DYFO
As warm weather fades away, Dance Your Face Off! has been seeking shelter at the indoor shows around New England. The month of October gave Massachusetts a solid variety of music offerings, spread out to venues all across the state. We covered a reggae rock show headlined by Passafire, Chadwick Stokes (of Dispatch and State Radio) who brought a mix of classic and new songs to his show, and a rock/metal event headlined by Clutch.
Photographs of Sublime With Rome at State Theatre in Portland, Maine on November 12, 2016.
It was a busy and productive last few months here at www.danceyourfaceoff.com (DYFO!). In our second summer of operation, we were fortunate enough to cover many magnificent shows and festivals throughout the country.
The ball got rolling in April when we traveled to Myrtle Beach for the California Roots Carolina Sessions. The star-studded lineup featured reggae acts including The Movement, Fortunate Youth, Passafire, and Stick Figure, with headliners Soja and 311. As great as the festival was, there was a bit of disruption throughout that was quite an annoyance; Soja’s Jacob Hemphill had to call out the security team (attendees referred to them as SWAT) for hauling off ‘potheads’ left and right and causing commotion. The festival organizers have since acknowledged this, and have vowed to loosen things up for next year. We look forward to that and to attending again.
Young the Giant announced a tour earlier in the year to accompany their August release of their third album Home of the Strange. On September 18th, the Orange County quintet landed in Boston with a killer set of old and new tunes playing nearly 20 songs over the course of two hours. Our first encounter with Young the Giant was back in 2011 at a Jimmy Kimmel Live show and the attraction to the bands thoroughly-developed, mammoth live sound was the immediate draw. DYFO has since attended Young the Giant both at indoor and outdoor venues between Massachusetts, Tennessee, and California. The band has only grown more and more into their live sound (which easily tops their studio recordings, in our opinion) which is reflected stupendously in any size arena, with singer Sameer Gadhia’s astounding vocals leading the charge.
Periphery came to town this week in the form of the Sonic Unrest Tour, hot off their recent release of Periphery III: Select Difficulty. For those unfamiliar, Periphery is a progressive metal/djent band who have been tearing up the metal scene since their debut in 2010 and have been cranking out albums ever since. Periphery III: Select Difficulty came to us just a month before the Boston show, the follow-up to 2015’s dual album and tour Juggernaut: Alpha & Omega. The new album, dense with the familiar heavy riffage of Periphery’s usual style, expands on the band members strengths without being overly experimental this time around – but the result is nothing but another great album from the group.
I had the chance to interview Emmy-winning sound designer Jeff Whitcher. Jeff was nice enough to give us some insight into his musical history and how he got to be where he is today in the industry – and I’ll tell you one thing, it sounds like a lot of hard work.
Interview:
I’ve always been nose-deep in music. I personally started my music path with the saxophone way back in elementary school, but have been playing guitar for a good thirteen years since then after seeing a buddy of mine nail the ‘Crazy Train’ solo when we were about fourteen years old. This inspired me more than any artist I was listening to at the time, and I decided I wanted to devote myself to an instrument.
Can you tell me a bit about what the inspiration behind your work consists of? What was it that made you get into music when you were young? Walk me through your process a little bit.
Trevor Hall has been around for what feels like ages to me. I first heard his debut album Lace Up Your Shoes back when it dropped in 2004 (he was at the ripe young age of roughly 18) and consider the songs Beautiful Lunatic, Proof of Destruction and Venomous to be classics – for a lack of a better word – at this point in my life. Hall fell off my radar for almost ten years because of my changing interests, but I rediscovered his music just as he seemed to rediscover himself when he released 2014’s Chapter of the Forest.
This song has been stuck in my head for a couple of weeks now! I’ve been familiar with Major Lazer for a while, even before the latest hit Lean On, but it’s typically a music genre I overlook or don’t think twice about.
Two weeks ago I heard Lean On on Beats 1 Radio and was not sure what I had just heard. Still not knowing what the song was or who it was by, I came across it on the dance floor of a wedding I attended this past weekend. I remember it was the third song played of the night and as soon as I heard it start I ran to the center of the floor and danced like never before. This song was fire for such a time of celebration and partying, and certainly got the attendees to loosen up, which then went to set the tone for the rest of the night.