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Barrage Releases Silver Linings: The Night the Work Became Real
A Kansas City Album Release Built from Change, Community, and Refusal to Quit
The raccoon arrived at Westport Bowery carrying a camera and the distinct suspicion that this was not going to behave like an ordinary show.
The data was correct.
This was an album release. The distinction matters. A concert shows the audience what a band can do under lights. An album release reveals what the band managed to finish before the lights ever came on. The writing. The rehearsals. The tracking. The revisions. The technical problems. The plans that changed shape halfway through. The work completed without applause. The repeated decision to continue when abandoning the entire operation would have been considerably easier.
On June 13, Kansas City hard rock and metal band Barrage gathered with The Hard Margarets, When Forever Finds Me, Kegare, Endrid, and a room full of the humans who had helped carry the project into existence.
They were there to celebrate Silver Linings.
Not merely an album. A completed piece of data. A field note of music, one might say. Data from years spent adapting to unforeseen change. Data from creative labor surviving real life. Data that shows persistence, while rarely glamorous, is remarkably effective when applied repeatedly.
The evening also carried a personal thread for the raccoon. I first met Barrage drummer Garrett Kleitz during my first season working as a stagehand. He was one of the first humans I encountered in the live production habitat. More importantly, he was one of the first who behaved as though a new stagehand asking questions was not an inconvenience requiring containment. He answered them. He explained things. He helped translate some of the expectations, systems, and unwritten rules that experienced crew members often forget were not installed in the rest of us at birth.
There was no grand speech. No ceremonial passing of the crescent wrench. No inspirational montage set to arena rock. Just one capable human quietly helping another human become more capable. The raccoon remembers those things.
Later, I took my son Tobias and two of his friends to see Barrage open for Sevendust at The Truman for his seventeenth birthday.
That night, the drummer I knew from production was seated behind an entirely different kind of machinery. The stage was larger. The room was louder. The humans were considerably more animated.
Barrage released “Tombstone” into that moment and captured footage that would later become the song’s music video. At the time, I was simply documenting another point on the map. A little over a year later, I stood in front of Barrage again with a camera in my hands, this time preparing to document the release of an album built through change, challenge, recalibration, and the stubborn refusal to leave the work unfinished.
The live music ecosystem is smaller than it appears from the outside.
Crew members become musicians. Musicians become coworkers. Coworkers become friends. Photographers become storytellers. And sometimes the human who helped you understand how to build the stage eventually gives you the opportunity to document what they built upon it.
That is how the raccoon arrived at Silver Linings. Not as an impartial observer. As a witness. As someone who understood that this night represented more than new music entering the world. It represented follow-through. It represented community. It represented years of invisible labor becoming visible all at once.
The room was not simply waiting for Barrage to perform.
The room was waiting to watch the work become real.
Silver Linings: Real Feelings, No Decorative Optimism
Before the raccoon can examine the celebration, the object being celebrated requires inspection.
The title is doing real work. Silver Linings is not optimism printed on a bumper sticker. It is not a cheerful demand to locate something pleasant while life is actively setting fire to the original plan. It grew from years of unforeseen change, altered routes, personal challenges, creative persistence, and humans repeatedly deciding that difficulty did not mean the work was finished.
A silver lining does not erase the storm. It does not undo the damage. It does not require anyone to pretend the experience was secretly convenient. It is what becomes visible when someone remains present long enough to find it.
Garrett explained that Barrage wants listeners to approach the album introspectively. The songs came from real emotions and real experiences—the kind that show up in ordinary human lives with irritating regularity. Relationships become complicated. People misunderstand one another. Connections fracture. Personal limitations become impossible to ignore. Challenges arrive without consulting the production schedule. Then the humans involved must decide what happens next.
Barrage writes from inside those decisions.
The songs move through interpersonal relationships, internal conflict, recognition, endurance, and the work of overcoming what can be overcome while learning to carry what cannot. The band means what it says.
The data reflects that.
Music written around an emotion can be technically excellent. Music written from inside an emotion behaves differently. It leaves fingerprints.
Silver Linings has fingerprints.
The vocals carry confrontation, vulnerability, frustration, and resolve without sanding down the uncomfortable edges. The guitars give those emotions structure. The bass places weight beneath them. The drums keep the entire operation moving forward, which feels appropriate for an album created through the repeated act of continuing.
The album does not suggest that growth is tidy. It does not promise that every difficult experience becomes worthwhile once someone extracts a lesson from the wreckage.
It offers recognition instead. A listener may recognize a relationship. A failure. A pattern. A version of themselves they had to outgrow. A challenge they survived without feeling especially heroic while surviving it.
