prom Poster

SWIM: So that gets us up to Snowchella almost. 

SHACK: We had DIY Prom in September 2019, and then this is a very pivotal moment. Friday, October 4th, Summerbruise played the shack for the first time… And then played the Summit Shack way more times after.

SWIM: Aside from American Spirits and Half Kidding, is there a definitive “Summit Shack Band”? Could you even boil it down to one?

SHACK: There are four bands that I would consider Shack bands who aren’t members of the Shack. I think it’s Equipment, Teamonade, Discount Nostalgia, and Summerbruise. Discount Nostalgia was our first local band that really played the Shack a lot. They were just really good homies of ours and an amazing band. Then Teamonade because they got their start at the Shack. Equipment became a Bowling Green local after they played the Shack for the first time. Then Summerbruise essentially became a Bowling Green local from multiple hours away. 

[The two of us digress, discussing mostly-defunct Midwest bands, then get back to the timeline]

[We had] DIY Prom in September, then all of October did a bunch of shows. November did a bunch of shows. Oh, that’s when Cliffdiver played the Shack in November 2019. Jess, a friend of ours from Cleveland who had come to many Shack shows over the years, messaged me and was just like, “Hey, there’s this band from Oklahoma. I really want to play at your house. Can I book a show there?” And it turned out to be fucking Cliffdiver, pre-pop-off, and they just played to like 30 people in the Shack.

Capo Fest and Sled Fest both happened in the summer 2019 and winter of 2019. Those were both fests in Chicago that we didn’t really help out with, but we were very good friends with the people running it, and Half Kidding played. I remember Addie asking for tips and stuff like that. They didn’t need any help. Addie had that shit on lock.

SWIM: And that was what led to “Bella,” right? Again, another example of a domino effect.

SHACK: Yeah, that’s where the Half Kidding song “Bella” came from. It was Capo or Sled, I can’t remember which one.

Saturday, December 21st. Equipment EP release show, Invite The Neighbor’s 50th podcast with Gami, Cheem, Parkway & Columbia, and In A Daydream. Jesus. There are some wild videos of the Shack going bonkers for Gami cuz that was post-Somewhere City. Quippy was really just starting to catch cause Madrigal had done really well, so people went bonkers for both bands. That was also my first exposure to Cheem, who I just booked a tour for.

Madrigal EP Release Show Poster

We did the New Year’s show. Bunch of shows in January. We did Showchella on January 25th, 2020, and it went fucking awesome. Really crazy lineup again. Sonder Bombs, Mover Shaker, Short Fictions, Plans, Teamonade, Gray Matter. She/Her/Hers, Snarls, Weak Days, Sweet Peach, Punch Drunk, Summerbruise. Former Critics- Yeah. Holy shit. Yeah. 

Snowchella Poster

So this was, this was definitely in the primo era where I had started filling in for bands. So right after DIY Prom is when I filled in for World’s Greatest Dad at Fest. Which, again, just catapulted me into like, “Yeah, this is sick, I wanna keep doing this, this is awesome.”

Then the Teamonade, Summerbruise, Half Kidding Tour, which was one of the only things Half Kidding did before COVID. There was Equipment, String Machine, Biitchseat, Summerbruise, for the Scratchy Blanket album release at Leapfest. So it’s like oozing Shack vibes with some of the bands that they got on it. Leapfest in Pittsburgh was on February 29th, literally 12 days before everything shut down, so I guess that is technically the last fest we helped out with.

SWIM: Yeah. I remember you guys had announced Fourchella, And at that point, I had moved to Denver, but I bought a ticket. I was like, “I’m coming back for this!” and was all stoked. You guys had announced it, and then the rest of the world happened and had to pull the plug. I feel like you guys did make lemons into lemonade with all the Minecraft stuff a little bit.

Fourchella Poster

SHACK: Yeah, prior to when things shut down in early to mid-March, we had been playing like a bunch of Minecraft, just on a realm in the Discord. The Discord was Ian (who lived at the Shack), Kate (who also lived at the Shack), Trey, Matt, Chance, Joey, and Serg. Marco from Kiss Your Friends and a number of other people from Michigan all hopped on to help us build everything. In less than a month, we made Minechella, and we did it on the same day that Fourchella was supposed to be: April 17th and April 18th. 

We literally had a chat called “minechella lol” because, at that point, it was just such a goofy concept. The process that we went through to record everything was streaming to Twitch, but also streaming in Discord so that we could have Chance flipping between Discord screens of the people that were the “cameras” for the fest.

So we essentially made it so the festival could be multi-camera, and we could switch between different shots. We had some people who were working on aesthetic shots and some people who were documenting people jumping around and the music playing and stuff like that. 

I’m sure if I went back and watched, it would be incredibly clunky, but we had a month, and none of us had ever done anything quite like that before. That was just an enormous team effort: 30–40 people all chipped in to make that happen.

