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Spotlight: Space Cubs

It’s always exciting when two singular artists come together to work on one project. In this case it’s Buffalo-based musicians Suzanne Bonifacio, who has performed locally as Space Cubs, and Shawn Lewis, popularly known as Lesionread, who have teamed up to flesh out Bonaficio’s solo project into a full band along with Ken Culton and Adam Pressley.

Green Window City, First Friday

It’s a week or two too early for the leaves and too late for St. Patrick’s Day, but there’ll be a different kind of green appearing all over Allentown this Friday to usher in the First Friday of Buffalo’s “out of doors and it’s OK” season. A month-long installation called Green Window City takes form, an experiment in creative sustainability made from upcycled materials diverted from the waste-to-landfill pipeline, however temporarily.

Tim Clarke Soul-Tet

[JAZZ] The Tim Clarke Soul-Tet is a brand new Buffalo-based quintet that puts their own soulful spin on groovey, latin-inspired hard bop jazz tunes from the 1950s to the early 1990s. Clarke leads the group on trumpet and flugelhorn, with Darryl Washington on drums, Nelson Rivera on tenor sax, Ed Croft on bass, and Harry Graser on keys. Catch the Tim Clarke Soul-Tet at Pausa Art House on Saturday, May 5. 

68 with American Nosebleed

[PUNK] It’s hard to say where a band like ’68 fits in. They came to be at the end of an era dominated by bands like Chiodos, Norma Jean, and Underoath, for whom they toured with as support, but too late to take full advantage of the wave of popularity that those bands enjoyed. That doesn’t mean that the ’68 won’t ride their own wave now, especially with the release of their latest record, Two Parts Viper, which met with solid reviews when it was released last year.

Niagara Falls Underground Railroad Heritage Center Opening

[OPENING] For decades before the Civil War, subversive white and Hodenosaunee activists around here worked with once-enslaved blacks in a shared enterprise of human liberation that delivered thousands of people to freedom in Canada. It’s a great story, it’s all true, it’s local, and it’s right down the street from the Niagara Falls Aquarium, directly across from the Whirlpool Bridge, and immediately adjacent to the brand-new Amtrak station. There’s a particularly poignant and focused presentation on the role played by the owners and staff of the old Cataract House hotel, operated by the Whi

Karuna featuring Hamid Drake and Adam Rudolph

[WORLD MUSIC] Two master percussionists, Hamid Drake and Adam Rudolph combine together to form the band Karuna. Karuna is a Bhuddist term for compassion, and despite the fact that Drake and Rudolph beat the shit out of their drums, they do so with an extreme love of rhythm that radiates into their audience. The two musicians have known each other since they were teenagers in Chicago, which could explain their deep rhythmic connection, and though they’ve toured the world together in various bands, this is their first tour as a duo.

Teenager

[NEW WAVE] Look at a promo photo of the Toronto punk band Teenager and it looks like they’re doing some nihilistic impression of the cast of Friends except they all look like they’ve been smoking too much weed, and that if it came down to it, they wouldn’t really be there for you. It does, however, look like it hasn’t been their day, their week, their month, or even their year, at least judging by their profoundly indifferent, vacant facial expressions.

Robt Sarazin Blake & The Letters

[FOLK] According to musician Robt Sarazin Blake, “Robt is simply an abbreviation of Robert. It is pronounced the same, but takes two less letters to spell.” This is a rare shortcut for Blake, however, as he doesn’t take many shortcuts in his music at all. Instead, he crafts slowburning, low key art-folk songs that are at once folksy, humorous, and heartfelt. On his latest record, Recitative, released on the artists record label, SameRoom, the style can best be described as jazzy talk-singing—which comes off as both poetic and affecting.

Buffalo Cherry Blossom Festival

[FESTIVAL] The folks over at Music Is Art are spearheading this year’s music portion of the Buffalo Cherry Blossom Festival at the Buffalo History Museum, this Saturday, May 5. That means festival goers can expect music Japanese rock band The Molice, who are signed to Music is Art founder and Goo Goo Dolls bassist Robby Takac’s label, Good Charamel Records. Indie rock band Mom Said No joins in too, along with DJ Sashimi.

Bullet For My Valentine

[METAL] Outrageous haircuts and sleeveless black t-shirts aside, Bullet For My Valentine are a band that, like it or not, have helped define metalcore music in the early 2000s. The band’s debut album, The Poison, released in 2005 on Trustkill records, has sold a million copies to date, thanks to it’s melodic emo-metal sound. Since then the band has released four records including the thrashier Scream Aim Fire, and their latest, 2015s The Venom.

Start Making Sense: A Tribute to the Talking Heads

[TRIBUTE] For those who missed David Byrne’s masterful, creative, and enthralling performance at the UB Center For The Arts in March, or even if you were there and just need more Talking Heads in your life, we’ve got some good news. Start Making Sense, the seven-piece Talking Heads tribute band from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, returns to Western New York for a show at Buffalo Iron Works on Friday May 4. Expect all of your favorite hits and some deep cuts too. Special guest Ruby Dear opens the show.

Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band

[COUNTRY] Reverend Peyton probably measures the term “big damn band” differently than you or I. His “big” has nothing to do with the number of members in his band— just three, including the Reverend himself—but more to do with the size of the sound, which is, in fact, big. You’d be surprised how much noise a washboard and a five gallon plastic bucket can make. Catch Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band at the Tralf Music Hall this Wednesday, May 2.

Stone Temple Pilots

[ROCK] It’s been a long hard ride for Dean and Robert DeLeo and Eric Kretz—the musical core of Stone Temple Pilots. Brilliant but deeply troubled vocalist Scott Weiland helped brand the band’s sound and catapulted them to superstardom, but Weiland seemed determined to tear down what the quartet had worked so hard to build, despite sporadic efforts to turn things around. Now with Jeff Gutt (of X Factor fame, oddly enough) as STP’s vocalist, the band is on the road in support of a new self-titled album that dropped on Rhino in mid-March.

Sunflower Bean

[INDIE] It’s early yet to be making statements about the best things that happened in 2018, but Sunflower Bean’s sophomore set, Twentytwo in Blue, is liable to show up on some year-end lists. The New York City-based trio wowed with their 2016 debut, Human Ceremony (and played a well-attended gig at the Tralf in August of that year, opening for – and inadvertently upstaging – Best Coast). But it’s amazing what a few years of life experience can bring.

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