That is where Silver Linings becomes useful. The songs do not instruct the audience how to feel. They create enough room for each listener to locate their own data. The raccoon finds the album speaks directing into her own life lately.
Barrage built the album from experiences that belonged to them. Once the songs were released, those experiences became available to everyone else. Music has a strange way of doing that. Something private is translated into rhythm, melody, distortion, and language.
It leaves the humans who created it. Then another person hears it and recognizes something of their own inside it.
That appears to be the invitation behind Silver Linings. Do not merely hear the songs.
Notice what they disturb. Notice what they uncover. Pay attention to what follows you after the final note. The silver lining may not be comfort. It may be recognition. Sometimes recognition is where the next part begins.
The Work Nobody Hears
Albums have an irritating habit of arriving in public looking effortless. A human presses play. The first track begins. Everything sounds deliberate. Organized. Contained. Finished.
The chaos has already been edited out.
The raccoon works behind enough curtains to recognize this as creative propaganda. Finished work is exceptionally good at hiding the mess required to create it. The listener hears a song. The musicians hear every version of that song that had to be dragged behind the venue and quietly disposed of.
The listener hears a clean transition. The band remembers spending several hours convincing three seconds of audio to stop behaving like an unsupervised goblin.
The listener hears an album. The creators hear late nights, technical problems, abandoned ideas, repeated takes, corrupted files, microscopic adjustments, and at least one moment when the entire project threatened to become an expensive digital graveyard.
Barrage recorded, tracked, and edited Silver Linings themselves. Garrett reports that this portion moved fairly quickly.
The raccoon would like the record to show that “fairly quickly” is a deeply suspicious phrase when used by musicians discussing a project they engineered themselves.
The band still had to lean into the grindstone to make the material land exactly where they wanted it. That means repetition.
Precision. Troubleshooting. Listening to the same section until it stops sounding like music and becomes a small mechanical animal that refuses to enter its crate.
Inspiration may begin the project. Inspiration is flashy like that.
Finishing requires something less glamorous. Systems. Scheduling. File management. Problem-solving. The ability to hear the same passage enough times that it begins appearing in dreams, traffic noise, and the low mechanical hum of household appliances.
Independent music contains considerably fewer champagne fountains than popular culture promised. There are more cables. More invoices. More revisions named “final.” Then “final two.” Then “FINAL ACTUAL.” Then “USE THIS ONE.”
The raccoon has observed this naming system across multiple creative habitats. No one appears willing to correct it.
The first Silver Linings singles were completed with Kevin Gates of Reach Audio. Barrage planned to continue working with him on the full album, but serious health issues required Kevin to step away from the project. The band speaks about his work with genuine gratitude and wishes him the best in both his health and career.
His contribution remains part of the album.
The route changed. The work continued. There is something almost offensively appropriate about this happening during the creation of an album called Silver Linings. Even the production process decided to participate in the theme.
Plans changed. Life entered the room without knocking. The system had to be rebuilt while it was still running. Barrage absorbed the disruption, recalibrated, and found another route forward.
The band eventually brought the album to Jack Daniels of Sicktones and War of Ages. He remixed the singles and completed the album’s mix and master. By then, the songs had already survived writing, rehearsal, recording, tracking, editing, and a major change in the production path.
Now they had to become one complete record. Not a folder full of songs. Not six files arguing with one another in a cloud account. An album. A body of work with its own movement, weight, emotional language, and internal structure. Once the masters arrived, the music was finished. Naturally, this meant there was still an alarming amount of work left to do. Distribution. Promotion. Merchandise. Release planning. Administrative labor. The endless colony of tiny decisions standing between “we made an album” and “other humans can successfully locate and purchase the album.”
Then came the release show. Because after years of writing, recording, adapting, funding, troubleshooting, and refusing to leave the thing unfinished, Barrage was not going to quietly upload Silver Linings and wander back into the woods.
They built a celebration. They called their friends. They assembled a five-band bill. They invited the fans, friends, and family members whose support had financed the album cycle over the previous two years. Then they gathered everyone in one room and turned the completion of a complicated creative task into a public event.
The raccoon strongly approves of this method. Creative work deserves witnesses. Especially when the finished product has been polished so thoroughly that no one can see the machinery, exhaustion, pivots, and stubbornness holding it together.
Silver Linings sounds complete because Barrage completed it.
Simple sentence.
Absolutely feral process.
Five Bands, One Finish Line
Once the album was finished, Barrage did not treat the release like an administrative task requiring one social post and a suspiciously optimistic link.They built a show. A proper one.
The Hard Margarets.
