Cat Valley, Tinsley, Cat Positive Indie rock, pop punk, garage rock
2025-03-01 21:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Shakedown, 1212 N State Street, Bellingham, WA, 98225, United States
Starts: March 1, 2025
Time: Doors Open 8:30 pm | Show Time: 9:00 pm
Location: The Shakedown
1212 N State St., Bellingham, WA 98225
Email: info@shakedownbellingham.com

Madeline Hawthorne Rock, country
2025-03-02 20:00 | Shakedown, 1212 N State Street, Bellingham, WA, 98225, United States
Starts: March 2, 2025
Time: Doors Open 7:30 pm | Show Time: 8:00 pm
Location: The Shakedown
1212 N State St., Bellingham, WA 98225
Email: info@shakedownbellingham.com

Aslan Depot Jazz Night
2024-05-21 20:00 - 22:00 | Aslan Depot: Barrels & Blending, 1322 N State St, Bellingham, WA, WA 98225, United States
Every Tuesday evening is Jazz Night at Aslan.

Yak Attack & Cytrus
2025-03-08 21:00 | Wild Buffalo House of Music, 208 W Holly St, Bellingham, WA, 98229, United States
Wild Buffalo Presents

Yak Attack & Cytrus
“Orange Is The New Yak” tour
Saturday, March 8th 2025
Wild Buffalo
8pm doors | 9pm show | 21+

Yak Attack is a live electronic power trio. The band’s music spans a wide variety of electronic genres (house, trance, breakbeat, drum and bass) and mixes in elements of many other genres such as jazz, funk, and psych. Founded in 2013, Yak Attack has gained recognition nationwide from virtuosic playing, a unique setup of live instruments and live looping with no pre-recorded samples or backing tracks, and compelling live performances featuring lush soundscapes, dynamic improvisation, and DJ-like transitions in continuous sets. The band has toured with an impressive array of national acts, thrown successful afterparties for many bands in numerous states, and has developed a passionate fanbase through its songwriting strength, extensive market history and festival appearances, live show recordings, and curation of an ecstatic, uplifting musical experience.
Shaped by Jared Squires (guitar/vocals), Luke Nevills (bass/keys), Brandon Hailey (saxophone), Owen Mayo (guitar/keys), Trevor Church (drums), Connor Merritt (aux percussion) Alex Dean (synth/keys), and Sean Connelly (vocals/keys), Cytrus’ eight-piece funk-driven fusion makes a place at the table for everyone, offering a psychedelic pallet of funk, disco, electronic, rock, hip-hop, prog, and more. The Seattle-based band is personalized by its juicy synths, bass-induced grooves, and cinematic live performances. The group is best known for their flowing transitions in variety, consistently sonic wall of sound, and undeniable chemistry – all of which you can hear on full display in Cytrus’ debut LP ‘Concentrate’.

Yot Club + Vundabar
2025-03-25 19:30 | Wild Buffalo House of Music, 208 W Holly St, Bellingham, WA, 98229, United States
Wild Buffalo Presents

Yot Club x Vundabar
with Faerybabyy
Tuesday, March 25th 2025
Wild Buffalo
6:30pm doors | 7:30pm show | 21+

Yot Club Artist Presale HERE
Vundabar Artist Presale HERE
Vundabar Spotify Presale: HERE

VUNDABAR – Fast Track

First Entry Into Venue
First Access To Merch
Commemorative Laminate
Keychain
Tote Bag
1 GA ticket to the show

YOT CLUB – Fast Track

First Entry Into Venue
First Access To Merch
Commemorative Laminate
Sticker Sheet
Tote Bag
1 GA ticket to the show

