Pigeon Pit / Walter Mitty and his Makeshift Orchestra / Antler Locked

Anodyne Coffee Roasting Co., Monday, May 4 at 07:00 PM CDT

X-RAY ARCADE PRESENTS
LIVE MUSIC / ALL AGES
6:30PM DOORS / 7PM MUSIC
$20 CASH DAY OF

PIGEON PIT
Olympia DIY Folk Punk

WALTER MITTY AND HIS MAKESHIFT ORCHESTRA
Of all the ways for a band to rise out of a decade of silence, Walter Mitty and His Makeshift Orchestra sent their fans on a real life treasure hunt for their new album, “Yikes Almighty”. The album, an existential crisis set to sugary melodies, cowboy chords and children’s toy instruments, was dubbed to a single cassette and buried in a cave in the California desert. The band released a cryptic video that served as the treasure map with the message “if you find it, we will release it.”

Though the bedroom folk punk outfit had not released music in 11 years, in actuality they have been consistently releasing and touring under the genre-defying umbrella name Walter Etc. When asked why the band is split into two identities, singer / songwriter, Dustin Cole Hayes, aka Walter, responded “my life is already such a mess, I decided I’d keep adding to the chaos.” It is Hayes’s cut-your-own-ear-off artistic sincerity that has made the Walter-verse and their art collective, Making New Enemies, fertile grounds for such strong mythology and deep connections. “Yikes Almighty” recounts a year of Hayes’s wandering, searching for home and stability, both physically and philosophically. It was released on Lauren Records, July 18th 2025.

ANTLER LOCKED
Cream City Folk Punk

https://mkeshows.com/event/pigeon-pit-walter-mitty-and-his-makeshift-orchestra-antler-locked

Myles Bullen/Willow Switch/Princess Unlucky/ Wychwood @ Avant Garde

Avant-Garde Bar, Sunday, March 8 at 03:00 PM EDT

Matinee Show at Avant Garde! $15

Myles Bullen Beautiful queer story telling and alt hip-hop to help you heal. Join Myles on the Adventure Tour to celebrate their new album "Afterlife" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VlHp0ZH3aQ

Willow Switch: Doom-folk from London. For fans of haunting harmonies, dark rituals, getting lured into the woods by floating lights. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5dysK0u1wQ&list=RDq5dysK0u1wQ&start_radio=1

Princess Unlucky: Beautiful Ottawa Harp folk

Wychwood: Doom-folk for the weeping heart.

https://ottawa.askapunk.net/event/myles-bullenwillow-switchprincess-unlucky-wychwood-avant-garde

The Pogues Play “Lorca’s Novena”

Listen to this track by Anglo-Celtic folk-punk banner bearers The Pogues. It’s “Lorca’s Novena”, a cut taken from their 1990 album Hell’s Ditch, their fifth record. By this point in their career that had started as an amalgam of punk rock aggression as it met with Irish traditional music and instrumentation, they began to wander farther afield stylistically speaking compared to their past albums. Rather than the Irish counties or London streets peopled by members of the Irish diaspora, many of the songs on Hell’s Ditch are set in more exotic locales.

“Lorca’s Novena” conjures the landscapes and histories of Almería in southern Spain, a region with a troubled history not unlike that of Ireland. Pogues frontman and primary writer Shane MacGowan’s time there to film Alex Cox’s Straight to Hell in 1987 helped to shape the song’s creation and expand on the band’s storytelling reach. Speaking of that movie, its star Joe Strummer sits in the producer’s chair on Hell’s Ditch. Strummer also appeared live with the band on the ensuing tour as a temporary member. “Lorca’s Novena” would appear on the Grosse Pointe Blank soundtrack, a movie for which Strummer would also provide the score.

This song preserves the band’s traditional music meets modern rock influences. It’s characterized by mandolins, acoustic guitars, harmonicas, and accordions matched with the rumbling bass guitar lope and the menacing march of the snare on the intro. There is a distinct tonal shift on this tune when compared to many of their songs on past albums. It’s darker and foreboding rather than reflecting the buoyant aggression for which the band had become known by then.

