Waldemar headline The Broadway with support from Labrador, Meir Levine + Rose Blanshei!
7:00PM Doors // 8:00PM Show
21+
$12 adv // $15 dos
Waldemar
Singer-songwriter Gabe Larson is the artistic gravity behind Waldemar, a heartland indie rock band (think The War on Drugs and The National with a dash of Willie Nelson), based in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Waldemar combines soaring vocals and poignant, confessional lyrics against a dense backdrop of sweeping guitar tapestries and synth textures to deliver a sonic freight train of an album. The new record Ruthless is a journeyman musician’s fixation, the renegade harmonies of a blue-collar poet.
Written and recorded over a span of five years, Ruthless is an act of remarkable patience and commitment. For two of those years, Larson spent every moment outside of his job sanding floors, painstakingly transforming a weathered, century-old horse barn on his property into a professional recording studio with his brother and bandmate Nick Larson. The studio is hidden in plain sight, nestled along an alley in Eau Claire’s North Side Hill, blocks away from the old Uniroyal tire factory. The setting is incredibly generative and inspiring. Across the street is an elementary school, complete with the sounds of laughing children at play, and in the industrial buildings nearby, hundreds of laborers maintain the neighborhood’s workaday heritage.
Ruthless is the relentless vision of a musician perfecting a sound. Cascades of guitars, synths and vocals wash over the listener like rivers polishing stone, like grit on grains of wood. But the album also represents a different generative experience: the recent birth of Larson’s daughter, Ruth. In this, the album is a poetic dovetailing of a craftsman musician honing his trade, and his young family begetting new life. In a Midwestern setting that gave rise to so many other American dreams, Ruthless is a testament to the power of struggle, that we are made by what we make.
Labrador
When the going gets tough, Labrador are there to lift you up. On their sophomore album, Hold the Door for Strangers, the tenderly bruised alt-country quintet have crafted a collection of compassionate story songs. Patching together ragged indie rock performances with stately strings and electrified solos, the introspective narrators of the band’s cowboy ballads wear emotional scars like a sheriff’s gold star. Led by Philadelphia-based songwriter Pat King, the album tracks a "a battalion of characters, like a populated novel or some enchanting universe that’s deftly and oddly familiar" (FLOOD Magazine) while reminding you that "the cruelty of the world affects us all, and that good times are just around the bend" (Post-Trash). Upon its release, the album was chosen as a "New & Notable" release at Bandcamp.
Meir Levine
Raised in the Hudson Valley and currently based in Brooklyn, Meir Levine blends his folk rock nostalgia for the 1970’s with a modern indie sensibility. He recorded his upcoming EP with acclaimed engineer D. James Goodwin (The Hold Steady, Bonny Light Horseman, Bob Weir, Kevin Morby, Watchhouse), with producer Andrew Freedman (Henry Jamison, Michael Mayo), and acclaimed players including Josh Kaufman, (Bonny Light Horseman, Bon Iver, The National, Anais Mitchell), Jordan Rose (Theo Katzman, Charlie Hunter), Mike Robinson (Sarah Jarosz, Railroad Earth), and Jeremy McDonald (Mason Jar Music, Louis Cato) among others; more details to be announced. With past projects, Meir has played stages from the iconic Brooklyn Bowl, Music Hall of Williamsburg, and Bowery Ballroom to the renowned Carnegie Hall.
Rose Blanshei
Rose Blanshei is a multi-instrumentalist, songwriter and performer “who tells emotional stories which range from satire to confession, all delivered with an undeniable raw intensity” (Rough Trade). For nearly a decade she has cultivated a reputation in New York City as a direct and powerful performer, transforming every concert she touches into a humanist event.
Self-taught and hailing from a small town in Northern California, she has since performed on three continents and in spaces like the Guggenheim Museum, The High Line, and Kino Saito. Informed in equal parts by performance art and rock ’n’ roll, she has worked with artists including Naama Tsabar, Ragnar Kjartansson, and Bruce Springsteen.
