Space Ballroom Weekly Round-up: 7 shows announced
Space Ballroom announced Exhorder, 12/OC, La Luz, May Erlewine, Nels Cline Consentrik Quartet, Swervedriver and Westbound Train this week. Tickets are on sale now via spaceballroom.com
Exhorder
Space Ballroom • 295 Treadwell Street, Hamden, CT 06514
March 17, 2025
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Exhorder
Formed in 1986, Exhorder’s journey has proven exciting, yet tumultuous. Fraught with euphoric peaks and crippling valleys throughout its existence, the band debuted that summer with the do-it-yourself demo recording, “Get Rude”. Swiftly building a strong local following in the New Orleans punk rock scene, Exhorder entered a legitimate 24 track studio in 1987 and crafted their controversial classic demo, “Slaughter In The Vatican”. From there, the international attention the band drew via the world of underground tape-trading was indisputable. However, as fate would have it, the band broke up for the first time in early 1988 due to internal struggles. A reformation ensued later that year, and Exhorder set out once again to pursue its vision.
The band soon signed with Mean Machine Records, but the label dissolved before the band’s debut could be completed. The contract was subsequently purchased by R/C Records, a subsidiary of Roadracer/Roadrunner Records. With a small recording budget and repairs to previous sessions, the album version of Slaughter In The Vatican was finally completed in 1990. With the assistance of legendary producer Scott Burns in 1990, Slaughter in the Vatican was finally completed nearly five years after much of the material was written.
Following a series of lineup shifts, a second full-length entitled “The Law”, and multiple hiatuses, the band finally relaunched itself in 2017. Legends grow over time, and new generations emerge to keep them alive. With the demand of Exhorder at an all-time high, the band set out once again to finish the job they had not yet completed. The band played a series of club shows and festivals to immense interest. Subsequently, a deal with the Nuclear Blast label was quickly inked, and in 2019 Exhorder released their third offering, “Mourn The Southern Skies”. Rave reviews from critics and fans saw the band’s popularity increase yet again, so Exhorder set out on the road to packed venues and large festivals.
In the years that followed the relaunch of the band, Exhorder has toured extensively in both the United States and Europe. The reputation the band has carried as a force onstage continues to grow. With a new release in association with Nuclear Blast completed and set for release in 2024, Exhorder are plotting another busy year performing worldwide.
Nels Cline Consentrik Quartet
Space Ballroom • 295 Treadwell Street, Hamden, CT 06514
April 9, 2025
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Nels Cline Consentrik Quartet
To be sure, the guitarist and composer Nels Cline has range. Think of how he elevates the songs of Jeff Tweedy as a member of Wilco, or the diverse musical terrain he’s traversed on his albums for Blue Note Records over the past decade — from the gorgeous, sweeping mood music of Lovers to the wide-open sonic audacity of Share the Wealth, the latter featuring his longtime group the Nels Cline Singers.
Now comes Consentrik Quartet, the eponymous debut showcasing a newer band comprising tenor and soprano saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, bassist Chris Lightcap, and drummer Tom Rainey. By turns swinging, grooving, bracing, mesmeric and quietly stunning, Consentrik Quartet spotlights the ensemble’s profound chemistry as well as Cline’s versatility as both a player and a writer in a focused context where his gifts can be appreciated with absolute clarity.
It also underscores his ceaseless appetite for and encyclopedic knowledge of great improvised music: Committed jazz observers might hear echoes of the sax/guitar frontline attack and programmatic scope of the Joe Lovano/John Scofield quartets, as well as the soft-spoken intensity and seamless blend of composition and improvisation that defined the various iterations of the Jimmy Giuffre 3. In fact, Consentrik Quartet feels at times like a roadmap to Cline’s rich and considered palette of influences — from the new-music hues of “The Returning Angel” and “Allende” to the groove hypnosis of “The 23” and the free-swinging “Surplus,” where Cline punctuates well-drawn post-bop lines with gritty electric-blues phrases.