As this song begins, it feels like a soundtrack to an unfolding drama about a coming menace that represents danger and struggle. Seeing as this tune conjures the violence of the Spanish Civil War and the oppression by Franco’s fascists, it stands to reason.

The “Lorca” in this song refers to poet and playwright Frederico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936) who was assassinated by Franco’s Nationalists when the fascist movement swept through Spain in the late 1930s and stayed in power until 1975. Before the war, Lorca had been a key figure in literature and art in Spain. Although he was celebrated and successful for many years, he was privately tortured in not being able to present himself as a gay man and a socialist without endangering himself. His country’s increasingly hostile atmosphere of strict social definitions of identity and political loyalties justified his fears.

The exact circumstances of Lorca’s assassination remain unclear. For one thing, his body was never found. When mystery, art, repression, and death characterize a story like this, folk mythology usually isn’t very far behind. It’s this poetic hook that MacGowan picked up on in writing this song about a tortured artist at the forefront of culture who is overcome by forces with the power to silence him.

Perhaps that sense of alienation was reflective of MacGowan’s own position at the time. He’d been in a downward spiral for a few years due to his worsening addiction issues. He’d missed shows and gave erratic performances that made him a liability to his bandmates at a crucial time in their development as their audience expanded. At the commercial peak of their career, having an unreliable frontman must have been a major source of tension. By 1991, MacGowan was out of the group that he once helped define.

Despite the personal turbulence in place when MacGowan wrote this song, it’s more likely that the themes found in “Lorca’s Novena” have more to do with how all artists must meet their times in relation to the state especially during times of political instability. The song is a reflection of the injustice and tragedy of Lorca’s death. But it’s also elegiac as a celebration of a voice that expressed the spirit of the nation despite the destructive political tides and social upheavals that threatened it.

The words really do suggest a novena, which is a series of rituals and prayers in the Catholic tradition to seek favour on behalf of the deceased while in a period of mourning. “Lorca’s Novena” conjures the suggestion of protecting the very things for which the departed once stood.

Mother of all our joys
Mother of all our sorrows
Intercede with him tonight
For all of our tomorrows

~ “Lorca’s Novena” by The Pogues

Even without the historical context, “Lorca’s Novena” makes a powerful statement about the integral role that artists of different perspectives and experiences play in the health of cultures and nations. It also suggests the idea that artistic works and expressions are powerful enough to threaten the hold that violent and oppressive forces have on citizens and the futures they strive toward. Why else would they ban books and demonize and even murder artists? Why else would they try to invalidate whole groups of people for whom their art was made?

Artists and their works are a reflection of and a path toward that future for which all citizens hope. They express visions of worlds better than the ones we’re in, and that dictators and their minions would prefer to keep from manifesting for fear of losing their power. Even when the artist is struck down, the ideals they stand for are that much more difficult to kill.

In 2001 and after a five-year span apart, The Pogues re-grouped as a live act with Shane MacGowan in front again. They stayed together off and on from then until 2014 before they called it quits again.

Shane MacGowan died in 2023. The following year, principal members Jem Finer, James Fearnley, and Spider Stacy regrouped under the Pogues name for a continuing series of shows.

You can learn more about Shane MacGowan at shanemacgowan.com.

For more about how important MacGowan was as an artist who gave voice to those of his culture and experience particularly in relation to power structures, check out this article that talks about all that, with selections of MacGowan’s songs to enhance it.

Enjoy!

Il est amusant ce clip tout en images de mauvaise qualité

#Folk #punk 's not dead
#FolkPunk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWU-W0SzVE0&list=RDjWU-W0SzVE0&start_radio=1&rv=qH-oXGYB7Ms

Boi N The Ghouls, Maumshed, Groundscore, Owls And Other Anomals

Big Foggy, Saturday, February 28 at 07:00 PM CST

https://chicago.askapunk.net/event/boi-n-the-ghouls-maumshed-groundscore-owls-and-other-anomals