FMH & The Bowery Present
Balance and Composure
w/ Kevin Devine & The Goddamn Band and Milly
Tickets ADV $35 • DOS $40
Doors 7pm
All Ages
Balance and Composure
After five long years, Balance and Composure return with Too Quick To Forgive––newly signed to Grammy-nominated producer Will Yip’s label, Memory Music, the alt-rock darlings sound more assured and adventurous than ever across two vulnerable tracks. Too Quick To Forgive is a reflection on personal perseverance in the wake of confrontation, told through two distinctly different scenarios. “Savior Mode” finds frontman Jon Simmons baring his soul in a way that is unparalleled in their discography, while “Last To Know” is an emotionally-resonant highlight that leaves a lasting impact well after its final notes play out.
Simmons' vulnerability and emotional delivery across both tracks cut through with unflinching precision courtesy of Andy Slaymaker (guitar), Matt Warner (bass), Erik Petersen (guitar), Dennis Wilson (drums), and who the band considers their 6th member––producer Will Yip. In the fall of 2022, the group got together at his Conshohocken, PA studio, Studio 4, with a few ideas that Yip helped turn into these otherworldly tracks. “It was all magic,” Jon says.
With a renewed sense of purpose, Balance and Composure will return to the stage for a series of Too Quick To Forgive release shows in some of the biggest rooms they've ever played.
Kevin Devine & The Goddamn Band
No One’s Waiting Up For Me Tonight, the upcoming five-song EP from Brooklyn musician Kevin Devine, tracks a period of unmaking, remaking, and unmaking again. Pulled from a collection of music written between January 2019 and March 2020, No One’s Waiting Up For Me Tonight is a set of cosmic folk and kaleidoscopic, acoustic acid-bedroom-pop, as tranquil and sedate as it is unsettled and shifting. It’s mournful and hopeful in equal turns, and above all committed to the even, blunt experience of both: the full spectrum of life and what it means to have lived. “These five songs are about the freedom, and the opportunity for growth, that comes with the capacity to be in fealty to reality, to not deny that which is, or not try to bend that which is to your preference or will, but to just accept and respond,” says Devine. Due out June 25 on Bad Timing Records, No One’s Waiting Up For Me Tonight was recorded entirely from the homes of each contributor: Devine’s vocals, guitars, and keys in South Brooklyn; Chris Bracco (mixing, keys) in Stratford, Connecticut; Morgan Kibby (vocals, keys) and Keeley Bumford (vocals, keys), each in Los Angeles; and Zack Levine (drums, percussion) in Chatham, New York. The process was disparate and isolated, but Devine says it tracked well with the working conditions of musicians at his level, which he describes as “non-celebritized, (someone) who has an audience and has been able to make a living, and has a career but also is not a famous person, but also is not just starting out.” Aside from touring, his work—writing, administrative tasks, and recording— is done from his apartment. Devine’s 20-year career includes nine full-length records, 11 EPs, 12 Devinyl Splits, three albums with his band Bad Books, and now a wildly-successful Patreon called “Social Club,” which delivers fans new original music, cover songs, livestream concerts, archival recordings, and more, every month. “It’s like on my headstone it could say, ‘Not famous, but beloved by those who knew,’” he laughs. “I authentically feel like I won the lottery that that’s the truth.” But that feeling doesn’t halt what Devine describes as “the Russian nesting dolls of distorted, warping influence” that encourage insecurity and competition in working musicians. “That’s late-stage casino capitalism,” he says.
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Devine cites Kurt Cobain and Elliott Smith as formative aesthetic and ideological influences, but mourns how capitalist music industries chewed up both artists. “I kinda wish neither of those people were any more famous than playing 500-capacity clubs, cause I think it was bad for them,” he says. He cites Smith’s tattoo of Ferdinand the Bull, the titular character of the childhood story of a bull who refuses his role in bullfighting and instead longs to sit among the flowers. Devine reads the story now to his daughter. Neither Cobain nor Smith could change the bullfight, despite their best efforts to disorder and unsettle it. Ferdinand’s greatest and most instructional success, says Devine, was to simply leave the arena. “I wanna figure out a way to just get as far away from the bullfight as possible,” says Devine. This is Devine’s refusal, too. What he prioritizes now is a spiritual relationship with listeners: “If someone likes what you make, and it occupies some place in their life, they want you to be able to keep making it.” This work naturally lends itself to ebbs and flows of life: Devine says he can be himself, and “grow and shrink and move around” accordingly. No One’s Waiting Up For Me Tonight is coloured by this humanism, which operates as a constantly-refocusing lens on a period of upheaval, loss, and reckoning. Opener “No One’s Waiting Up For Me Tonight,” with its hazy, warbled guitars and sticky drums, introduces this cryptically: “No distraction from our dreams, denied/No one’s waiting up for me tonight,” Devine sings gently. “I’ve Never Been Happier Than I Was In That Picture” is a bruised and bruising meditation on love and flashbulb-pops of memory, Devine’s voice backed by haunting harmonies from Kibby. “It happened, it’s over/I love ya, I miss ya/And I’ll never be happier than I was in that picture,” Devine laments. “Taking Shape” beds calm finger-picking under sunset melodies and a determination to be better. “Lakes On The Moon,” a dark, soaring epic, builds to the EPs rich, starry-eyed climax, while closer “All There Is Now” is a tender elegy, a bittersweet and caring send-off to the past. Devine describes the processes on No One’s Waiting Up For Me Tonight as “muscular and routinized,” as things which aren’t simply learned once, but which are constantly being built and rebuilt. “What I’m talking about is taking inventory,” he says. “How do you accept your personhood in all of its great and bad iterations, and how do you see that they’re not actually great or bad, but that everything is on a spectrum of grayscale? We’re just trying to figure out how to get through the day as responsibly as we can, to ourselves and the people around us.”
milly
Originally the solo project of Brendan Dyer, his relocation from Connecticut to Los Angeles saw the band expand to include collaborator Yarden Erez. After signing to Dangerbird Records, 2019 saw the band on tour with Swervedriver & DIIV, and in 2021 they released their acclaimed EP Wish Goes On.
To understand Eternal Ring, you have to go back to Dyer’s childhood. Learning guitar and drums from his uncle, a musician, from the age of ten, Dyer was one of the only young people in his rural Connecticut town interested in anything other than sports and other stereotypical markers of American life. Naturally, Dyer began to gravitate towards emo — the closest thing many teens have to outsider art — as an art form he could identify with, bands like Hawthorne Heights subconsciously laying the groundwork for the music he would make as an adult. “It probably only lasted a year or two that I was interested in that sort of thing, but now I feel like it’s become a thing in my life where it’s like, full circle,” he says. “When we were writing this album, and touring before writing this album, I was reconnecting with a lot of the music that I was listening to in my youth and realizing that…
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there was a reason why I liked this music so much.”
The MILLY of Eternal Ring, though, is a vastly different project from the one Dyer began in his childhood bedroom. Where the band’s old songs were dazed and gorgeously laconic, Eternal Ring is muscular, punchy, almost alarmingly direct. You only need to hear album opener and debut single “Illuminate” to understand the change: slipping quickly from emo balladry into something heavy and intoxicatingly intense, it’s a clear marker that this is the work of a tighter, more dynamic Milly. There is no slack to these songs — even the nine-minute “Stuck In The Middle” is an impossibly taut endurance work, jumping from emotive build to gut-wrenching squall in a second.