Lee Bains & the Glory Fires, Loamlands, Rocket Bureau

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Joe Steinhardt

Lee Bains on a porch with a guitar.

Lee Bains

If you're worried about finding a reserve of energy to head out on the Sunday night of another weekend packed with festivals, Lee Bains & the Glory Fires will most certainly help you fire it up. (But maybe build some sleeping-in time in your Monday morning schedule.) For the new album Old-Time Folks the trio started with the goal of making an album for the ages, enlisting producer/engineer David Barbe to help them craft a carefully arranged and more sonically diverse sound on record. While the guitars may be less roaring than on past albums, their rock has always been about more than volume thanks to Bains' heartfelt and to the bone lyrics. Also on the bill: Loamlands, a North Carolina group focusing on telling the stories of historical and modern-day queer life in the South; and Madison's own Rocket Bureau, whose Middle Angst cleverly conceals the travails of moving through life into a hook-laden rock song cycle that was one of 2021's best albums.

media release: $8.

LEE BAINS + THE GLORY FIRES 

Lee Bains + the Glory Fires released Old-Time Folks, their fourth full-length studio album, on Aug. 5 via Don Giovanni Records.

Since releasing their first album There Is a Bomb in Gilead in 2012, the road-worn Birmingham, Alabama band – singer and guitarist Lee Bains, bassist Adam Williamson, and drummer Blake Williamson – has built a reputation as being what NPR calls “punks revved up by the hot-damn hallelujah of Southern rock” who carry on “the Friday-night custom of burning down the house,” a raw live sound that they captured with Texas punk producer Tim Kerr on studio albums Dereconstructed (2014) and Youth Detention (2017) before recording a full-on live album at their favorite hometown dive, Live at the Nick (2019). 

Their work has come to be known, too, for Bains’s lyrics and their literate, incisive social commentary on the band’s beloved homeplace, leading him to publish poetry in the New Yorker and speak at universities from Mississippi to Sweden. 

Bains and the Williamson brothers can also be found collaborating with artists like Lonnie Holley and Swamp Dogg, lending their bombast to truck-bed protests of Donald Trump and Roy Moore, playing benefit shows for striking Alabama coal miners and Southern Black LGBTQ liberation organizations, and presenting gospel-music live streams for Birmingham and Atlanta food banks. 

LOAMLANDS is a distorted country music outfit based in Durham, North Carolina, that places queer storytelling at the forefront. Their music intimately grapples with identity, gender and experiencing a queer existence in both modern-day and historical southern culture. 

It is a project built out of love of this geographic area and our queer and otherwise marginalized elders and peers. It is a reckoning. It is a desire to join other poets and artists in visible vulnerability and accountability. We are obsessed with growth, storytelling / creating, distortion and some bleep bloops. 

We hope some of these stories connect with y’all and invite you into conversation with us and each other. We hope to reflect loudly, humbly and publicly on our collective and individual lived queer experience down here. 

And we hope you have fun w/ us. 

And think we’re cute. 

ROCKET BUREAU is the solo recording project of Madison multi-instrumentalist Kyle Urban, and a live rock'n'roll band featuring Dan Bornemann, Paul Kennedy, and Josh Labbus. Rocket Bureau released "Middle Angst", a self-recorded LP, in the spring of 2021.