Matt Lorenz described what he wanted from his new record with the kind of sentence that stops you cold: he wanted something where you can “tap your toe, or dance even, and still think about death.” That is a precise set of instructions for a piece of art, and if The Suitcase Junket’s two decades of output are any measure, he knows how to follow them.
About the Show
Lorenz brings the project to The 9th Ward at Babeville on Friday, September 25, exactly one week before To Go On (his seventh studio album) releases on October 2 via Bad Chef Records/Symphonic. The record grew out of the years following the death of his sister Kate Lorenz, who was also a singer-songwriter; they had co-founded the band Rusty Belle together before Lorenz struck out on his own with a guitar he’d pulled from a dumpster and built The Suitcase Junket into a two-decade, two-continent project. Three singles have arrived ahead of the release: “One More Mile,” “Put Your Phone Down,” and “Blindside Memory.” The first, which dropped July 14, was written for another friend who was dying — “in her nineties,” as Lorenz described her, and gone in a way “very different” from his sister’s experience. Grief, he seemed to be saying, arrives from every direction and refuses to sort itself into neat categories.
NPR World Cafe called Lorenz a “master of musical imagination” and characterized his sound as “avant-garde, one-man-band” music with “gutsy, fuzzed-out, groove-laden psych rock.” WBUR Boston landed on “astonishing.” The Suitcase Junket draws on early blues, rock ‘n’ roll, jazz improvisation, and Tom Waits-inflected songcraft — a combination that resists tidy genre shelving, which is part of how it survives. Live, the project takes on additional dimension: Lorenz plays every instrument on his records himself and brings DIY contraptions to the stage, including a suitcase bass drum and a box-of-bones hi-hat. He studied music and adaptive instrument design at Hampshire College and has since played Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, the Winnipeg Folk Festival, and California WorldFest, averaging close to 200 shows a year across North America and Europe. Rochester City Newspaper once described the voice as “a cross between Hound Dog Taylor and a Tuvan throat singer who has swallowed a bird.” By most accounts, it’s more alive in the room than anywhere else.
The Buffalo date falls mid-run of a fall stretch that includes Syracuse the night before and Rochester the night after.
Venue & Logistics
The 9th Ward at Babeville is at 341 Delaware Avenue in Buffalo, part of the western New York music circuit that draws the roots and Americana crowd that turns up for this kind of show. Doors are at 7 p.m. for the 8 p.m. set.
Tickets
General admission seated tickets are $18 in advance, $20 day of show. On sale via Tixr and at the Babeville Box Office, open Monday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Cash is fee-free; card payments carry a 3% fee. Buy tickets