Yot Club

For decades the bright lights of New York have drawn artists to its storied city streets — those
seeking their tribe, those looking to solidify their identity, and those hungry for inspiration and fresh
encounters, all there for the taking on this new, broadened horizon. And now 26-year-old Ryan
Kaiser has joined those ranks, moving from Nashville to Brooklyn, at the tail-end of 2022. Except,
unlike so many who have come before him, Kaiser’s already made a name for himself creating
daydreamy, sun-blasted, Polaroid-pop as Yot Club.
With Yot Club’s second full-length, Rufus, Kaiser is expanding his sonic palette and challenging his
own established modes of music making by letting collaborators in. The record includes co-writes
with the likes of Tommy English (Carly Rae Jepsen, Kacey Musgraves), and singers Charli Adams and
Harrison Lipton, with Patrick Wimberly (Lil Yachty, Joji, Blood Orange, MGMT
) on mixing duties, and the result is a collection of songs that sounds bolder and brighter. From the
shimmering surf-pop of opener “Stuntman,” to the minor chord angst and quiet-loud-quiet pulse of
“New Day,” to The Strokesian swoon of album closer “Lazy Eyes,” Kaiser lo-fi hooks have a new
cinematic scope.
But let’s rewind to 2019 when his music first captured the ears and imagination of listeners thanks to
the song “YKWIM?” off his Bipolar ep, one of three EPs he released that year alone. Newly graduated
and still living in his college town of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, it was a pivotal year for Kaiser.
Seemingly out of nowhere the streams on “YKWIM?” started climbing: 500k streams a day soon
ballooning to a million. Unbeknownst to Kaiser, his song — which is now 2x RIAA Platinum — had
become a go-to sad song for nostalgia-centric TikToks. The virality didn’t stem from a dance craze. It
was about a vibe.
The knock-on effect was every major label came calling, but for Kaiser, signing his music away for 25
years in exchange for an non-recoupable advance was a hard no. Ultimately, Kaiser signed with
Amuse, a distro company-turned-label, where he retained ownership of his masters and gained their
full support for his vision. Kaiser followed 2020’s Nature Machine EP with 2022’s Santolina EP, and
then, in 2023, he released his debut album off the grid and the EP amateur observer. Not to mention
a ton of loosies including “LAUREN” with spill tab, and “Safe House” with Jordana, releases which
underscore his newfound explorations in collaboration.
Nostalgia is an oft-used descriptor too, but it’s one that Kaiser’s unafraid to lean into — “I don’t like
anything that sounds like it was made now,” he notes — with his own song titled, “Nostalgia,”
ringing out like the perfect soundtrack to a movie montage directed by John Hughes (with just a
pinch of The Postal Service). And then there’s “Drowning,” written with Charli Adams, where
Kincaid’s razored guitars recall Bloc Party. With production credits including MGMT, Solange, and Lil
Yachty’s latest LP, Patrick Wimberly mixing brings a different dimension to Yot Club’s sound.
There’s an economy to Kaiser’s songwriting, a feel-it, sing-it straightforwardness that cuts to the
meat of the matter, with his titles often providing the jumping off point, like lead single “Pixel.” With
its ticking urgency and cascading guitar line, it was written and recorded in two days with producer
Tommy English, and features Kaiser on live, looped drums, with additional slide guitar. “That song’s
about getting caught up in your own life and technology in relation to self-importance and how you
see yourself,” offers Kaiser. “It’s never been harder to appreciate your own circumstances than it is
today because you can play the comparison game. It’s a complicated dynamic: the people whose
lives look the best can often suck, ’cos why else would they go to such efforts to make it look like their
lives are great!”Then there’s “Human Nature,” written with artist Harrison Lipton, who also plays in the band
MICHELLE and happens to live down the street. Written and recorded at Lipton’s parents’ 100+ year-
old Connecticut house, Kaiser describes it as a driving-down-the-Pacific-Coast-Highway kind of tune.
But those sunny sonics belie the melancholic inevitability of so many splits: the lover you spent every
day with can eventually turn into someone you don’t recognize at all. “This album is not meant to
serve as an eloquent story where there’s characters and side characters and betrayal and
heartbreak,” he says. “It’s just 13 separate episodes that restart and don’t necessarily match each
other, but I wanted to give it a character to wrap it all together.”
Rufus is not exactly Ryan Kaiser, but these snapshots capture the essence of his experiences: a bad
relationship and fresh realizations; leaving it all behind to try and find footing in a shiny new city that
maybe isn’t exactly the imagined, mythologized creative utopia. It continues Kaiser’s coming of age
— looking back, picking it all apart, trying to work it all out, and constantly pushing forward.

