Doors at 6:30pm
21 and over
Dinners in the stage room.  All tables reserved for dinner. Call (805) 962-7776 for reservations.
Advance dinner tickets available at ticketfly.com

Kate Miller-Heidke
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We all know her voice by now. Without question, they are some of the most gloriously elastic vocal chords in contemporary music. In one song, she will sound as hushed and intimate as a lover before sleep, before reverberating with an operatic force so great, it seems possible walls might collapse and time will fold in on itself. Across the Pacific and Atlantic—from Australia to Asia, the US and UK—stunned audiences have been mesmerised and transformed, one at a time, by the extraordinary talent that is Kate Miller-Heidke.

Now, following double-platinum sales for her last album (2008’s Curiouser), sets at Coachella, international dates supporting Ben Folds, acclaimed opera performances in Australia and the UK, and catching US critics—from the New York Times to the New Yorker—off-guard, Kate Miller-Heidke returns with Nightflight, her first solo album in three years. Over 11 songs, Nightflight signals a new-found sophistication in songwriting that sees Kate meditate on homesickness, mortality, love and surrender, in an album that is both sonically lush and emotionally stark, deeply personal and yet utterly panoramic.

Written between the frenetic jolt of London and the rising floodwaters of Toowoomba, Nightflight showcases songs about real people’s lives: family members who have died, teenagers who went missing in the ‘90s, friends looking for love in the wrong places and Kate’s own longing for home. In previous albums, Kate has immersed herself in high cabaret drama, polished electro-pop and heart-arresting ballads. With Nightflight, her mission was simple: to focus on the craft of pure human storytelling with clear-eyed clarity.

“Everything I’ve ever done has been a reaction against the previous thing,” Kate says. “Nightflight is definitely a more vulnerable and exposed record than anything I’ve done before. If Curiouser was a playful, dysfunctional adolescent,Nightflight is more like a damaged, melancholy person in her late 20s. With Nightflight, we wanted something darker and more organic, more beautiful and more expansive.”

A Silent Film
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“The first time we drove into New York we were all crammed in a tiny rental car. We came
out of the Lincoln Tunnel and ‘You Will Leave a Mark’ was playing on the radio,” A Silent
Film vocalist/pianist Robert Stevenson says, recalling hearing his group’s career-opening
single scoring a powerful moment of its inaugural 2010 U.S. tour. The Oxford quartet had
just released its debut of epic and ambiently anthemic indie rock, The City That Sleeps, on
Bieler Bros. Records, a Florida-based indie with an incongruously niche heavy rock
profile. Despite the curious association, A Silent Film had an impressive American
welcome. The group became the longest charting band on Sirius XM’s Alt 18 Countdown,
shifted 200K downloads as iTunes’ Discovery Download, and sold 75K digital singles.

“Never in my dreams could I imagine the songs I wrote in my bedroom as someone else’s
soundtrack to the skyline of New York City. It was only three and a half minutes but it
opened my eyes to the greater possibilities of sharing our music,” Robert says. The
American tour was a transformative experience for A Silent Film and the group decided to
relocate to Arizona and record their sophomore album in the rustic environs of the West.

The band’s latest, Sand & Snow, to be released June 5th, 2012 is a snapshot of the fevered
creativity inspired by an impulsive tryst with Americana. “Jack Kerouac and Bob Dylan are
massive inspirations to me. I felt like I always had a kinship with America; as soon as I
could experience it, and I didn’t have to read it in a book anymore, I needed it for writing,”
Robert says of the creative necessity of the move. “Previously I had written everything in
Oxford, but as soon as I saw America, it changed my process; I wanted to live and breathe
it.”

In addition to Robert Stevenson, A Silent Film is rounded out by Karl Bareham (guitar),
Ali Hussain (bass) and Spencer Walker (drums). A Silent Film formed in 2005 and has
garnered favorable comparisons to Coldplay, The Killers, and Snow Patrol. Its new
offering is aligned with its formative poetic and expansive pop-rock aesthetic but there is a
freshly confident depth and distinction evident in the writing. Sand & Snow is searchingly
hopeful with emotive hooks and romantically purposeful lyrics.

The album gently unfolds with ‘Reaching the Potential’s’ lone, winsome but dreamy vocals
bathed in bittersweet strings. Robert sings the following wearily existential lyric: A
scholar’s wit in a boxing ring/Went floating by on a humming bird wing/Wide enough to
guide you in/With the sun in our eyes we started shivering/Any way we know how/We’re
going to get our bellies full/By living on a fault-line/Are we reaching our potential? The
dramatic sweep of the song, from delicate ambience to tribal drums with crashing guitars,
aptly establishes the album’s mood: introspective but bursting with optimism.

There is a Beat Poetry-esque fevered meter to the creativity inherent in the album, like a
Brit-pop score to Jack Kerouac’s On The Road. Rob’s literate flow on ‘Danny, Dakota &
the Wishing Well’ is a marquee moment as he sings: Danny met Dakota looking deep into
the wishing well/Danny couldn’t write so Dakota taught him how to spell/Dakota told
Danny she was falling in love/But Danny couldn’t speak when Dakota grew up. The song
has a euphoric gait, with a propulsive rubbery bassline and swooning symphonic melodies
that dart in and out to punctuate with essentially elegant primary-color melodicism.

There is an unyielding positivity in Sand & Snow, a spirited wisdom that has a no-matter-
what-everything-will-be-alright attitude. ‘Harbor Lights’ captures the liberation of a
breakup, the peace you make after the mourning. A key lyric is: You were my rock, never
my stepping stone.

“You know that feeling when someone leaves you in a relationship, they have moved on
and you’re left behind?” Robert says, explaining the lyric. “If I was in that position I’d want someone to have the humility to say ‘I moved on because I had to, not because you were
insignificant to me’.” The song has a patient warmth with cinematic textures appropriately
reflecting the longing vocal, the effect manages to be lonely but comforting.

‘Loves Takes a Wrecking Ball’ bursts forward romantic and desperate with an infectious,
modern loud/soft dynamic that pairs delicate electro pensiveness against powerfully
emotional hooks. “Sometimes you’ve got to pull a house down to build it again. You can
keep fixing the doors and painting over the cracks but eventually it may come down and
take you with it.” Robert says of the song’s message reflective in its evocative title. “I think love can be like that sometimes, its fun to swing that wrecking ball and say, ‘This is it, are you with me?’”

The band self-produced this time in its new Arizona homespun rehearsal studio. The
resulting production treatment is refreshingly contrasting with textural nuanced
atmospherics boldly balanced by an earthy candor. “Some of the vocals we recorded
outside in the desert because we could. We dragged the cables out into a dry river bed and
just let outside noises come out in the recording. I remember this noisy owl silhouetted in a
tree. A producer wouldn’t have it, and that makes things becomes mechanical,” Robert
says. Mix engineer Alan Moulder – best known for his work with The Killers, Death Cab
For Cutie, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Foo Fighters – tied the seemingly incongruous
approaches together with a mix that favors theatrical dynamics using the Arizona ambience
as scene-setting flavor.

A Silent Film had a 5 year history with a highly respectable alternative radio campaign and
an impressive tour itinerary, highlighted by jaunts with One Republic and Civil Twilight,
The Temper Trap, Smashing Pumpkins, Athlete and Sleigh Bells, but the band found itself
when it found America. Sand & Snow documents the wisdom and romance gleaned from
self-discovery from band with proven songwriting chops and buzzing career potential.
“Our story got started when we got on a plane and came to America in 2010, we felt like
we had something to offer America,” Robert says. “We felt defined by the music we
made.”