I Just Read About That…

[CANCELLED: May 21, 2022] Vagabon / Maneka

There is evidence that Vagabon was supposed to play White Eagle Hall on May 21, 2022.  But there is very little of it. There’s no announcements of the show/tour.  There’s np posters or fliers.  And if you look at the website for White Eagle Hall, there a post announcing the show, but not one cancelling it.

I have wanted to see her for a few years now.   I loved her debut album, but i believe her follow up records sound quite different, so maybe I missed my chance back in 2019 when I didn’t see her with Angel Olsen.

Maneka used to be in Speedy Ortiz.

I listened to a track off his new album and it was mellow and almost a little boring.  But then I read that his previous album was wild and crazy and it is.

Turns out Maneka is really hard to pin down and would probably be amazing to see live.

Here’s a little blurb from Pitchfork.

After parting ways with Speedy Ortiz in 2017, Brooklyn-based musician Devin McKnight adopted the moniker Maneka to experiment with genres beyond his indie-rock roots.   …  McKnight came into his own on Devin in 2019, and he cranked his energy up to 11 by blending heavy metal and noise-punk with hip hop and jazz. On Dark Matter, McKnight continues to ask what it means to be Black in the indie scene while expanding his musical range in surprising ways.

McKnight likens America’s racist history to dark matter—an invisible force that binds the country together. “America has this really dark energy. How has it been this fucked up for so long and no one’s done anything about it?” he has said. On Dark Matters, he confronts that energy directly, writing lyrics that attack racism at its roots. On “Winners Circle,” an unusual fusion of trap drums, shoegaze guitars, and a double-time hardcore outro, he plays on the theory that Beethoven might have been a person of color who lightened his skin to pass in his own scene, singing, “Don’t paint a smile in the place where that shame hid/Play that brand new shit/That No. 9 shit.” On “The Glow Up,” he grapples with generations of racism—“And how do you explain this?/The seat in the back is meant for me?/And how do you explain this?/The ones we lost hanging from the trees”—over syrupy electric bass and guitar. And on the psychedelic “Runaway,” over dueling electric and acoustic guitars, he comes brutally to the point: “Stored in the bones/Is the feeling/You don’t belong here.”