STG Presents Dr. Dog & Punch Brothers

Seattle Theatre Group (STG) announces the following concerts:

Dr. Dog
Date: February 14, 2012 @ 8:00pm
Venue: The Neptune (1303 NE 45th St)
Price: $20.00 advance, $23.00 day of show, not including applicable fees
Seating: General Admission (All Ages / Bar w/ ID)
On Sale: Friday, December 2nd @ 10am
Ticketing Information: Available online at Tickets.com, in person at the Paramount Theatre box office (M-F 10am-6pm), 24-hour kiosks located outside the Paramount & Moore Theatres, charge by phone at (877) 784-4849, or online at STGPresents.org.

Beloved Philadelphia band Dr. Dog are poised to release a staggering burst of vital rock 'n' roll with their new record Be The Void. The album hits stores this February 7th via Anti-Records and is the raucous follow up to the group's critically lauded Shame, Shame. While the band's previous records boasted meticulously crafted symphonic pop, this time around the band turns up the guitars and delivers a truly great cathartic rock 'n' roll album played with near reckless abandon and passion. With the addition of new drummer Eric Slick and electronics-percussionist-guitarist Dimitri Manos, the band entered the studio (Meth Beach) with a renewed sense of enthusiasm and confidence, tracking the songs live to perfectly capture the rough and tumble energy of their renowned live show. "We would just get in the pocket and go with it because it sounded great," bassist-vocalist Toby Leaman explains. "There wasn't this endless deliberating. We just went with our gut feelings on things." "It was reminiscent of when we were starting out and were these fearless weirdoes in a basement, so confident and reckless and bold," guitarist-vocalist Scott McMicken adds. "It was really liberating." The songs on Be The Void flawlessly combine Dr. Dog's adventuresome and expansive arrangements with a far leaner and meaner primal sound. The beats are harder, the guitars louder and edged with a warm distortion. "Guitars stopped being problematic and started becoming very exciting to us," McMicken explains. From the rollicking re-imagined blues of the disc's opening track to the searing guitars of "Vampire," the frenetic punk urgency of "Over Here Over There" and the beautifully fuzzed out rock of "Warrior Man," Dr. Dog's Be The Void is a truly great rock 'n' roll record and the unmistakable sound of a band whose moment has arrived.

Punch Brothers
Special Guest: Aoife O'Donovan
Date: March 6, 2012 @ 8:00pm
Venue: The Neptune (1303 NE 45th St)
Price: $20.00 advance, $23.00 day of show, not including applicable fees
Seating: General Admission (All Ages / Bar w/ ID)
On Sale: Friday, December 2nd @ 10am
Ticketing Information: Available online at Tickets.com, in person at the Paramount Theatre box office (M-F 10am-6pm), 24-hour kiosks located outside the Paramount & Moore Theatres, charge by phone at (877) 784-4849, or online at STGPresents.org.

"Antifogmatic" is a bit of bygone slang that mandolinist Chris Thile and his bandmates stumbled across, "an old term," explains the Punch Brothers founder, "for a bracing beverage, rum or whiskey, that one would have in the morning before going out to work in rough weather, to stave off any ill effects." It's an apt title for the Punch Brothers' second Nonesuch disc. This ten-song set of collectively written material takes a clear-eyed view of those things less tangible than booze that can make us woozy: the pleasures and pitfalls of romance, the seemingly limitless possibilities and multifarious temptations of life in the big city. "When we heard that term," says Thile, "it was so easily applied to the bulk of the record. We want our music to be something that people can sink their teeth into, if not help make sense of all the various things happening to them. We want to pat them on the head and slap them in the face and tell them everything will be okay." The arrangements on Antifogmatic range from intimate to boisterous and back; genre-wise, the band once again ventures where no string band has ever gone before. The spare opening track "You Are" contrasts percussive guitar riffs with lyrical string parts that dance around Thile's sweet upper register as he spins a tale of romantic emancipation; occasionally, the other instruments give way to reveal the throb of the bass. The band also engages in some unexpectedly beautiful harmony singing, smoothing out the compelling melodic twists and turns of "Welcome Home." "Me and Us" and "Woman and the Bell" both have a dream-like quality; the former, in fact, was inspired by those jumbled, thought-filled moments before sleep sets in, and the instrumentation keeps pace with the ever-shifting imagery. In contrast, "Don't Need No" and "Rye Whiskey" are foot-stomping barroom boasts and "Next to the Trash" is the closest the band gets to traditional bluegrass, even as the lyrics tug the piece in a more surreal direction.

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