A double LP that remains compelling from beginning to end, Consentrik Quartet can feel more like a best-of compilation than a new work. To put it a different way, it just might be the finest leader recording of Cline’s long and storied career. And with its deft balance of swing and the avant-garde — check out “The Bag” — it’s also a terrific and meaningful addition to the Blue Note catalog, calling to mind the label’s 1960s classics by Andrew Hill, Eric Dolphy, and others.
Of course Cline, a genial and generous man, can’t help but channel praise toward his empathetic bandmates. Compared to his often-otherworldly Singers, he explains, the Consentrik Quartet is “much more of a jazz group, if I dare use that word. I wanted to have the music reflect the players, and have the players come forth so that everybody is able to hear them and enjoy their lucidity and their mastery.”
To start, “I’ve got one of the greatest drummers on the planet in the band” in Tom Rainey, says Cline. Rainey, probably best known for his work with Tim Berne and Laubrock, his spouse, is that rare avant-gardist who can expertly color and improvise freely, then swing with old-school ferocity. Cline wrote “The Bag” as a dedication to Rainey, whose opening drum solo hits like a master class in the art of drum-kit-as-orchestra. Lightcap has earned acclaim for his original music and his collaborations with Regina Carter, Craig Taborn, Joe Morris, Matt Wilson, and other luminaries, and Cline praises the vast reach of his skills. As heard on the extended solo intro to “Question Marks (The Spot),” he is capable of inspired melodic and narrative playing in the post-Scott LaFaro and Charlie Haden mold, but he also “plays real bass bass,” as Cline puts it. “He has that solid, supportive thing,” he adds. “Deep feel.”
A superb avant-gardist whose music is equally challenging and alluring, Laubrock has left Cline dumbstruck over the years as a co-leader with Rainey and in groups like guitarist Mary Halvorson’s octet. “I heard her negotiating these perplexing chord changes in that band, with this amazing combination of great facility but also a kind of intimacy,” he says. “Honestly, when I listen to her playing on the Consentrik record, I’m consistently blown away. To me, it sounds like it’s her record because of how she shines.” Cline and Laubrock urge each other toward greater heights throughout, sparring and entangling to riveting effect on tracks like “House of Steam.”
Cline wrote one of the album’s most remarkable pieces, “Satomi,” in tribute to Satomi Matsuzaki of the experimental-rock titans Deerhoof. During the pandemic, despite experiencing profound and tragic life changes, Matsuzaki provided a ballast to Cline and his wife, the musician Yuka Honda. “Satomi is an amazing artist,” Cline begins, “but she’s also an incredible friend. She’s the kind of person who is just there for you.”
“The first part of the piece is a reflection of Deerhoof, and more specifically her exuberance and amazing energy,” Cline says. “And the second half is my reflection on the challenges she faced during the pandemic; basically, I’m sending a message to her musically that I care. It’s thoughtful and slightly sad until the very end, where there’s a bit of resolution — a light at the end of the tunnel, or a kind of prayer.” In its melancholy stillness, the album-closing “Time of No Sirens” is similarly affecting.
The pandemic figures heavily into the Consentrik story. Cline first assembled these musicians six years ago, for a free-improvisation set at the Brooklyn outpost of John Zorn’s venue The Stone. Soon after, Cline became aware of a commission and grant opportunity through the renowned Philadelphia arts organization Ars Nova Workshop, to compose new music and tour it in the Eastern U.S. “So I wrote about why I thought this was something I’d want to do, and I got the grant,” Cline says. “And then the pandemic hit.”
Cline estimates he wrote half of this material during lockdown, first in Brooklyn and then in rural upstate New York, where he and his wife relocated. “Suddenly,” Cline recalls, “we were enveloped in silence.” The respite afforded Cline the bandwidth to immerse himself in writing, and to think in a diligent way about what the Consentrik aesthetic could be. “Initially, for myself anyway, my sonic palette, I was looking at a more conservative approach—a little more traditional, I guess you’d say.” But Cline’s imagination, it turns out, is too fertile to be hemmed in by artistic parameters—even if he sets them himself. “Over time, I found myself looping and writing funkier grooving tunes,” he says.
