The music is a patchwork amalgam of influences, including: twangy Southern rock (they've opened for the Drive-By Truckers), reverb-soaked psychedelia reminiscent of early My Morning Jacket or fellow Athens residents Phosphorescent, soaring guitar solos à la Neil Young and Crazy Horse, rhythmic jangle from that other Athens band, REM, multi-part vocal harmonies (which every band ought to have, dammit), and, weaving through it all, lyrical slide guitar. - Vox.com

The Grateful Dead continue to have one of the most rabid and loyal followings of any band in history, and deservedly so: They wrote great songs, and they were excellent musicians and terrific improvisers who never played a tune the same way twice.

Grateful Dead cover band The Stolen Faces deftly capture the spirit of the Dead, covering a wide variety of songs from the band’s expansive catalog and delivering them with the sort of energy and spontaneity that might have you thinking you’re standing in the Fillmore West in 1971. Led by bassist Christian Grizzard, the group features guitarist Jack Silverman and a rotating cast of some of Nashville’s top session and touring musicians, including Annie Sellick, Will Harrison, Jamie Rogan, John Wallum, Allen Thompson, Jon Loyd, Dave Coleman, Brian Kotzur, Ben Cameron, and Jeff Sturms, folks who have worked with George Strait, Billy Currington, Eddie Money, Alan Jackson, Jimmy Buffett, Lou Rawls, Love & Theft, Grayson Capps, Nell Carter, Johnny Hiland, Sonia Leigh … the list goes on and on.

But despite their diverse musical backgrounds, the members of The Stolen Faces all share a love for the Dead, and for the freeform jamming and good vibes that music entails. The group puts a high premium on nailing the vocal harmonies, and has the instrumental firepower to take the extended jams into some seriously trippy sonic territory. In a short time, touring through Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Arkansas, they’ve begun to establish a reputation as one of the Southeast’s most solid and rockin’ Dead bands.

Originally from Birmingham, AL, Banditos is a group - more like a gang, actually - of six 20-somethings, nowadays operating out of Nashville, close to, and simultaneously very far away from, the gleaming towers and industry hustle of Lower Broad and Music Row.

With the rugged power of a flashy Super Chief locomotive, the Banditos’ self-titled debut album bodaciously appropriates elements of ‘60s blues-fused acid rock, ZZ Top’s jangly boogie, garage punk scuzz a la Burger Records, the Drive-By Truckers’ yawp, the populist choogle of CCR, Slim Harpo’s hip shake baby groove, gut bucket Fat Possum hill country mojo and the Georgia Motherf**king Satellites. From backwoods bluegrass, to slinky nods to Muscle Shoals soul and unexpected bits of doo-wop sweetness, the Banditos recall many, but sound like no one but themselves.

The members of the band first met playing in various punk and rock ‘n’ roll projects around Birmingham at D.I.Y., all-ages venues. In 2010, singer/guitarist Corey Parsons and singer/banjo player Stephen Pierce began busking around town and were soon asked to perform at their favorite local bar. Without a full band they invited friends Randy Wade (drums), Jeffrey Salter (guitar), and Mary Beth Richardson (vocals) to join them. 

Salter and Wade studied together at music school learning classical/jazz techniques, while Richardson’s background was mostly singing in church choirs. After some apprehensions from Richardson about taking the stage with an unrehearsed band, a last-minute trip to New Orleans with the group (which resulted in a stolen hotel Bible inscribed with the band’s lyrics) seemed to cure a case of the cold feet. The ensuing performance was raw and electric, and an ecstatic crowd response further cemented the members’ convictions to become a full band. The addition of bassist Danny Vines made the group complete.

The members soon moved into a house together in Birmingham, and after repeated tours through Nashville, decided to move the band there instead, where the music scene was bigger and more diverse. The sextet has since developed their unique and airtight sound, culminated through several years of enduring friendships and a roaddog touring schedule that has, at their count, numbered over 600 shows in the last three years. 

Their self-titled debut full-length album is layered with as much grime as it is with pinpoint songwriting and feverish technical savvy. Each song wafts new dynamics into a streamlined stylistic roots, punk, and rock ‘n’ roll jet stream, the variations heard evidently through the vocal baton passing and wrenching harmonies of Parsons, Richardson, and Pierce. Each vocalist, as with each performer in the band, is given the spotlight during the course of the album’s 12 songs. And at its core, Banditos is a unified coalescence of six bright beams of light, a spiritual collaboration between friends with a singular musical vision.

The album was recorded and mixed at The Bomb Shelter in Nashville with Andrija Tokic (Alabama Shakes, Hurray For the Riff Raff, Benjamin Booker).

The Captain Midnight Band plays "Waterbed Rock & Roll", a unique hybrid of Classic Rock, Jam, R&B, and blue poetry.

The Captain Midnight Band creates "Water Bed Rock & Roll" for the mind, booty, and soul. Crunchy Rock Guitar, Soaring Vocal Harmonies, and thick R&B grooves create a sonic landscape for the band's suggestive, Sci-Fi imagery and improvisational interplay.

Formed in New Orleans in 2002, The Captain Midnight Band stays true to the Crescent City's celebratory heritage, turning every show into a sweating, throbbing event, interspersed with humor, eroticism, and inspired jams.

Flattering comparisons to genre-defying acts such as P-Funk, Frank Zappa, and Ween are evident in the relationship between band and audience. Striking visuals and an ever-changing set list keep fans coming back for more.

