It’s that time of year again: Western’s big end-of-year music festival, Lawnstock, is almost upon us. AS Productions has developed a great tradition, where the winner of the early spring Sounds of the Underground competition gets a slot on the Lawnstock stage.
This year it was a relatively new band called Frog Rocket. They’ll get the event started at 5 p.m. on Saturday, June 8 — so I figured I should take this occasion to find out a little more about the band.
The group formed last September, in a process lead singer Noah Randazzo describes as just “friends jamming for fun.” But after playing their first show last November, audience response convinced them this was something they needed to take more seriously. They’ve since developed an uptempo, catchy brand of indie rock influenced by groups like The Arctic Monkeys or Cage the Elephant, which quickly garnered them a substantial core group of fans.
The group also includes guitarist Jack Sovelove, bassist Eli Yost, drummer Brady Nehls and Rubin Hochauser on synths and vocals. Most of their early songs were driven by Randazzo, but their process has become more collaborative, with everyone sending demos around to each other.
Nehls has taken on the role of “the picky one”, challenging everyone in the group to come up with creative parts and not settle for obvious choices. They’ve been working all spring on an as-yet-untitled album at the studios at Fairhaven College, and are hoping to have that out in the fall. The first single, “Classic,” should be out any day now.
Frog Rocket should be a great start for the evening’s festivities — but there will be plenty more music at the event, including lively indie pop from Aurora Ave, disco influenced pop duo Cherry Ferrari and horn-driven “tequila funk” from Reposado. The evening wraps up with the sweet melodies of THEM, an up-and-coming pop/rock group from Seattle who have been making some serious waves in the regional music scene.
Of course you also get all the other trappings of a festival: food trucks, art market, games, et cetera. The event is free and open to the public, so even if you’re not a student, you can celebrate the end of the school year with some of the best music Bellingham and Seattle have to offer.
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If you, like me, watched the Duper Humans live video from the Freshwater Sessions series and thought, “They should just put that out as an album” — well, your wish has been granted. If you’re not familiar, this is a collaboration where the Rhetorician brings the rhymes while the members of Supermissive provide creative live instrumental backing. That’s out now on streaming platforms, and they say they’ve got a proper studio album on the way.
Reggae nights with DJ Yogoman are a long-running Bellingham tradition at this point. This year they’ll be at Larrabee Lager Co. from 6–9 p.m. on Thursday nights, starting June 13. It’s your chance to dance to reggae, ska and rocksteady on vinyl, and maybe even play some dominoes.
Checker Bloom just released “Forbidden Love,” the first single off their upcoming album. I’ve had a chance to preview the album and I think it’s going to be one of the truly notable local releases of the year. I’ll have more on them in an upcoming column, but make sure to check out the single for now.
Jesse Stanton's music column, The Beat Goes On, appears weekly. Reach him at jsbhammusic@gmail.com; @JSBhamMusic. Check with individual venues to make sure events are still taking place as scheduled. Live music events in Whatcom County: http://www.cascadiadaily.com/category/living/arts-and-entertainment/music/music-calendar