“Consentrik started with me trying to strip it down and hardly use any effects,” he continues. Slowly but surely, however, the pedalboard came into play, and in the end Cline’s tasteful command of electronics serves the group well: “The sound of an overdriven guitar, I realize, just so matches the sound of a tenor saxophone.”
This new release is also, in many ways, a love letter to the Brooklyn improvised-music scene that he became a vital player in well over a decade ago. And though he no longer lives in the borough, his allegiance to the creative musicians Brooklyn nurtures remains steadfast.
“My dream starting in the mid-’70s was to live in New York City and play music there,” Cline reflects. “I didn’t do it until 2009, when I met Yuka, and I thought, ‘Whoa—I guess I’m finally doing this.’ But I was very happy to be a part of this community. And I’m still happy about it.”
12/OC
Space Ballroom • 295 Treadwell Street, Hamden, CT 06514
April 13, 2025
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12/OC
The country band 12/OC was born in their family kitchen in Portland Maine, when brothers Will and Reid were both still just kids. Country music was always playing in their household and making music together was simply put, the way of life. The band started to find its groove at open mic nights throughout the region, which became the foundation to turning this family pastime into a family career. As their popularity has grown so has their versatility; their wide range of music has helped increase their fan base across the country making them one of the fastest growing country music acts in New England. Having the most requested song on Maine’s #1 Country Music station for 16 straight weeks, as well as adding a hand full of New England Music Awards, 12/OC isn’t slowing down anytime soon.
La Luz
Space Ballroom • 295 Treadwell Street, Hamden, CT 06514
April 15, 2025
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La Luz
“I was in a dream, but now I can see that change is the only law.”
With a credo adapted from science fiction author Octavia E. Butler, an album title from a collection of metaphysical poetry, and an expansion in consciousness brought on by personal crisis, guitarist and songwriter Shana Cleveland learns to embrace a changing world with unconditional love on News of the Universe, the new full-length from California rock band La Luz.
News of the Universe is a record born of calamity, a work of dark, beautiful psychedelia reflecting Cleveland’s experience of having her world blown apart by a breast cancer diagnosis just two years after the birth of her son. It’s also a portrait of a band in flux, marking the first appearance for drummer Audrey Johnson and the final ones from longtime members bassist Lena Simon and keyboardist Alice Sandahl, whose contributions add a bittersweet edge to a record that is both elegy for an old world and cosmic road map to a strange new one.
But is there any band in the world more suited to capturing the chaos of change in all its messy beauty than La Luz? Formed by Cleveland in 2012, La Luz is beloved for their ability to balance bedlam and bliss, each new record another fine-tuning of the band’s mix of swaggering riffs with angelic vocals borrowed from doo-wop and folk; a band so reliably great that it makes the huge step forward in confidence and sheer musicality that is News of the Universe all the more formidable. Cleveland, also a writer and painter, has developed into a truly original songwriter with her own canon of haunted psychedelia that, in recent years, has drawn upon the changing landscape around her rural California home for inspiration, notably on last year’s critically acclaimed solo release, Manzanita, a magical realist documentation of her pregnancy and early motherhood that appeared on many year-end lists.
Yet if Cleveland has spent years writing songs about ghosts, what lurks in the shadows of News of the Universe is nothing less than death itself. “There are moments on this album that sound to me like the last frantic confession before an asteroid destroys the earth,” says Cleveland.
Sonically, the record is all urgency. Songs trip over themselves as if trying to outrun the apocalypse: the breathless pitter-pattering of toms on “Strange World,” the title track’s finger-tangling opening riff drenched in murky distortion. An atmosphere of doom hovers hazily over the Sgt. Pepper-esque baroque pop song “Poppies,” on which Cleveland sings of a wavering orange idyll about to be set ablaze by the late summer sun. On the similarly kaleidoscopic “Dandelions,” she figures the yellow flowers for unsuspecting “little suns” soon to be “turning into moons” as the season marches on. The synthesized sounds used on the band’s last record, 2021’s La Luz, to mimic the languid buzz and crackle of a summer’s day in the countryside have been cut adrift in space—now they are silvery comet tails, dapplings of space dust, showers of stars.
