Shakey Graves w/ Kid Reverieon 2018-12-14
Price: $70 GA / $105 Reserved
Genre: Blues Rock, Americana
ALL AGES: 18+ with valid photo ID. Under 18 must be accompanied by a parent or guardian.
Reserved seating is available for $105 and guarantees a seat in the reserved section. If necessary groups will be paired together at tables. Seating is based on time of purchase and the configuration of groups.
There is a 4-ticket limit for general admission OR a 6-ticket limit for reserved per customer, credit card or email address. Orders exceeding these limits, or any tickets purchased for resale, may have a portion or all of their orders cancelled without notice.
Pre-sale: Wednesday, September 19th @ 10am MST
Public Onsale: Friday, September 21st @ 10am MST
Shakey Graves
Back in December 2017, Shakey Graves proclaimed on his Twitter page, "Next album. New sound. Sell your suspenders." The tweet was tongue-in-cheek, but Alejandro Rose-Garcia, the Austin native who's been plying his trade as Shakey Graves since 2007, was making a dead-serious point about his latest album, Can't Wake Up (Dualtone, out May 4). This ambitious, audacious work heralds an artistic metamorphosis for the 30-year-old veteran, whose risk-taking in painting outside the lines has been rewarded tenfold. "This record is the most I've ever intentionally worked on a project, musically speaking, in terms of the scope of it and how much thought went into it," he says. "It's a dense album; there's a lot of information going on."
That is not a hyperbolic boast. From one moment to the next, Can't Wake Up veers from the inevitable to the revelatory, its thirteen songs teeming with jarring musical and thematic collisions and thrillingly seamless intersections, gnarly psychological hornswoggles and ecstatic resolutions. Central to the prevailing sense of disorientation are the lead vocals, none of which is purely solo. Instead, each lead performance is shadowed by a queasy harmony or slightly out-of-sync unison part, giving the sense—especially on headphones—that these voices are emanating from inside the listener's head.
Newfound inspirations the Beatles and Harry Nilsson ("I could only deny the inevitable for so long," he says of his belated immersion in the sacred texts) cohered around Rose-Garcia's longtime touchstones, including Elliott Smith, Beck circa One Foot in the Grave, Broken Social Scene, Built to Spill and other indie bands of the 1990s and early oughts.
"I've never worked like this before, but I went into the record with the idea of having a thesis statement of what I wanted to get across," Rose-Garcia explains. "And the place that I got at was that I wanted it to be vaguely Wizard of Oz-themed, and I wanted it to be hectic and a little uncomfortable, like what I refer to as the Big Five Disney cartoons: Pinocchio, Fantasia, Snow White, Dumbo and Bambi. All those movies are terrifying—some of the most stressful movies I've ever seen. So I started with this Wizard of Oz thing—'Tin Man' that has obvious allusions to that—and the idea of black-and-white to color."
The creative process was paralleled by the conception and execution of the striking, hallucinatory cover art. "I built an elaborate miniature diorama in my house and used plexiglass plates, paint and train set buildings to create a forced-perspective illusion and photographed it," Rose-Garcia explains. "The goal was to have the cover and the process to mirror the album in a way, and I am thrilled with how it turned out."
Can't Wake up is Alejandro/Shakey's second official studio-album project—more official, in any case, than the several mostly solo odds-and-ends collections he's been putting out through Bandcamp since his very first release, Roll the Bones, in 2011. It was his previous Dualtone album, 2014's And the War Came, and centerpiece song "Dearly Departed" that lifted Shakey from hard-core cultdom to the elevated status of bona fide career artist.
