ARTS Pick: Shagwüf

Sally Rose leads her trio Shagwüf in Sweet Freakshow, an anniversary performance to celebrate five years of stirring up crowds with the group’s psychedelic, retro swagger. “The most punk thing you can do in divisive times is to write music and try and bring bodies together, to sweat and celebrate being alive and compassionate,” says […]

Wild ride: Buckle up, The Falsies are back

It’s hard to decide what deserves your attention at a Falsies concert. Is it the music? The musicians themselves, constantly swapping guitars for saxophones, for drums, for keyboards? Or is it band founder Lance Brenner in his yellow chicken suit, gesticulating wildly while shoving a microphone into the beak to sing? Maybe you’re wondering how […]

Trickling streams: How digital has affected local musicians

Paul Curreri remembers getting rid of his CD collection. He and his wife, Devon Sproule, both musicians, were packing up their Austin, Texas, home to move back to Charlottesville in 2015, when Curreri realized he hadn’t added to his CD collection in a while. “There wasn’t a bad one in the bunch,” he says of […]

ARTS Pick: Wild Rose

Girl Choir is distortion driven. The Chuggernauts opt for a punk-rock pirate vibe. And while The Unholy Four strives for old-school hard rock, Wild Rose keeps it modern as a quartet. Expect a blend of grit and tenderness when punk rock meets punk ‘n’ roll during an evening with these four local bands. Friday, January […]

Over hard: Punk band Fried Egg goes beyond its hardcore roots

One week before the winter solstice, the weather is nasty in Charlottesville and it’s cold as fuck inside Magnolia House. The four members of hardcore punk band Fried Egg—guitarist Tyler Abernethy, bassist Sam Richardson, drummer Sam Roberts, and vocalist Erik Tsow—sit on mismatched couches and chairs in the dim living room of the DIY venue […]

Hear us out: A never-complete list of local releases from 2018

It’s time for us to take up the sticks and beat this drum again. Here’s our never-complete (but still pretty comprehensive) look at what Charlottesville-area artists released this year. We’ve focused mainly on albums and EPs, but there are dozens of other bands and artists releasing single after single, or playing songs that haven’t been […]

Playing it out: Stray Fossa is a new band with a long history

Nick Evans sometimes wakes at “god-awful hours of the night” to find his brother, Will, in the living room, sitting quietly amid microphones, coiled cables, amps, guitars, and drums, his shoulders hunched toward his computer, the blue-white glow of the screen illuminating his face, laser-focused, with headphones covering his ears. Nick laughs as he describes […]