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Best in the Nest 2023: The Party
Sunday, Dec. 3 · Norfolk Hall · 3 to 8 p.m.
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THE RESULTS ARE IN! Get out there and grab a copy of the 2023 Best in the Nest issue (find them here) and get ready to throw down with us. Winners receive a special 50% off discount code on ticket purchases – If you find out that you’re a winner, send us an email (info@qcnerve.com) for the code and let us know what category you won in.
After five years of putting together our annual awards issue, we are pulling it all together in person to celebrate our five-year anniversary. Join us at Norfolk Hall on Sunday, December 3 for an evening full of live music, live art performances, food and drinks, a local market and a VIP art gallery.
VIP Tickets are SOLD OUT
Come hang with the rest of us in General Admission
BEST COMEBACK EVENT: Confluence
After a four-year hiatus caused by the pandemic, the Confluence music conference and festival returned in October with a fresh slate of panels, workshops and live music performances spread across locations inside AvidXchange Music Factory and other Charlotte venues.
Local, regional and national industry representatives led panel discussions and workshops on music marketing, tour booking, production essentials, visual content, collaborations, digital service provider (DSP) playlists and more, while a slew of top-tier performers (including many from the list to follow) played shows in Uptown, Plaza Midwood, NoDa and Elizabeth.
Music Everywhere Charlotte is committed to making Confluence an annual event, as was originally planned, building its reputation and recognition over time.
Taylor Winchester, a Confluence organizer, believes resuming Confluence can help pull influential music industry players into a local conversation, benefiting Charlotte’s music economy and, in turn, allowing Charlotte’s music scene to learn and grow from industry professionals.
BEST MUSIC ORGANIZATION: Welcome to the Family
Aged 24 and 26 when we met them in March, Jake Woodard and Dylan Harley might seem young to be the masterminds behind the annual three-day Welcome to the Family Fest, a genre-transcending celebration of the Queen City music scene held each October at The Milestone Club.
Yet the two have been hosting the festival since November 2019 — with the most recent iteration selling out both days. In January, the pair drew on the expertise and experience gained in mounting the festival to begin booking other shows featuring local artists year-round. Continuity between the inclusive festival and the partners’ business direction is stressed by the name of their promoting brand: Welcome to the Family.
As Woodard sees it, his and Harley’s expansion into booking is driven by a desire to lend a helping hand to the bands and music they love. “Bands … in Charlotte have never been hungrier,” Woodard says. “They’re starting to go out on tour, they’re playing hometown shows and packing them in, but there is not much room for growth in the city. We want to change that.”
BEST BAND: Ink Swell
A soundbite from David Lynch’s Blue Velvet opens Ink Swell’s 2023 single “Lincoln Street.” Dennis Hopper’s Frank Booth rapturously huffs nitrous and praises Roy Orbison. Then, over Music Knight’s hissing hi-hats, Adrian Allman’s subterranean bass and Pete Hayes’ bright guitar chords, Jason Vas alternates between reedy alt-rock speak-sing and full-throttle punk shouting.
“When did the job of a baker/ Become a needed caretaker?/ The red flag changes course/ Galloping away like a horse…”
The Belmont foursome’s psych-prog punk with an indie edge nods to past outsider iconoclasts like Butthole Surfers, but Ink Swell seamlessly fuses their melodic punk, swirling Sid Barrett psych and multiverse-jumping progressive rock in an original and organic way. As Vas freefalls from shamanic musing to down-to-earth existential dread, it’s like watching a confidant’s sanity slip away in real time. He’s a playful and divine madman with something to say.
BEST NEW BAND: Modern Alibi
Some bands grab your attention straight out of the gate with captivating chord structures and irresistible earworm melodies. Others with razor-wire guitar lines and surprising time signatures demand repeated listens that grow increasingly rewarding with each deeper dive. With Modern Alibi, you get both band templates rolled into one.
With dynamic songwriting that evokes 2000s alt-rockers like The Editors, Modern Alibi builds its debut single “Seventies” on driving and dueling melodic guitars and founder/frontman Holden Scott’s nervy, literate and vulnerable wordplay. Vocally, Berklee College of Music alumni Scott evokes the urban drawl of The Strokes’ Julian Casablancas as he unfurls rapid-fire couplets on the foursome’s swaggering “Silver Spoon.”