Kegare.
When Forever Finds Me.
Endrid.
Barrage.
Five bands with different methods of making a room loud, emotional, unstable, or some useful combination of all three.This was not a pile of interchangeable openers arranged to occupy time before the headliner.
The bill behaved like a progression. Each band altered the room.Each added a different texture. Each moved the humans another step toward the moment Silver Linings would finally be performed as a completed body of work. The album had been built through community. It made sense that its release would be celebrated the same way.
The Hard Margarets: Grit, Melody, and Coordinated Misdirection
The Hard Margarets entered the habitat dressed in matching tracksuits.
All five of them.
Same color. Same general visual threat level. The effect suggested either a rock band with excellent branding or a recreational sports team that had taken a profoundly wrong turn and accidentally located the stage.
One of the raccoon’s friends encountered them before the set and concluded that they were not the band at all.
Just five random men wearing matching tracksuits. The Hard Margarets allowed this theory to survive.
The raccoon respects a band willing to begin its performance with psychological warfare.
Then the matching humans picked up instruments. Data collection resumed.
The Hard Margarets brought hard rock with grunge and alternative-metal weight, but they did not immediately attempt to crush every nervous system in the room. They understood pacing. The groove-oriented riffs created movement. The atmospheric passages gave the songs room to expand. The melodies offered something solid to hold while the heavier sections gathered momentum. Their vocals carried emotional weight without relying on aggression as the only available tool.
This made them an effective opening species. Heavy enough to wake the room. Melodic enough to draw people inward. Controlled enough to leave functioning tissue for the remaining four bands. Their sound lives comfortably between classic hard rock, grunge, and modern alternative metal without appearing especially concerned about obeying the borders between them. The songs breathe. They build. They hit when the structure is ready to support the impact. And they feel made for live rooms, where a little grit is frequently more useful than perfect laboratory conditions.
The matching tracksuits made them memorable before the first note. The music confirmed that the wardrobe was not doing all the work. By the end of the set, the data was clear: They were, in fact, the band.
The raccoon’s friend had been successfully deceived.
The Hard Margarets had opened the room.
A productive beginning.
Kegare: Pressure, Atmosphere, and Controlled Collision
Kegare entered the habitat after The Hard Margarets had primed several emotional compartments and left them unsecured.They did not attempt to close them. They increased the pressure. Their sound moved the room into darker territory through dense riffing, aggressive modern metal, and atmosphere that behaved less like decoration and more like a weather system moving toward the building.
Some bands create heaviness by adding more sound. Kegare creates it by controlling tension. The riffs establish weight. The atmosphere stretches the space around it. Then the impact arrives after the nervous system has already begun preparing for something unpleasant.
The raccoon recognizes this as highly organized menace. Their songs feel cinematic without becoming distant. Large. Dense. Oppressive in the useful way. The kind of oppressive that does not make humans search for an exit. It makes them move closer to inspect the machinery responsible.
Kegare understands that tension has value. If the impact arrives immediately and remains there, the body adjusts. The pressure becomes background noise. But when a band allows a song to gather itself first, every heavier moment lands carrying the full weight of anticipation.
Kegare applied this principle with suspicious competence. The music tightened. The room followed. Their role in the lineup was escalation. The Hard Margarets had created movement. Kegare made it dangerous. Not careless. Not chaotic. Dangerous in the controlled sense. The collision had already been calculated. The instruments knew where they were going. The humans in front of the stage were simply invited to stand inside the impact zone. Their sound appeals to listeners who want modern metal to create an environment rather than merely display aggression. Humans who enjoy dense riffs. Humans who want atmosphere with teeth. Humans who prefer their tension sustained long enough to become a physical object.
There was darkness in the set, but not emptiness. The songs contained structure beneath the pressure. Every shift contributed to the next. Every atmospheric passage made the following impact feel heavier. Nothing wandered into the room without an assignment. By the end of Kegare’s set, the celebration had acquired considerably more gravity. The crowd was no longer simply engaged. It was compressed.
The Hard Margarets opened the habitat. Kegare raised the emotional pressure.
The room was moving steadily toward Barrage.
Several internal organs had already filed formal complaints.
When Forever Finds Me: Feelings With Structural Reinforcement
When Forever Finds Me entered the habitat with a different assignment.
The Hard Margarets had opened the room. Kegare raised the emotional pressure. When Forever Finds Me began opening the humans. Their music lives in the unstable territory between melody and impact. The vulnerable moment. The incoming breakdown. The brief interval during which the nervous system recognizes an emotion and realizes it is about to process that emotion at considerable volume.
