Events . Rave Ami with Sleeping Witch & Saturn, The Zells, and Justin Bennett & the Debtors

Rave Ami with Sleeping Witch & Saturn, The Zells, and Justin Bennett & the Debtors

Friday, March 29th, 2024

Thunderbird Music Hall
4053 Butler Street, Pittsburgh, PA

Doors @ 7pm
Show @ 8pm

AGE RESTRICTION: 21+

raveamiii.bandcamp.com
All three members of Rave Ami turned 30 in 2023. They’ve been a band for over a decade. They’ve been the best live rock group in Pittsburgh for almost as long. In that time, they’ve released three albums, each one better than the last. Alas, they remain one of American indie-rock’s best-kept secrets. The kind of band local scenesters will gush profusely about because they know, having seen Rave Ami tear down the house in a dive bar, that this band are the real deal.

People have been saying nice things about Rave Ami for so long that it’s beginning to wear on the boys. In fact, the three of them — guitarist/vocalist Joe Praksti, bassist Pat O’Toole, and drummer/vocalist Evan Meindl — are starting to feel like they have no arc. That they’re destined to remain hopelessly overlooked savants for as long as they exist. So Rave Ami, ever the cheeky self-deprecants, titled their fourth album No Arc.

It’s an act of smirking self-deprecation, a choice use of punchy verbiage, and a masterclass in irony. For No Arc is a wildly exaggerated upward spike on their discographical Y-axis. It is, by every measure, their greatest album yet. If Rave Ami’s career was a TV show, then they may have been everybody’s favorite side characters for the first three seasons. But No Arc is when they finally become the focal point of the series.

After their 2017 cake-smashing romp of a debut, Mock Pop, and 2018’s boozier, moodier All Great Bands Break Up, Rave Ami made a rather drastic leap forward on 2021’s dexterous Let It Be. No longer inclined to be pigeon-holed as beer-caked basement poets blathering through distortion, the trio decamped to producer Warren Pryde’s home studio, expanded their tertiary powers into an ensemble of nine guest collaborators, and tapped into their deep well of pre-Nineties rock scholarship. There was a real bohemian songcraft to Let It Be that blurred their raucous grunge outbursts with British Invasion pop-rock dollops and, as the title nods to, a late-era Beatles sense of borderless wonder.

“Let It Be was a culmination of 10 years of playing and recording together,” Praksti says. “It marked the end of the cycle our first two records set in motion, and with that came the heightened level of maturity we needed to spur on the opportunity for No Arc to be born. This record is a natural next step for us, and it feels, like the lyrical content, very transitional.”

Ticket Tier Info:
General Admission Tickets – Standing Room Only
There are no additional entry protocols at this time. Entry requirements are subject to change. By purchasing tickets to this event you agree to abide by entry requirements in effect at the time of the event. Check the venue website leading up to your event for the latest protocols. Please visit https://thunderbirdmusichall.com/safety/ for more information on Covid-19 Safety.

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Related Entities: Rave Ami Sleeping Witch & Saturn Thunderbird The Zells
Tags: Alternative Indie Post-punk Rock Shoegaze