These earthy observations are inspired by Cleveland’s walks around her home in the shell-shocked days post-diagnosis when she found she had to be very intentional about what she consumed. “Seeing the cycle of life, seeing things grow out of decay, the decay of other living things—was super comforting to me. I had to get to a place where I felt more comfortable with the idea of death,” she says.
But for every moment of fear, there is one of pure ecstasy. Shimmery chamber pop song “Blue Moth Cloud Shadow” puddles into a twinkly organ-driven reverie; “I’ll Go With You” starts out with the record’s sludgiest riff before turning into its prettiest song. “Always in Love” is a real power-of-love ballad that serves as the record’s centerpiece and is capped off by a fiery and jubilant guitar solo, Cleveland’s own “November Rain” moment.
The powerful sense of openness that permeates News of the Universe is at least partially due to the fact that it is a record made entirely by women—from the performing, writing, and producing all the way through to the recording, engineering, and mastering. “There is something inherently and simultaneously sweet and brutal about womanhood,” says Cleveland. “That is something I hear on this record.”
Working with producer Maryam Qudos (Spacemoth), the all-female environment allowed Cleveland to feel safe tapping into difficult places and expressing hard emotions women are socialized to suppress. “Having that kind of connection and that comfort straightaway let us push it further,” she says. “We didn’t spend the first half of the session being careful not to offend someone’s ego.”
Qudos also helped shape the songs, bringing ideas to the table “that to me felt like choices that I would not normally make, but I was really stoked about,” says Cleveland, pointing out that the dubbed-out effects on “Moon in Reverse” were all Qudos. “Sometimes she would have ideas about the structure of the songs, which a producer often doesn’t really mess with. But as a songwriter herself, I think she felt really comfortable with us.” Their working relationship was so organic that Qudos has since joined La Luz full-time on keyboards to replace the departing Sandahl.
Unashamedly vulnerable, unabashedly feminine, and undeniably triumphant, News of the Universe is another knockout record from a band so reliably great that it has perhaps led people to overlook how pioneering La Luz really are: women of color in indie music forging their own path by following their own artistic star into galaxies beyond current musical trends, always led by an earnest belief in the cosmic power of love and a great riff. Never is that more true than on News of the Universe, which might be La Luz’s most brutal record to date but also their most blissful. After everything, how could it not?
Swervedriver
Space Ballroom • 295 Treadwell Street, Hamden, CT 06514
April 25, 2025
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Swervedriver
Swervedriver are an English alternative rock band formed in Oxford in 1989 around core members Adam Franklin and Jimmy Hartridge. Between 1990 and 1998, the band released four studio albums for Creation Records in the UK and A&M Records in the US as well as numerous EPs and singles. Breaking up in 1998, the band reformed in 2007 and have released two further full length albums, as well as reissues of all their albums, the most recent being the 99th Dream reissue which was released in January 2024 and went to no.18 in the official UK album chart and no.6 in the official UK vinyl albums chart. Their latest release is the World’s Fair EP, out March 2025. Containing four brand new songs, the World’s Fair EP is the band’s first new music in over five years.
Westbound Train
The Cellar on Treadwell • 295 Treadwell Street, Hamden, CT 06514
April 26, 2025
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Westbound Train
May Erlewine
Space Ballroom • 295 Treadwell Street, Hamden, CT 06514
May 2, 2025
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May Erlewine
May Erlewine has dedicated her life to writing songs for the human heart’s existence.These songs have the relentless ability to find the tender places within us. Her body of work stands as a reminder that our greatest strengths come from allowing ourselves to be courageously vulnerable.
It’s evident that her career in the music industry has been service-oriented. She uses her platform to fight for positive change. Stressing the important, necessary work of advocacy, justice and empowerment in our world. This community building message has touched people all across the globe.
Her new album, What It Takes, culminates decades of hard work and perseverance. Produced by Theo Katzman and recorded in the north woods of Michigan, the record offers a fresh and electric sound supporting May’s soulfully familiar songs.
Her calling is to share this music. Her words have held solace for weary hearts. They offer a light in the darkness and leave space for the pain and joy of being alive. When she starts to sing, everyone is invited, come as you are.
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