Fourchella Minecraft Poster

SWIM: And at the time, no one knew when we were gonna be able to see shit again. So it was a godsend really to have something that communal translated digitally. And I do think all that effort showed in the end product.

SHACK: I’m looking at the Facebook event, and the description literally says, “We doin’ it big on Minecraft. 4/17 to 4/18, 1:00 PM to midnight.” That’s all it says.

SWIM: Say no more.

SHACK: Doing it big on Minecraft, that’s so goofy. Then that extended into the Shack Craft Monthlies. Beach Bunny submitted an acoustic set for one of ’em. It was Beach Bunny, Save Face, Sonder Bombs, and Short Fictions.

We did Origami Angel Broke Minecraft. I’m assuming that was in either late April or early May. The server went down, again, continuing the tradition that something will go wrong at a Gami Shack show. Oh yeah, at the Equipment Madrigal release show, the soundboard crapped out. So Origami Angel was already two for two breaking Shack shit, and then the server goes down for Minecraft.

Ryland, I think a day or two before Minechella, decided to completely revamp the set they were gonna do and did the kind of like lo-fi remixes.

SWIM: Yeah, I remember you posted the text, and they were just like, “Yo, can I, can I do a dubstep set?” And you were like, “Yeah, sure.”

SHACK: At that point, I was like, literally whatever anybody wants to do, we’ll showcase it. In a weird way, it’s kind of returning to the Same Co. roots of just whatever you have to showcase, this is a platform for it.

SWIM: And now it’s cool that set is documented on that EP basically as it was presented. And that’s such a cool document of a terrible time in the world, but it’s at least something good. 

SHACK: A silver lining. 

SWIM: You pulled all that out of 2020 and got back to it by last year, which is so fucking cool. After burnout and COVID just wreaking havoc on everyone’s mental health, then it’s just like, “Okay, at what point is it safe to start planning something like this again?”

SHACK: October 2021 was our first show back, and it was with Summerbruise, Carpool, Equipment, and Half Kidding at Howard’s. At this point, everybody had moved out; Lisa and I live here alone now, so we did all of our shows at Howard’s from that point on. 

SWIM: Keep your space.

SHACK: December 2021 through April 2022 were very sparse. We did so few shows, and most of these were Ellie's shows. This is when Ellie started working at Howard’s cause at some point over COVID, we all drove to pick up Ellie from Jersey and moved them to Bowling Green, and now Ellie is more of a local than I am. 

June 2022, Ellie booked the Weatherday, Michael Cera Palin, Oolong, Summerbruise, Waving, and Brown Maple show. And then Fauxchella V. I’m trying to figure out when we were just, “Yeah, we’re back.”

Fauxchella V Poster

I wanna say we probably started booking Fauxchella V like six months out, so realistically it was probably January 2022 when I started. I remember I sat down with everybody and I was like, “Okay, we have to decide if we just wanna say fuck it.” Like yeah, there’s still COVID, tours are still getting canceled, all of this stuff is still happening… But if we’re gonna get back into it, we need to do it now, or I’m gonna move.

Not necessarily holding everything ransom, but I was just, I can’t live in Bowling Green anymore if I’m not gonna do Bowling Green stuff. You know what I mean? Lisa and I were considering moving somewhere else, and I was considering just sucking it up and getting a job job and actually just being a career person. But that’s not fulfilling. I was gonna be depressed as shit doing that, and I knew that. And since getting back into the swing of things, I’ve definitely kind of reconfirmed for myself that I wanna expand on this in one way or another.

We did Fauxchella V once again, just like DMing bands on Twitter. But at this point, like almost everybody that I had reached out to is at least somewhat aware of the Shack.

SWIM: And it feels like the reach is farther than ever for Fauxchella VI. You’ve leaked various incarnations of that lineup to me, and this is probably the biggest one yet.

SHACK: We’re doing three days: Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. It’s like a 10-hour day, a 13-hour day, and a 9-hour day. We’re having Damb come out, and kind of help be an organizer with Ellie and me, along with JJ from JJ’s Bar and Grill and X-Ray Arcade. 

SWIM: And it’s still at Howard’s too, right?

SHACK: Yep. Still at Howard’s.

SWIM: Paid now. 

SHACK: Yeah. Fauxchella III was free, and then Sword Fest was $5. DIY Prom was, I wanna say $10 or $20. Snowchella was $10 or $20, and then Fauxchella V was $30 presale, $40 at the door. 

SWIM: Man, inflation for real. 

SHACK: True. 

SWIM: But, also like an incredibly small price to pay to see like 30 bands really.

SHACK: I mean, we’re really keeping the whole dollar-per-band guarantee alive. I think we’ve got 60-something bands and we’re gonna do $60 for a full weekend pass.

SWIM: Okay. Last I had was like 45 on the list that you sent me, so I, yeah, I need a new lineup.

