Lily Seabird's Album Release Show w/ Closebye & Robber Robber @ Light Club Lamp Shop

21+

$12 adv | $15 dos

8pm doors | 8:30pm show

Lily Seabird (Insta | Spotify | Youtube)

Lily Seabird is a perceptive songwriter who can channel moments when everything feels raw and overwhelming into something healing and galvanizing. With Alas, the Burlington, VT-based artist’s sophomore album, she confronts grief with palpable clarity on tracks that careen from delicate folk to blistering indie rock. While it’s her second LP, it serves as a proper introduction to an undeniable and idiosyncratic voice. “Alas sounds way more like me,” she says. “This is the album I wanted to make in the first place.”

Though Seabird is now known as a solo artist and collaborator in Burlington’s vibrant music community as the bassist for Greg Freeman and other acts, her journey started in Pennsylvania when she picked up the saxophone as a kid. At 14, she learned guitar and started performing as Lily Seabird. After a brief stint in New York City playing in bands, she moved to Vermont, which has been her home since 2018. “When I came to Vermont, I was playing solo a lot but then I started a band with Greg Freeman,” she says. “Since 2018, it's been me and Greg and a bunch of different casts of characters have been in the band since then it's an ever-evolving thing. It's just us playing my songs.”

The songs on Alas, came from a particularly unmoored period for Seabird. “I wrote this album in 2021 and 2022 on the road, trying to figure out who I am,” she says. “A lot of them also deal with the time when my close friend passed away. The title Alas, meant a lot to her.” Even if the songs don’t always directly tackle this specific loss, there’s a sense of mourning in how relationships change and dissolve. Take “Grace,” a reflection on female friendship, which features the lines, “I hope she's happy now she should be 25 / She taught me something that I thought I'd always hide.” Elsewhere, the knotty and unpredictable “Dirge” finds her singing, “I don't know if I believe in god / I don't know if I know how to go on.”

Seabird and Benny Yurco produced Alas, which was recorded at Burlington’s Little Jamaica Studios with Freeman and drummer Zack James (Benny Yurco). It’s a quietly expansive album full of subdued, organic textures and moods. Songs like “Cavity” are lush and inviting with silky guitar and Seabird’s expressive saxophone playing. The 10 songs on Alas, stretch out and leave space for introspection and deep listening with some tracks taking nearly seven minutes to mesmerizingly unfold. It’s a remarkably assured and vital statement from one of the most promising new songwriters alongside peers Merce Lemon, Squirrel Flower, and Allegra Krieger.

“The album is about loss, coming of age, and sadness but there are also all these moments where happiness takes over,” says Seabird. “It can be two things at once: life isn't just pain and sadness, there’s also joy. They can all exist at the same time. Alas, is an expression of grief but it’s also for letting go.”

Closebye (Insta | Website | Spotify)

Both born in Dallas, Texas in 1997 to respective Smith families, singer-songwriter Jonah Paul Smith and guitarist Julian Paint Smith met in elementary school. An organic orange juice debacle at Booker T. Washington High School for Performing and Visual Arts’ cafeteria cemented their partnership. In 2016, the two enrolled at The New School and moved to New York City. They formed a band and released the EP “Boring the Camera” under the name Pueblo in 2017. Through their collegiate years, the band developed an idiosyncratic folk-rock sound, combining elements of Elliott Smith’s baroque-pop songcraft, Aimee Man’s irreverent adult contemporary, and The Dandy Warhols’ lighthearted, college rock singalongs. Attending Jazz Studies and English Literature courses by day, the band played shows across NYC, headlining venues like Elsewhere and Baby’s All Right, sharing the stage with rising indie contemporaries like Ritt Momney, Wallice, Mamalarky, and Toledo.

In April 2022, Closebye released their debut album, “Lucid News.” The 9-song collection anxiously processes time’s relentless passage, charting a chronology of reverie and reconciliation, estrangement and acceptance, sadness and self-forgiveness. The record’s multiple sessions took place in Bearsville, NY with Producer Tim Bright (Kate Davis, Lisa Loeb, Grey Reverend), and in Fort Worth, Texas with Producers Josh Block (Leon Bridges, Caamp, White Denim) and Robert Ellis at Niles City Sound. Upon the album’s release, the band expanded to become a solidified lineup of 5, adding multi-instrumentalist Ian Salazar, bassist Margaux Bouchgnies, and drummer Simon Clinton. The resulting live show is a testament to the quintet’s ripening sound – sweet, sharp and pithy, like the Texas oranges upon which their destiny is staked.

Robber Robber (Insta | Spotify | Youtube)

Burlington VT’s Robber Robber are purveyors of slimy, cerebral post-gunk, soaked in deadliest poisons and deep fried in diesel fuel. The bass is like a broken transmission, the guitars like a bucket of loose bolts, the drums ready to rattle the lugs right off the hub. Pair that with scorching vocal delivery and you’ve got the whole bitch.