Midnight's style has infiltrated a variety of musical realms. Bob Weir, moe., Merl Saunders, Dumpstaphunk, Galactic, Cornmeal, Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings, Cypress Hill, Jimmy Herring Band, Dark Star Orchestra, Emmitt-Nershi Band, New Mastersounds, and The 2 Live Crew are just a few musical entities Midnight has either shared the stage or bills with.

Major influences include The Grateful Dead, Steely Dan, Funkadelic, George Lucas, KISS, Boz Scaggs, Little Feat, Joe Walsh, Frank Zappa, Joni Mitchell, Todd Rundgren, and Richard Pryor.

"It’s rare that a song strikes so perfect a balance between foreboding and sensual, but Thayer Sarrano gets it just right on “Shaky,” the title track from her new album. The tune is a study in contrasts, pitting hard edges against the soft allure of suggestion as Sarrano wraps her whispery drawl around a flat, forceful rhythm while vaporous tendrils of steel guitar float past." - Paste Magazine

"there is an aura of “southern gothic” via twangy guitars, deep woodsy echoes and a rhythm like cautiously trudging through those woods. But she also exudes a patina of the urban, opiatic tenor of ’90s gaze-girls like Opal or Mazzy Star." - CMJ

"A siren of the cypress swamp, Athens, Georgia’s Thayer Sarrano beckons you into the darkness on the throbbing “Touch My Face.” Evoking the mystical side of Stevie Nicks, overdriven guitars guide the listener through meandering paths that follow Sarrano’s smoky coos to what one can only hope is a mystical communion.” - Bucketful of Nails

"Thayer Sarrano is a force to be reckoned with in the ever-fertile Athens, Georgia scene, having worked as a touring and session musician with Cracker, Camper Van Beethoven, T. Hardy Morris, of Montreal, Dave Marr, Kuroma, and David Barbe, among numerous others. This haunting track is taken from her upcoming third album, Shaky, a tour de force of Gothic Americana...We love it."- Big Takeover
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Thayer Sarrano is forging her own path into a southern- psych-dreamland, bottling up ghosts and bringing them to life through her ethereal desert rock hymns. The tones tremble and bend, layered in swirling atmospherics of a place that is melancholic and haunting, yet bursting with heavenly light.

With her latest release, Shaky, The Athens, GA multi-instrumentalist sounds, more than ever, like where she is from. She grew up in a seminary/the swamp in southern, coastal Georgia. Classically trained as a child, awakened by Grunge in the 90s, with chanting forever in her subconscious, she had always written instrumental compositions and poetry. Songwriting came when she landed in the vibrant musical community of Athens, GA and began to collaborate with friends to form her own band, as well as establish herself as a studio/touring session player (Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven, T. Hardy Morris, of Montreal, Dave Marr, David Barbe, many more). Debut album, King was released in 2009 dubbing her “The new Queen of Shoegaze” - Americana UK. The sparse and raw album was recorded live in her living room in one day. Her follow up LP, Lift Your Eyes to the Hills , (2012), enters more complex arrangements and features the single “The Bend,“ written for Groninger Museum, The Netherlands, leading to consistent European touring. The record was produced by Thayer and Hank Sullivant (Kuroma, MGMT), and was an independent release as a charitable campaign for Nuci’s Space’s teenage rock camp, “Camp Amped,” of which Thayer is passionately affiliated. “Featuring heavily spiritual themes, it could have collapsed under it’s own weight, but ‘Hill’s manages to maintain a startling lightness of being.“ -Flagpole Magazine. Now, with Shaky, we see Sarrano at her bravest and most vulnerable.

Written in an unstable period of much loss, Shaky is still a record of grace and perseverance. The honest, painted lyrics weave the mystical with personal experiences. We start to believe these seemingly abstract visions are really happening, and in this other world we see pictures we can relate to. Pictures of dissolving relationships in “Crease”, "your memory unties my cells/ it breaks the line from your heart to mine…” Of the elusive in title track, "I trace your echo I follow your lead/ you’re shaky shaky but you settle me.” Of the search for something greater in “Glimpses,” “there’s a world at the same time as this one/it’s bright it trembles it glistens,” and of the beautiful ether in “Lost Art,” “their hands are open, call to the wild/ layer landscapes, breaking the sky/ I remember them from when I was a child/ it’s the same little image from inside my eyes…“ 

Dovetailing the thick twang of the country with the airy, echoing, spacious feeling of an empty church, Sarrano has carved out a pocket in which her otherworldly music has room to breathe. Or perhaps the pocket was already there and Sarrano stumbled upon it, becoming a vector for something deep and soulful and strange.

The Allen Thompson Band, East Nashville stalwarts for the better part of the last decade, could very well be writing the soundtrack for their ever-evolving neighborhood. It’s a neighborhood that, like the band, has changed markedly over the years, ever since Thompson, a Virginia native, left his home state and headed west.

They’re a rock & roll band with roots in southern soul, California country, and psychedelic music. Along the way, they’ve grown a bit louder, too, adding a keyboardist to the lineup and replacing Thompson’s acoustic guitar, a familiar sound on earlier albums like Salvation in the Ground, with its electric cousin. The songs still takes their cues from the music that came out of San Francisco and Laurel Canyon during the ’70s, but the sound has broadened over the years, now owing just as much to the rock & roll that roared out of Minneapolis and Athens during the following decade.

The sound coming out of Nashville these days is eclectic and ever-changing, which suits the Allen Thompson Band’s broadening sound. Rather than mimicking the past, Allen and the Boys are using their collective inspirations to reflect the sights, sounds, triumphs, and tragedies of their current surroundings, all the while keeping a hopeful eye toward the future, where more big things are in store!