SHACK: Yeah, I love to do stupid shit. I go in assuming that they’re all gonna say no, and then they all say yes, and then I have way more bands than I anticipated.

SWIM: I think that’s the theme of this whole interview, really.

SHACK: I like shooting shots just for the sake of shooting shots. And every party was interested, and I was just like, okay, this was like a goofy pipe dream. 

Michael Cera Palin and Dikembe are doing three days around Fauxchella. The Riley!/Ben Quad tour that just happened mainly happened because of them both being on Fauxchella V last year. Just so many little things that all domino effect into these crazy ideas that I now have for the future. 

You know, all in all, the past month and a half, it just feels good to be back. Fauxchella V really kicked me back into gear a little bit. It kind of kicked me in the butt, and then starting booking with Fauxchella VI.

Cheem posted about needing a tour booked, and I was just like, ah, I’d book a tour for Cheem. And it was like their most successful one yet! The leg Seaholm did with Riley was their most successful tour yet. And it’s just kind of blowing my mind that it’s working.

Cause, again, the theme of it all is I have no fucking clue what I’m doing. Like, I am like flying by the seat of my pants at all times and just learning in the process. I’ve been very lucky to have a team of people with the Shack and a team of people doing this all across the Midwest that have offered all sorts of tips and advice and knowledge to help make these things not only feasible but productive and run well.

And, you know, even since we started charging for the fests, all of the money after covering overhead goes back into the bands. So it is like truly what people put in is what bands get out of it. 

Kicksie – Slouch | Album Review

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Counter Intuitive Records

Kicksie’s previous full-length, All My Friends, was released in August 2020, a time when society was essentially folding into itself as we collectively came to terms with the fact that COVID was not just a couple-month-long endeavor. Much of the world was forced to shuffle indoors and find ways to occupy their time, unknowingly unearthing who they are without any external means of coping. I was no different, as I too found myself burnt out with work, mundane online college courses, and life in general. While I don’t exactly remember how Kicksie’s 13-track pandemic release came into my field of view, I was immediately taken aback by the effect it had on my life. The opening track, “Sleepyhead,” had me wanting to run through a wall, all without using down-tuned guitars, breakdowns, or aggressive pit calls. This is where Kicksie finds their niche-- hard-hitting lyrics that stick to your brain for weeks on end, all while sounding like the soundtrack to a blockbuster coming-of-age movie.

Almost three years later, Kicksie, otherwise known as 22-year-old Giuliana Mormile, still never seems to lapse in consistency when it comes to creating captivating hooks and charismatic lyrics. The indie bedroom pop-emo project carries on its impressive run of self-recorded releases, this time around backed by scene anchor Counter Intuitive Records. One might find it daunting to release an album alongside labelmates with as much experience under their belts as Origami Angel, Oso Oso, and Mom Jeans; however, Mormile holds their own and then some on every track throughout their fifth full-length album, Slouch.

The record goes on an absolute tear in the first five tracks, which include the album's two singles, “You’re On” and “Sinking In.” Mormile tiptoes a fine line between confrontational, almost boastful lyricism on some tracks while being entirely introspective on others. She leans on this strength throughout the release, finding an immaculate balance between making the listener feel on top of the world, then at their lowest point, all within the span of a few minutes.

The first three tracks all portray Mormile at their feistiest. It’s in these tracks where crumbling relationships are confronted, including one song about having a complete lack of sympathy for straight-up stealing someone’s girlfriend. Track four, “Arcade,” is where the earnestness and lack of certainty begin to spill out. It is a spectacular love song about being unsure who someone really is in comparison to your expectations. Starting the track with melancholic chords, Mormile shows off her keen ability to pair lyrics with an exquisite vocal melody.

Tracks like “You’re On,” “Sinking In,” and “Go-Getter” all display Mormile’s pop-rock abilities at their finest, striking the listener with loud, memorable choruses. Although this is not all the album has to offer, she does a hell of a job writing slower, pensive tracks like my favorite, “Wish I Was (Anyone Else).”  The album offers a satisfying spread of upbeat, energetic pop-rock tracks alongside emo-tinged slow burners.

Many bands get away with writing 10 or 12 okay-ish tracks on a new album and calling it a day. It’s clear that Kicksie put their all into each and every song–not a single cut on Slouch lacks emotion or musicianship. While the two singles chosen for this release represent the album well, literally any other song could’ve done the same. 

Although it may seem obvious to some, I had to take a step back when listening to this album and appreciate how much these songs simply make me feel. Kicksie does a phenomenal job of crafting high-quality music, all while connecting with the listener on a personal level. Given the level of production and musicianship on display, it’s hardly accurate to call this a “bedroom” project anymore. Slouch launches Kicksie into a realm that longtime fans always knew the band would reach. 

Brandon Cortez is a writer/musician residing in El Paso, Texas. When not playing in shitty local emo pop punk bands, he can be found grinding Elden Ring on his second cup of cold brew. Find him on Twitter @numetalrev.