Vundabar

Vundabar is a Boston-based trio that delivers jangly, fuzzed-out math-and surf-tinged indie rock shot through with plenty of post-punk spirit. Formed in 2013 by vocalist/guitarist Brandon Hagen and drummer Drew McDonald while still in high school, the duo eventually recruited bassist Zack Abramo and began playing locally. Sporting a melody-rich blend of knotty folk and loud-soft-loud indie rock à la Beantown luminaries Pixies, Vundabar issued their debut album, Antics, in late 2013. They adopted a grittier tone on 2015’s Gawk, which added grungy post-punk to the mix. The cathartic and dense Smell Smoke arrived in 2018, delivering an earworm-heavy set that was both bracing and sincere, and in 2020 the trio released the tight and succinct Either Light, which saw them working with a producer, Patrick Hyland (Mitski), for the first time. In 2021, online snippets of fans singing along to the group’s 2015 single “Alien Blues” flooded social media, which garnered millions of streams for the seven-year-old cut. Devil for the Fire, Vundabar’s wide-ranging fifth studio effort, appeared the following year.

Nite Wave
2025-03-29 21:00 | Wild Buffalo House of Music, 208 W Holly St, Bellingham, WA, 98229, United States
Nite Wave performs
Prince & The Revolution’s “Purple Rain” album in full!
+A Full Set of Live 80s New Wave
Wild Buffalo – Bellingham
Saturday, March 29th
Doors at 8pm
Tickets $20/$25

Featuring
Nite Wave (’80s New Wave) (NiteWaveParty.com)
Immediately following the album will be a full set of Live 80s New Wave (Duran Duran, INXS, Billy Idol and more)
w/ DJ Dance Dance
About Purple Rain:
Purple Rain is the sixth studio album by American recording artist Prince, the first to feature his band the Revolution, and is the soundtrack to the 1984 film of the same name. It was released on June 25, 1984 by Warner Bros. Records. The first two singles from the album, “When Doves Cry” and “Let’s Go Crazy”, topped the US singles charts, and were hits around the world, while the title track went to number two on the Billboard Hot 100. The album was certified thirteen-times platinum (diamond) by the RIAA. As of 2008, it has sold over 25 million copies worldwide, making it the third-best-selling soundtrack album of all time.
Nite Wave – Seattle, WA – (NiteWaveParty.com). Known for their high energy show, Nite Wave continues their ’80s dance ways performing New Wave hits from Duran Duran, INXS, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, The Cure, New Order, Prince, Depeche Mode and more! Most noted for being handpicked by Billy Idol to open for the legendary ’80s rocker, they have also performed with Multi-Platinum recording artist Tiffany, Jane Wiedlin of The Go-Go’s, Clive Farrington of When in Rome and Everclear. Featured on CNN and Good Morning America, Nite Wave has help raise over $17,000 for Northwest Harvest and American Red Cross

Joe Pug
2025-04-10 20:00 | Wild Buffalo House of Music, 208 W Holly St, Bellingham, WA, 98229, United States
Joe Pug is an American singer-songwriter from Greenbelt, Maryland. He has released two EPs, as well as the albums Messenger, The Great Despiser, Windfall, The Flood in Color, and The Diving Sun.
While working as a carpenter in Chicago after dropping out of the University of North Carolina, Pug wrote and recorded what would eventually become his debut EP, Nation of Heat. Its literate lyrics received widespread acclaim and Pug’s unorthodox promotional strategy of distributing free CDs to anyone interested in sharing his music resulted in the EP selling over 20,000 copies. After touring with Steve Earle in 2009, Pug was signed by Nashville indie label Lightning Rod Records and released Messenger in 2010. After moving to Austin, Pug released The Great Despiser in 2012.
Pug’s acclaimed narrative songwriting has led critics to draw comparisons between his work and that of John Prine[3] and Bob Dylan.[4] His stated influences include John Hiatt, Warren Zevon, and Beck,[5] as well as literary figures such as John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck,[6] Raymond Carver and most notably, Walt Whitman.[7]

Ghost Note
2025-04-12 21:00 | Wild Buffalo House of Music, 208 W Holly St, Bellingham, WA, 98229, United States
Wild Buffalo Presents

Ghost Note
with special guests
Saturday, April 12th 2025
Wild Buffalo
8pm doors
9pm show
21+