Modern metalcore understands something useful about humans: Sometimes a feeling requires language. Sometimes it requires distortion. Sometimes it requires both, followed by a room full of strangers moving violently in approximate agreement. When Forever Finds Me builds songs around that sequence. The melodic sections create access. They allow the listener to locate the grief, frustration, conflict, or memory hiding beneath the surface. Then the heavier sections arrive and provide somewhere for it to go.
The raccoon recognizes this as emotional processing with reinforced flooring. Their sound carries the large dynamic swings that make metalcore effective in a live room. Vulnerability does not weaken the aggression. It gives the aggression purpose. The breakdown is not simply present because the genre regulations apparently require one. It arrives carrying accumulated pressure. By the time it lands, the audience understands why.
This made When Forever Finds Me a particularly useful species on the Silver Linings release bill. Barrage built the album from real relationships, real conflict, and personal challenges that did not remain politely outside the rehearsal room. When Forever Finds Me works from similar emotional material. Both understand that heaviness and vulnerability are not opposing forces. They are frequently found sharing transportation. Their set appealed to humans who want more than volume from heavy music. Humans who listen for the line that feels uncomfortably familiar. Humans who need melody before impact. Humans who prefer their introspection accompanied by sufficient low end to rearrange several internal organs.
The songs created room for reflection without allowing the room to become passive. People listened. People moved. People recognized something. Then the guitars arrived to assist with containment. By the end of the set, the emotional pressure in the room had increased considerably.
The Hard Margarets had given the night momentum. Kegare escalated it. When Forever Finds Me gave that momentum somewhere personal to land. The celebration was becoming more than loud.
It was becoming invested.
Endrid: Precision Before Impact
By the time Endrid entered the habitat, the room had already been opened, emotionally compromised, and compressed into a denser state of matter. A useful condition for technical modern metal.
Endrid did not waste it.Their sound arrived with a strong rhythmic spine and the kind of precision that causes musicians in the audience to stop moving for half a second because they are trying to determine exactly what just happened. Then the next section lands and movement resumes.
The raccoon considers this efficient.
Endrid builds heaviness through control. The riffs are tight. The rhythmic shifts are deliberate. The impact is placed rather than thrown. Nothing feels accidental, even when the music appears to be approaching structural collapse at speed. This is not chaos. It is machinery wearing chaos as stage makeup. Their set rewarded two different populations at once.
The casual listener received force. The technically inclined listener received a mechanism to inspect. Both were allowed to enjoy themselves without completing an entrance exam.The music carried enough rhythmic weight to move the room, but the musicianship kept demanding attention. A phrase would turn. A pattern would shift. The structure would reassemble itself somewhere slightly different.
The humans in front of the stage adjusted accordingly. Endrid appealed to listeners who want heaviness with architecture. Musicians who enjoy following the construction beneath the sound. Metal fans who appreciate precision without requiring the performance to become a public demonstration of advanced mathematics.
The raccoon supports technical skill. The raccoon also supports not making the audience feel as though it forgot to study. Endrid managed both. Their placement directly before Barrage was useful.
The Hard Margarets had established movement. Kegare darkened the atmosphere and increased the pressure. When Forever Finds Me gave the room an emotional center. . Endrid tightened the remaining structure until the entire room felt calibrated. The celebration had passed through grit, vulnerability, tension, and control.
Now it required release.
The stage changed over. The crowd remained close. The finished album was waiting behind the curtain.
Barrage was next.
Barrage: The Work Steps Into the Light
Then Barrage took the stage. The room had been opened, emotionally compromised, compressed, recalibrated, and left with only a questionable amount of functioning connective tissue.
Perfect conditions.
The Hard Margarets brought grit and coordinated deception. Kegare increased the atmospheric pressure until several organs began submitting complaints. When Forever Finds Me gave the feelings structural reinforcement. Endrid tightened the machinery. Then the humans responsible for Silver Linings stepped into the center of the system they had spent years building.
Rylie Justine on vocals.
Benjamin Blevis on vocals and guitar.
Jordan McCune on vocals and bass.
Garrett Kleitz behind the drums.
The album was no longer a collection of files, masters, merchandise, links, deadlines, and administrative creatures breeding inside someone’s inbox. It had bodies again. It had breath. It had movement. It had four humans standing beneath stage lights, playing the songs in front of the people who helped make their completion possible.
This is where an album release separates itself from an ordinary performance. The audience was not meeting the music for the first time. Many of these humans had already followed the singles. They had attended the shows. Bought the tickets. Bought the merchandise. Shared the posts. Watched “Tombstone” emerge from The Truman. Watched “Closing In” receive its own visual life. They had helped finance the album cycle simply by continuing to show up. Now the finished work was standing in front of them.
