Sat, Dec 17
|Spotlight @ The Paramount
Low Cut Connie
WITH SPECIAL GUEST: GAMBLERS | Genre: ROCK -GET TICKETS BELOW- ** 21+ EVENT **
Time & Location
Dec 17, 2022, 8:00 PM
Spotlight @ The Paramount, 370 New York Ave, Huntington, NY 11743, USA
About The Event
MUST BE 21+ TO ATTEND EVENT
Alternating between raucous rock and roll ecstasy and gritty, stripped-down vulnerability, ‘PRIVATE LIVES’ is Low Cut Connie’s most potent and wide-ranging work to date, a complicated, sprawling double-album that’s at once beautiful and sloppy, brilliant and sordid, pissed off and joyous. Exploring the schisms between our inward and outward-facing selves, the 17-track collection is as empathetic as it is ambitious, giving voice to the losers and loners and outcasts who live their lives beyond the spotlight without glory or credit.
“I see more clearly now than ever before what my calling is,” explains frontman Adam Weiner. “I’m here to write and sing for the underdogs, for everybody who’s not part of that shiny, sexy 1%.”
While Weiner might not call ‘Private Lives’ a concept album, there is an underlying architecture at play. The record’s vacillations between riotous, anarchic anthems and raw, painfully honest solo performances underscore the lyrical shifts between its expressions of the public and private self. What do we show the world when we walk out the door? Who are we in our most personal spaces? The result plays out like a series of short films populated by dive bar patrons and late shift workers, single parents and starving artists, sex workers, gutter punks, and senior citizens. Weiner’s characters are ordinary folks just looking for escape and connection in a society that’s built on bad faith and broken promises. Rather than romanticize their struggles, though, ‘Private Lives’ dignifies them, painting rich, nuanced portraits of the kind of modern American lives that often go ignored or misunderstood.
Weiner’s no stranger to struggle, himself. In the three years he spent writing and recording ‘Private Lives,’ he weathered what was perhaps the most tumultuous stretch of his life, rearranging the band’s lineup multiple times, facing down a harrowing mental health crisis and multiple injuries, and reimagining just what Low cut Connie was. Nearly thirty different musicians appear on the self-produced record, which Weiner captured raw and loose in studios across the country during a time in which he was spending more than 200 days a year on the road, lugging hard drives and tapes with him everywhere he went. If that sounds like a chaotic way to make an album, that’s because, quite frankly, it was, and the music is refreshingly impulsive and unpolished as a result.
Hailed as “pathologically fun” by The New York Times, Low Cut Connie first exploded out of Philadelphia roughly a decade ago with their self-released debut, ‘Get Out The Lotion.’ Crossing the rapturous energy of Jerry Lee Lewis with the flamboyant sleaze of the New York Dolls, the record earned immediate critical raves, with Rolling Stone describing it as “what indie rock might sound like were it invented in Alabama in the late fifties” and NPR’s Fresh Air praising it as “both a throwback to early rock and a vital collection of raucous new music.” A year later, they followed it up with ‘Call Me Sylvia,” which the NY Daily News called “Mott the Hoople-style honky-tonk with a hint of garage-punk spunk,” and in early 2015, they returned again with ‘Hi Honey,’ an album dubbed “the essence of what rock ‘n’ roll should be” by Sound Opinions host and legendary rock critic Greg Kot. Despite all the glowing press, Low Cut Connie still remained something of an underground phenomenon, continuing to build up their cult audience one sweaty show and glorious festival at a time. That all changed in the summer of 2015, though, with a very unexpected co-sign from Barack Obama, who added the group to his summer playlist. Soon the band was counting the likes of Elton John and Bruce Springsteen among their fans as they sold out increasingly larger and larger rooms around the country. With more eyes on them than ever before, the band delivered big in 2017 and 2018, releasing a pair of critically lauded albums—‘Dirty Pictures (Part 1)’ and ‘Dirty Pictures (Part 2)’—and by the time 2019 came to an end, they were sitting pretty on Rolling Stone’s Best of the Decade list.
LOW CUT CONNIE
- GAMBLERS -
Gamblers formally introduced itself with the release in 2020 of Small World, which was praised by outlets like PopMatters and Newsday and landed single airplay on Sirius XM, NPR Music, and WFUV. Frontman Michael McManus’s kaleidoscopic pop sensibility is the through-line—from the beatific, soaring harmonies of “Give Yourself Into Love” to the wistful psychedelia of “Corinthian Order”—but the songs are also replete with references to mental illness, violence, and personal tragedy. “Tug of War” addresses the struggle of trying to balance being an artist with being a good person, while “Blood Sport” is a bubblegum pop song written from the perspective of a family dealing with a loved one in the throes of addiction.
The new EP, When We Exit, can be understood as a bridge between Small World and an in-progress second Gamblers LP, which is already in the mixing stage. The goal was to put a new spin on preexisting songs and essentially “A&R” the album from a hip hop standpoint.
Thus, the EP contains skeletal remnants of five songs from Small World, remixed and thoroughly reimagined in a studio in Ridgewood, Queens. Small World’s airy, lush title track, now called “Preach Your Love,” morphs into a ghostly electro-pop banger, and “Bound 2 Be Together” is deconstructed with technicolor synths and pounding ’80s snares fit for a John Hughes soundtrack.