“I feel like mustard stinks. I feel like onions stink. You put the two of them together … it’s just funky,” says drummer-keyboardist Robert Sput Searight, co-founder and co-producer of groove titans Ghost-Note alongside percussionist Nate Werth.
Indeed, the 15 tracks on Mustard n’Onions — the band’s third LP, first new album in six years and debut for Artistry Music/Mack Avenue Music Group — further Ghost-Note’s mission to provide rhythm-hungry crowds with, per Sput, “a mind-blowing healing sensation.” From the Soul Brother No. 1 tribute “JB’s Out! (Do It Babay),” through the masterfully funky “Bad Knees,” a co-write by the group’s visionary bass player, MonoNeon, the psychedelic-soul-tinged “Grandma’s Curtains,” and “Nard’s Right,” one of R&B/jazz hero Bernard Wright’s final recorded appearances, Mustard n’Onions delivers Ghost-Note’s supremely danceable goods. The 10-piece band’s performances — as befitting veterans of Snarky Puppy, Prince, Kendrick Lamar, Herbie Hancock, Marcus Miller, Kirk Franklin and other icons — are bracing in their virtuosity, affecting in their soulfulness and inspired in their sonic choices.
But the album also presents a story of an ensemble maturing and solidifying and finding an identity. On the band’s freewheeling 2018 release, Swagism, the lineup was still developing and, as Sput explains, “We didn’t have a sound; we didn’t know what we were gonna sound like.” The music on Mustard n’Onions, he says, reflects the firmed-up character of a unit whose “camaraderie and chemistry” have accrued over countless gigs. What’s more, nearly every band member has at least one writing credit on Mustard n’Onions. Sput remains Ghost-Note’s primary writer and de facto musical director, but he’s now shaping his music for and with his bandmates.
Though it was tracked primarily on tour breaks, during fun, hang-style sessions at a house/studio facility in Southern California, Mustard n’Onions finds Ghost-Note carefully honing that sense of collaborative songcraft — wrangling the jammy openness of Swagism into Sput’s arrangements of striking clarity and precision, and using pockets of vocals to ramp up the house-rocking vibe. “It was authentic the way the recording happened,” Sput says, “but we were more strategic about it this time.”
Along for the funky ride is a who’s who of groove-music greats. Most moving is the presence, on three tracks, of Bernard Wright (1963-2022), a musical genius who led a nomadic life and who stayed with both Sput and Werth at various points. “It was like a celebration whenever he would show up,” Werth says, before Sput calls his time with the much-sampled sage “an opportunity to take care of your mentor — and to learn from him.” Mustard n’Onions also features, among other guests, Karl Denson, founding Robert Glasper Experiment member Casey Benjamin, Snarky Puppy standouts Mark Lettieri and Jay Jennings, pedal-steel luminary Travis Toy, and electric-bass GOAT Marcus Miller, whose funky melodicism is the perfect fit for the strings-accented “Yellow Dan” — titled for its evocations of Yellowjackets and Steely Dan.
One of Sput’s “all-time favorite” guitarists, blues-rock god Eric Gales, wails on the single “Grandma’s Curtains,” which Sput wrote in the image of his ’70s soul favorites — Tower of Power, Sly and the Family Stone, and Parliament-Funkadelic. (He also mentions a bit of Hendrix as an inspiration, and with Gales’ explosive guitar work, that association isn’t far from mind.) The tune is fever-pitch funk, with an atmosphere of sweet, personal nostalgia just underneath: “When this music was being created in the ’70s,” Sput explains, “I was pulling at my grandma’s curtains when she was babysitting me, ’cause I wanted to look out the window.”

