The Red River Cultural District is heating up this week with its first-ever free music series, Hot Summer Nights, running July 13-16.
Similar to Austin Free Week, the festival will take over venues across Red River for four nights — and each show is free. In addition to live music, attendees can nosh on tasty food while they peruse wares from local vendors.
The lineup features White Denim, the Octopus Project, Matthew Logan Vasquez, Golden Dawn Arkestra, Magna Carda, and The Midnight Stroll, just to name a few. Participating venues include Barracuda, Beerland, Cheer Up Charlies, Elysium, Empire Control Room & Garage, Mohawk, The Side Bar, The Sidewinder, Stubb's Bar-B-Q, Swan Dive, and Waller Ballroom.
Hot Summer Nights comes from the Red River Merchant's Association, a nonprofit formed by businesses and stakeholders in the district to preserve and cultivate the local music scene.
"The Red River District itself is a true cultural icon here in Austin and we want to do everything we can to see the area not only survive, but thrive in the years ahead," says Stephen Sternschein, RRMA board member and owner of Empire, in a release.
"These Hot Summer Nights events are meant to serve as a way for our team to give back to residents here in Austin, as well as provide amazing musicians and artists an opportunity to directly interact with the local community."
Free music is just the beginning for the hard-working nonprofit. "We can't wait to kick off these first Hot Summer Night events, which will be the first step of many to come for RRMA, and reveal additional plans for the district in the near future," Sternschein says.
For more information on Hot Summer Nights and to view the full lineup, follow the Red River Cultural District on Facebook.
Annabelle Chairlegs fell into a concept album this time...or did she wake up to it?
Austin-based singer-songwriter Lindsey Mackin, a.k.a. Annabelle Chairlegs, is coming to consciousness and greater prominence with her third LP, Waking Up, out January 30. The dreamy album is appropriately hard to pin down but easy to listen to, a continuation of what the local artist has become known for over her 12 years in Austin so far.
Waking Up contains four singles — "Heavy Sleeper," "Concrete Trees," "Ice Cream On The Beach," and "Patty Get Your Gun" — six more regular tracks, and two bonus tracks for 12 in total. This release is her first with Todo Records, which is based in Austin with photographer Pooneh Ghana as well as New York City with Simon and Meesh Halliday.
This album cover was collaged in real life and shot in floating layers, a video shared on social media revealed.Album cover of Annabelle Chairlegs
"This is the first time I've ever released anything with a label, and it's interesting to have perspective," says Mackin. "They all voted for ["Heavy Sleeper"] as a single. And I was like, 'No way!' ... That's one of the oldest songs I've written on the album. So I think I just had a lot of space from it, and I was kind of forgetting about her a little bit."
It seems fans partially have the label to thank for the stylistic diversity of this album, but it's also Mackin's calling card. Los Angeles guitar savant Ty Segall surely had something to do with it, too, as the album's producer. Experimental moments like a stiltedly panned vocal intro in "Waking Up," the opening track, and an electrical insectoid buzz in "Shoo Fly" are scattered throughout, making the sweeter side shown in tracks like "Above It All" and "Sally" all the more surprising.
"Ice Cream On The Beach," one of those gentler tracks, recalls late-aughts indie rock and dream pop, ushering in a nostalgic feeling early in the record. Mackin says it's "a very different track than I've ever released before," and she enjoyed the "hard turn" into "Concrete Trees," which memorializes friends and family who have passed away. For "Heavy Sleeper," the songwriter was picturing racing cars and Quentin Tarantino films.
Hardly any artist escapes replicating styles from earlier times, but Annabelle Chairlegs — on this album in particular — seems to consciously wink at decades of music history while fusing, but not fully blending them: a grimy hipster take on 60s pop, something sonically descended from The Go-Go's in the 80s.
Mackin attributes this sensibility to studying acting in college and developing a love for musical theater, in an explanation where she charmingly slides 10 years at a time from talking about Vaudeville to 90s grunge.
"I love, love, love girl groups — like, 50s, 60s girl groups, and things like that," she says.
With all these touchstones, the visual imagery, and the album's evocative title and cover art, it's hard not to call it a concept album. She also talks about wanting to "color or paint" her home state of New Jersey using sound.
"I had recorded a full album a few years ago ... and then as I wrote other songs, I was like, 'Oh, these are all starting to make sense in this world together,'" Mackin explains. "So I scrapped the other album and sort of ripped it in half. [I took] the same-world songs and put them together, and then the other half the album is some other [theme]."
The proto-album was called Heavy Sleeper, and in newer songwriting, more positive themes started emerging from the "more dreamy and dark" primordial abyss. Waking Up, then, was the natural evolution. "It kind of turned into more of a concept as time went on," Mackin says. "It's fun to think about that now."
Fans have a couple of weeks to soak up the album before the release show at Mohawk on February 13. Annabelle Chairlegs will also play a show in-store at Austin's Waterloo Records on February 4, and another at Austin Psych Fest on May 9. After that, she'll embark on a European tour.
Waking Up is available to purchase on vinyl or as a download via Todo Records at todomusic.net. It is streaming on major services, and music videos or a visualizer for all four singles are available on YouTube.
This album cover was collaged in real life and shot in floating layers, a video shared on social media revealed.Album cover of Annabelle Chairlegs