HAZY POP | Funeral Advantage

w/ Arctic Flow and Lightness

Wed. Sept. 30

9 p.m.

$5

Tin Roof

New wave pop-rock project Funeral Advantage is the creation of Boston, Mass. songwriter, vocalist, and producer Tyler Kershaw. The band’s most recent LP Body Is Dead, featuring ominously titled tracks like “Back to Sleep” and “Cemetery Kiss,” offers a drowsily blissful wave of steady drumbeats, poignant guitar, and hazy vocals. “I remember listening to Björk’s Vespertine album while on tour with a different band and thinking that I had to make an album like this,” says Kershaw. “She had a goal from start to finish, which she does with all of her later albums, and it hit me directly in the face with how moving the overall feel from one song to the next was.” While Kershaw began as a solo bedroom endeavor, he has now added a band for live performances, and the current lineup is composed of good friends, including vocalist Chelsea Figuredo, whose harmonies complement Kershaw’s emotive lyrics. “Everyone has their own interpretations of the songs, where in some cases it’s like, ‘Oh, I thought you played this on the recording’ or ‘I figured this would sound better if I played it like this,’” Kershaw says. “And 95 percent of the time, what they come up with is honestly better than what I did in-studio, so it can be a beautiful thing,” says Kershaw. “The difficult part is finding people who can handle it.” —Kalyn Oyer WEDNESDAY

SPACE-POP INSTRUMENTAL | White/Bogan Duo

Thurs. Oct. 1

9:30 p.m.

$8/adv., $10/door

Pour House

Two local musicians recently teamed up to create a new instrumental venture called the White/Bogan Duo. Locals may recognize Ross Bogan, keyboarder for Sol Driven Train alongside Weigh Station drummer Stuart White from their live performance on Charleston’s Ohm Radio earlier this summer. Together, the twosome create heady, space-like instrumentals that lift from your speakers with audible antigravity. The Bogan/White Duo will open for psychedelic sci-fi band Consider the Source during their performance at the Pour House. Bogan and White’s collaboration has little in common with the rock bands they currently play with, but Bogan says this shouldn’t be a surprise. “Stu and I have both played with lots of different bands, different sounds,” he says. “We’ve been wanting to do something together for a while now.” So, will they be releasing studio recordings in the near future? “Definitely,” Bogan says. “This is something we’re both really passionate about. We started recording three of our new songs yesterday.” —Kaleb Eisele WEDNESDAY

ROOTS ROCK | Charles Cook

Sun. Oct. 4

4 p.m.

Free

Stereo 8

With sounds varying from barroom honky tonk to slide-guitar blues, local singer-songwriter Charles Cook composes songs others can identify with, laugh about, and dance along to. “I try to write and produce music so the songs take on a conceptual, image-oriented drama or scenario that most of us can relate to in our own way,” he says. “There’s also resolution to these dramas, which is a constant, ongoing theme in my songs.” Out this week, Cook’s new album Fruits of the Laurel explores eclectic instrumentation (like implementing bagpipes) and multi-cultural influences. The track “Garden,” for example, was written in Tuscany, Italy. “I spent several years in Europe experiencing various cultures, experiences, and people,” he says. “I found my own world during that time and was able to convey it through songwriting.” Cook also wrote “Fat Cat” during his travels — composing it first in Philadelphia before “finishing” the song in Spain, revisiting it in Italy, and ultimately recording it in Charleston. Another track with an interesting evolution is roots-rocker “Strait Shootin’ Man,” which was written when Cook spent some time in Nashville absorbing a myriad of hit songs from country artists. “I was trying to decipher why certain songs were hits and others flopped,” he says. Cook wound up getting frustrated with his discoveries, and he wrote “Strait Shootin’ Man” as a response. “Certain women were writing hit songs with the premise of being a psychopathic bitch who would smash out headlights with a baseball bat and key the pickup trucks of their favorite boyfriends,” Cook says. “The top male songwriters of the time were writing tunes about how their woman left them and ‘Let’s all cry in our beers for a full 3.30 minutes.’ It just seemed absurd to me the difference in what women could say in a song that might make a hit as compared to what the men were on about. Frankly, I was embarrassed.” —Kelly Rae Smith SUNDAY

AMY WINEHOUSE TRIBUTE | Elise Testone

Sun. Oct. 4

8:30 p.m.

$10/adv., $12/door

Pour House

There are few albums in recent memory that have had as much of an impact as Amy Winehouse’s 2007 release Back to Black. The combination of vintage ’60s soul and lyrics that mix the blunt and the poetic freely (not to mention Mark Ronson’s modern-yet-classic production) explains part of the attraction, as did Winehouse’s Ronettes-inspired retro look. But the truth is that none of those factors would have mattered without that voice. Winehouse possessed the voice of a world-weary, impossibly soulful chanteuse who had spent decades pouring her broken heart into song, yet it was emanating from the slight, fragile body of a 23-year-old girl from Southgate, London. Yes, she had released an album before Back to Black (2003’s Frank), but the jazz and folk inclinations of that record had disappeared, making way for the dark, shattered soul of songs like “You Know I’m No Good,” “Tears Dry on Their Own,” and “Rehab,” culminating in the desolate, unforgettable title track. In the three years between her two studio albums, the jazzy ingénue had become a bruised and battered torch singer. That second album by Amy Winehouse made an indelible impression on innumerable singers, even after her death in 2011. And it’s no doubt the reason that Charleston singer/songwriter (and American Idol finalist) Elise Testone has put together a tribute to Winehouse. Testone, a versatile vocalist who can handle blues, rock, and jazz with equal aplomb, will play a set of Winehouse’s material , followed by a set of Teston’s songs from 2014’s In This Life. —Vincent Harris SUNDAY

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