And while these fiery guest spots remain highlights, so many of the most extraordinary moments throughout Mustard n’Onions belong to the core Ghost-Note players, and stem from the band’s nearly nonstop life on the road. Take “Where’s Danny?,” with its tour-de-force solo by the group’s youngest member, trombonist Danny Wytanis: The title, a band in-joke, came about after Sput, feeling the effects of psychedelics, couldn’t find his surrogate little bro at a music festival. “We lost Danny for two hours!” Sput chuckles today. “I was like, ‘I haven’t met his parents yet! It would be horrible for me to tell them I lost their kid!’”
Every element of Ghost-Note exudes togetherness — not least those house/studio sessions for Mustard n’Onions, where, as Nate Werth recalls, “quite often the rhythm section would be practicing — Sput would be teaching us a new song section by section — and in the kitchen the horns would be cooking up dinner.” But familial vibes should be expected in a band that began with a life-changing brotherhood.
Well over a decade ago, Sput and Werth found themselves gigging together in the Texas-rooted fusion powerhouse Snarky Puppy — Werth on his creatively, globally curated percussion setup, and Sput on keys and, later, drums. What developed, rapidly, was a great mutual respect and a musical kinship that seemed to border on telepathy. “I started to get a kick out of anticipating what it was going to feel like to play with Nate the next night,” Sput recalls. The two musicians’ hookup began to rhythmically define Snarky Puppy’s groundbreaking work, making both men multiple Grammy Award winners in the process.
At a certain point during Snarky’s ceaseless tour schedule, Sput’s nightly improvised solo began to signify a new pathway. “I got bored taking drum solos,” Sput says, “so I asked Nate to join me. It was like we were finishing each other’s sentences. We did it so well to where fans started coming up and asking, ‘What was the name of that song you and the percussion player were quoting?’” An idea for a beat CD was hatched, which quickly flowered into a new group — one that would function less as a “collective” à la Snarky Puppy and more as a dedicated squad.
“We bonded in life as brothers and in making music,” Sput says. Now, Ghost-Note have become OGs or elder statesmen in a way, influencing newer generations of “frustrated jazz musicians,” to borrow Sput’s favorite description of his bandmates: That is, state-of-the-art jazz-trained musicians who worship the groove but not genre limitations.
With its more focused approach to funk and vocal performances like those on “JB’s Out!,” featuring current lead singer Mackenzie, and “Grandma’s Curtains,” showcasing Sput and Dominique Xavier Taplin, Mustard n’Onions can also be heard as a “sign of what’s to come” for Ghost-Note: more vocal-led tunes, a greater emphasis on songwriting. This is, after all, a band that simply cannot stop evolving, that seems to grow and learn with every year, every tour, every gig.
Still, you can be sure that whatever the next phase brings will remain, as Sput puts it, “positively, unapologetically funky.”

Laura Jane Grace & The Mississippi Medicals
2025-04-23 20:00 | Wild Buffalo House of Music, 208 W Holly St, Bellingham, WA, 98229, United States
Laura Jane Grace is a major figure in today’s rock scene as both a solo artist and the front person of Against Me!, which she founded in Naples, FL in the late 1990s. As a working artist, she has released six solo offerings and seven albums with Against Me!, and in 2012 went public with her gender transition in the pages of Rolling Stone. In her music, she continues to detail her journey all while staying true to her earlier themes of outspoken political critique – environmentalism along with personal and social liberation – with a base in American music including country and folk-rock, with a penchant for noise and anarchy. Laura Jane will be joined by her band “The Mississippi Medicals” featuring Matt Patton of Drive-By Truckers (bass), Mikey Erg of The Ergs (drums) and Paris Campbell Grace (vocals, percussion).

Dirtwire
2025-05-09 21:00 | Wild Buffalo House of Music, 208 W Holly St, Bellingham, WA, 98229, United States
Wild Buffalo Presents

Dirtwire
with special guests
Friday, May 9th 2025
Wild Buffalo
8pm doors | 9pm show | 21+

Dirtwire stands poised between ancient Mother Earth and modern technology, a blend of ethnomusicology and the psychedelic trance state, gut-bucket delta blues and what the band variously dubs “back-porch space cowboy blues, swamptronica, and electro-twang.” It’s a sound informed by Dirtwire’s travels and performances around the globe, where East meets West and North joins South. From the favelas in Brazil, Femi Kuti’s Shrine in Lagos, Tokyo’s bluegrass clubs, Ayahuasca ceremonies in Central America, Gamelan performances in Bali, desert festivals in the Australian Outback, and the 20th anniversary of Kazakhstan’s modernized new capital Astana, the band spreads its message by building bridges across musical cultures in their own unique way.
Dirtwire plays an array of instruments both ancient and modern, including West African kamale ngonis, jaw harps, space fiddles, whamola basses, Rickenbacher electric 12 string guitars, bowed Banjos and mouth harps from around the globe, all interwoven into modern laptop beat creation. Hailing from the underground west coast electronic bass music scene Dirtwire finds itself at the forefront of experimental electronic music production mixing in their wide array of world instruments with sampled beats and 808’s. Dirtwire’s live shows are a communal psychedelic journey, ranging from down home boot stomping get downs, to bass and blues electronic mashups, to ethereal cinematic beat driven soundscapes. Woven into each is the exploration of where live instruments meet computer production, and where tradition meets experimentation.
