9pm $10 Adv. / $12 Door 21+
Heavenly Oceans is a semi-erotic instrumental music ensemble, known for their dreamy doom, psychedelic, and atmospheric soundscapes.
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Veradas is a psych-rock trio from Portland, OR, that blends fuzz-laden riffs, grunge, shoegaze, and alternative rock influences.
For the members of fuzz-driven psych-rock trio Veradas, the band represents both the culmination of three musicians’ winding journeys through the music industry and a defiant middle finger to its rigidity. The Portland, Oregon-based band is all about following it’s own creative impulses. There are no Veradas “brand pillars,” and the band doesn’t conform to genre standards. After all, how many psych bands count The Everly Brothers as a big influence?
Veradas’s debut album, Universal Relays, is a 10-song onslaught of sludgy riffs, tribal drums, harmony vocals, arty effects, and cathartic hooks. In some form or another, this beast of a record is conceptually or musically inspired by shoegaze, jazz, funk, 1990s grunge and alt-rock, Kraut rock, American psych, the madness of the Aussies, the abandonment of the Pacific Northwest, and, of course, The Every Brothers. Universal Relays will be preceded by the art-grunge single “Hud Money.”
“We’ll take on anything. We’re not afraid to let any genre influence us. Some of these songs are inspired by the most random things, but they still end up sounding like us,” says guitarist, vocalist, and lyricist Travis Ferguson.
Locked in a Portland basement, the trio—rounded out by drummer Shane Fisher and bassist/vocalist John Hetherington—writes democratically, sculpting songs from extended jams. These improvised sessions congeal into imaginatively arranged mini-epics that make full use of the band’s three-piece instrumentation and dual vocal attack.
As the primary lyricist, Ferguson favors themes that grapple with the digital abyss and the full spectrum of the human experience, from fighting the system to fighting just to get out of bed in the morning. His words are barbed and brainy, informed by his trifecta of college degrees in literature, philosophy, and Eastern religion.
“I write about making sense of life in a world that seems to constantly make it hard for you. Why does this device [cellphone] cause so many problems? But in the 1930s, the big issue was everyone staring down at their newspapers. Before that, the Egyptians used to say writing would ruin people’s memories. It’s all a distraction to ruin truth and obscure meaning,” Ferguson says.
The band’s curious name pulls mismatched words from the 1951 science fiction film The Day the Earth Stood Still (Berada), and the 1992 comedic horror film Army of Darkness (Verata). In Spanish,“veradas” is the feminine plural of verado which means “varied,” and in Hungarian it can mean “bloodletting.” While no explicit meaning was intended, “bloodletting” aptly captures the band’s pointed lyrics and frenetic live performances.