Triple Bill featuring Whiting Tennis with his band
Lo-Liner
Zaida LaRose
Vashon Sugar Shack
Friday, September 13th
7:30pm
21+
Food + Full Bar
$10 at the door

Whiting Tennis is a Seattle based indie-rock songwriter specializing in dark, mid-tempo originals. Whiting visits Vashon Island with his mellifluous broken-hearted northwest story telling, set atop breezy nocturnal mythological inward shaped soundscapes.

While his music certainly can be filed under low-fi folk rock, these words seem too lazy a description. Tennis drops various musician's names as influences, clues that get us closer to what his music is like; Elliot Smith, Mark E. Smith, Nick Drake and Sparklehorse, to name a few. In Tennis' lyrics and music you can hear the dark, hard-soft and often ominous tones conjured by these artists, but the influence that is the most telling to us is Neil Young. Like Young, Tennis is driven by an unshakeable commitment to his musical aesthetic regardless of its commercial viability; a rough, loose, fuzzy, dense, electric-acoustic and at times seemingly unpracticed sound... music as outsider art. But also like Young, there is an unmistakable intentionality and purposefulness to Tennis' music.

Described tentatively as “Garage Folk”, Lo_Liner avoids easy comparisons while mining the rich vein of American music that stretches from old country to punk rock. Arlan’s titanic voice, guitar and harmonica is tendered by his partner in the band Lucile Lackie, whose ethereal harmonies, additions on winding lap steel, and percussion, make Lo-Liner a band. Think White stripes meets the Carter Family…or The Handsome Family arguing with Simon and Garfunkel.

Zaida LaRose is truly a jack-of-all-trades musician, able to write songs on virtually any instrument she gets access to. With this skill, she has been able to change her environment and lifestyle often, while continuing to be generative in every new setting and stage she enters. Her most recent EP, Hold Me Down, Lift Me Up, speaks to her adaptiveness; the recorded versions of these four songs show a unique range in sound and complexity, and comprise a collage of many years, countries, studios, and band configurations. They contain imprints of lost eras, marks of passing phases, and signs of new beginnings in her work and in her life.