A Burst and Bloom special in celebration of Bellows’ brand new album. Come enjoy a stellar summer night featuring these three stellar bands.
ABOUT BELLOWS
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Bellows is the bedroom recording project of songwriter and producer Oliver Kalb. The sound of Bellows is sensory and delicate, subtle and quiet, but erupts with frantic wobbling drums, large orchestral sections and bursts of noise that push the conventions of pop and folk. Started in late 2010 in a bedroom in upstate New York, Bellows has since blossomed from a solo recording experiment into a large-scale rock band, employing the help of friends to bring Kalb's intimate home recordings to life on stage in sweeping, loud, and intense live performances.
Bellows’ sonic palate has developed and grown considerably across six albums released over the last fifteen years. Bob Boilen of NPR’s All Songs Considered named Bellows’ sophomore album Blue Breath one of his favorite albums of 2014. Two tracks from Bellows’ electronic-inflected third album Fist & Palm were included in Stereogum’s Best Songs of 2016 list. The Rose Gardener was given a 9.0 review in Paste Magazine and was included in the publication’s Best Overlooked Albums of 2019 list.
Bellows’ sixth album, the mammoth double-LP “Que Bello!” finds Kalb both refining and dramatically expanding the sonic palate of the band’s signature emotionally urgent, orchestrally inflected maximalist pop-via-folk songwriting. Over the course of an hour of music split onto two records, “Que Bello!” swings wildly between visceral one-minute blasts of caustic energy (“FCA”, “Delta9 Self Immolation”) to intricate, labyrinthine songs that expand the compositional boundaries of Bellows’ music (“Chrysanthemum Flowers”, “Bureaucratic Tower”). The collection is woven around lyrics that knit threads of history, mythology and stories of European aristocratic decadence (“To the God Nemesis”, “Venetian Glass”) into a tremendously wide-ranging record that channels ancient metaphors into larger questions about the value of art in the indifferent landscape of today’s world.
“Que Bello!” focuses on disposability – the feeling that we have been asked to accept a world in which art and human fellowship are treated as disposable currencies in a cruel ecosystem of neo-Reaganite consumerism. The album mourns the loss of an old world, channeled through Kalb’s’ own experience living through the life and death of past worlds of New York City DIY and punk scenes – the ghosts of shuttered independent venues, the lost presence of bands that once existed, and community spirit replaced with the unrecognizable New York of today’s social-capital driven art world.
While Bellows’ fifth album Next of Kin saw Kalb finding wealth and joy in loss, the beauty of a world in which things we love are ephemeral, “Que Bello!”, by contrast, looks back in anger: the album is steeped in rage against the loss of a sense of cultural permanence and memory, and the resulting violation of integrity expected of artists in the persona-first marketplace of art-as-self. This backward looking lyrical thread is contained in “Que Bello!”’s propensity to sublimate stories about history and myth into broader meditations on the abjection of an artistic life. “To the God Nemesis” reframes the myth of Narcissus and Echo into a story about two touring musicians destroyed by repeating their own narcissistic lyrical laments day after day on tour. “Venetian Glass” channels the feeling of a loss of permanence and a corruption of the artist-self into a story of the mysterious Murano glass craftsmen of the Renaissance. The song is a melancholy and lightly taunting lament of the loss of a sense of the indelible from our increasingly disposable world of art, its chorus repeated in echoing interludes throughout the record’s two sides: “a glass jar, clear as the sky, bright as the stars, shame that you had to go.”
Despite the piqued heart of the record, "Que Bello!" also finds tremendous hope and vitality in memory and in the practice of continuing to create. The album opens with “Chrysanthemum Flowers”, a clarion call for the whole record, built around the mantra “my chrysanthemum flowers creep, they eternally grow,” an oblique homage to the idea of art and beauty creeping out of the most unlikely places, growing in the cracks of the sidewalk and among the weeds. It’s a message of dedication to continued art making no matter the circumstances, while holding a hope for a better world somewhere in the distance.
“Que Bello!” will be released on June 12th, 2026 through Bloody Knuckles.
ABOUT TIGER SAW
The beloved indie rock band Tiger Saw formed in Newburyport, MA in 1999. They have long been the preeminent indie rock band of the Seacoast area, playing hundreds of shows across three continents. The band's sound has evolved over the years- from their slowcore roots to a DIY "basement soul" era, Americana / country collaborations, to the current expansive, experimental pop sound. The ever-changing lineup has included 65 different players on record, and even more in a live setting. In early 2026, the band brought their 2019 "basement soul" classic album "The Featherweight" to the stage in collaboration with Newburyport's Exit Dance Theatre for two New England sold-out performances.
The current lineup includes Alan Bull, Guy Capecelatro III, Chris Côté, Marc McElroy, Dylan Metrano, and Erik Tans.
ABOUT HELLO SHARK
Hello Shark is the musical project of Linc Halloran (born August 31, 1988), a Kittery, Maine based singer-songwriter. Since 2006, Halloran has released a handful of albums and EPs including Break Arms (2010), HS (2012), and the critically acclaimed Delicate (2016). Hello Shark features a rotating cast of musicians on releases and live performances, and has consistently toured North America since the band’s formation.