“I’m telling you/ She shines like stars/ But has a dark side like the moon…”
Modern Alibi has raw talent to burn, but Scott’s Berklee-honed songwriting chops focus the band’s inner flame like a laser.
BEST RAPPER: Mason Parker
With the June release of The Paperback Hero Saga, rapper, actor, spoken-word poet and now-author Mason Parker had a chance to show off all four tent poles that have sprung from his foundation of talent in more than two decades of moving within Charlotte’s creative scenes. One might think that with a hybrid album/comic book release, at least one of his mediums may have fallen off, but not the case.
While the 10-track album does serve as a soundtrack to the comic book, its creation actually preceded the first issue that coincided with its release, with Parker currently working on new issues that will each correlate to one of the album’s tracks (Issue 1 correlates with opening single “Petey Pablo”) and eventually come together to form a graphic novel.
All that said, the album could have dropped all its own without any of the corresponding comics and been one of the best releases we heard this year, which was all part of the plan.
“If you want to study it, you can study it if you wanted to. And if you don’t want to get that deep, I’ve had some people like, ‘What is all this futuristic stuff at the beginning?’ They’re not into that, but they were like, ‘Yo, the music is dope,’” Parker told Queen City Nerve. “So that’s what I was trying to go for. Like, if you just love hip-hop, then I think you’ll still appreciate it.”
And that we do.
BEST PRODUCER: Te’Jani
After singer-songwriter, producer, engineer and multi-instrumentalist Te’Jani Inuwa gained recognition with the Living Quarters collective and Summer Camp project in 2020, he released his eclectic and critically-lauded Gimp EP, followed in 2023 by his vulnerable confessional EP On Prozac.
He also played his first show in New York City this year, shared a bill with local R&B bedroom-pop soulsters Alan Charmer and Cam Cokas at Snug Harbor, then went to Boone to help record emo-rockers Dollar Signs’ new album Legend Tripping, named below (spoiler alert) as the year’s best rock album.
Hosting an increasingly eclectic bill of local and national alternative, rock, folk, metal, country, classical, rap, Latin, dance, electronic, R&B and more, the sturdy haven for diversity has arguably become Charlotte’s most vital independent music venue.
“I don’t think we would last if we … were forced to cater to some specific thing,” Reader told Queen City Nerve. “I think there’s authenticity in having everything be so eclectic.”
BEST NEW VENUE: VisArt Cafe
Located in Eastway Crossing shopping center, right next door to its sister shop VisArt Video, the doors recently opened at VisArt Cafe (temporarily called 3102 VisArt until a few days before we went to print), a new intimate listening room and event space for indie performers in a city that’s starved for just such a thing.
The venue is located in the space that was once home to EastSide Local and for a very short time after that Loto Café. Now the folks at VisArt Video, who have owned the space throughout that time, have turned it into a cultural venue that includes indoor and (covered) outdoor seating, beer, wine, non-alcoholic provisions, a java bar, and a food menu while remaining friendly to dogs.
On Tuesday nights they host a singer/songwriter series called Listening Room (catch perennial BIN award winner Kadey Ballard’s performance on Dec. 5), but it’s not only about the music. In November, they hosted Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, which marked the raunchy return of Nicia Carla’s PaperHouse Theatre after a years-long hiatus. Somehow, Eastway Crossing just keeps getting cooler.
BEST FREE MUSIC VENUE: Tommy’s Pub
Thank the music gods for Tommy’s, the neighborhood joint anchoring one end of the above-mentioned Eastway Crossing. The comfy club is a mecca for rock, folk, punk, Celtic, instrumental and so much more. Incredibly, club owner Jamie Starks keeps this tuneful cornucopia free for lucky listeners.
Despite all the love shown the pub by longtime customers, Tommy’s doesn’t get enough credit for booking musical gems that may otherwise fall through the cracks in the Queen City’s gigging scene.
Local bookings include such cherished unclassifiables as R-rated Renaissance Fest habitués The Reeling Rogues and The Angels, legendary surf-rock guitar slingers Aqualads, and eclectic electronic/progressive rock/soul jazz trio Rich Skeleton, just to name a few, then throw in diverse day-long music festivals, film screenings and collaborations with other businesses on the strip.
Tommy’s Pub boasts an eye for Charlotte’s musical past, unclouded by nostalgic glaucoma and with an insatiable appetite for the new.
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