The data changed.
The songs on Silver Linings are built from interpersonal conflict, personal challenges, damaged patterns, hard recognition, and the repeated decision to keep moving. Onstage, those private experiences became public architecture. Rylie’s vocals carried emotional force without behaving like vulnerability required someones permission. There was power in the delivery, but also intent. The lyrics were not being launched randomly into the room in the hope that someone might catch them. They were aimed.
Benjamin’s guitar gave the songs teeth, shape, and enough melodic structure to keep the heavier moments from collapsing into one continuous object. Jordan’s bass anchored the lower end while his vocals added another layer of texture and pressure. Jordan also wins this field notes "hair flip" award.
Then there was Garrett. The raccoon has previously documented a sentimental attachment to drums. This remains medically unresolved. From behind the kit, Garrett drove the entire operation forward with the particular violence required to make precision look natural.
Together, Barrage sounded like a band that had stopped searching for its identity and started using it. Silver Linings balances heaviness with melody instead of treating the two as competing departments. The riffs have weight. The choruses remain accessible. The arrangements know when to push and when to allow air back into the structure. The album does not stay at maximum intensity until the audience’s nervous system stops producing detailed reports.
It moves. Builds. Releases. Returns. The hooks remain after the impact passes. That is one of Barrage’s strongest systems. The music is heavy enough for the metal crowd, melodic enough to remain memorable, and emotionally direct enough to reach humans who did not arrive carrying a detailed map of the genre. No entrance examination required. The songs create access without becoming soft. They create weight without becoming shapeless. They invite reflection while continuing to move the room.
The raccoon calls this useful engineering.
Across seven tracks—“Tombstone,” “Beneath the Surface,” “Dealer’s Choice,” “Breathe,” “Closing In,” “Hourglass,” and “Runaround”—Silver Linings sounds less like a band demonstrating everything it can do and more like a band deciding exactly who it is. The release performance carried that confidence. This was not a group nervously presenting a new object for public inspection. Barrage knew what they had made. The humans in the room knew what it had taken. Pride moved through the space differently than ordinary excitement.
There was relief in it. History. The accumulated dopamine release produced when a complex creative task has finally been completed, released, and placed safely into the hands of other humans. The band performed. The crowd responded. The songs left the stage and returned from the audience in movement, voices, and recognition.
For a few hours, all the invisible labor became visible. The revisions. The redirected production path. The late nights. The financial support. The friends who contributed their skills. The fans who kept showing up.
The family members who kept believing the strange collection of rehearsal noise, files, invoices, and determination would eventually become an album.
It did.
It became Silver Linings.
And on this night, Barrage did not merely cross the finish line. They brought the entire community across with them.
The Humans Who Kept Showing Up
Independent albums are frequently credited to four or five humans. This is technically correct. It is also incomplete.A band writes the songs. A much larger collection of creatures helps keep those songs alive long enough to become an album.
Fans buy tickets. Friends share posts. Family members tolerate rehearsal schedules, financial decisions, delayed plans, repeated conversations about mixes, and the sudden arrival of boxes containing merchandise. Other musicians offer stages, contacts, advice, equipment, skills, and moral support delivered in parking lots at unreasonable hours.
Humans buy shirts. They stream singles. They bring friends. They stand near the stage even when the room is still mostly empty. They return. That last part carries more weight than it appears to.
Garrett explained that the entire Silver Linings album cycle was funded by the fans, friends, and family members who supported Barrage during the previous two years. Not by an invisible corporate creature descending from the clouds with a ceremonial briefcase. By people. People who attended shows. People who purchased merchandise. People who kept choosing to participate. Every ticket became part of the recording process. Every shirt became part of the production budget. Every human who showed up helped move Silver Linings a little closer to completion, whether they realized it or not.
The raccoon finds this beautiful. Also mildly alarming. Independent art is apparently financed through community affection, stubbornness, and a large number of small transactions completed near merchandise tables. The system should not work as well as it does. And yet. There they were. The same humans who had supported the album cycle were now standing inside its release party. They were not merely an audience. They were part of the infrastructure. The songs belonged to Barrage. The journey belonged to more people than could fit onstage.
That was visible throughout the night. In the hugs. The laughter. The conversations between sets. The humans wearing Barrage shirts purchased before Silver Linings was finished. The friends documenting the moment. The bands lending their music to the celebration. The crowd moving closer when Barrage began to play. Nobody needed to announce that the room was proud of them. The data was already moving through it.
This is what community looks like when it becomes physical. Not a follower count. Not a mailing list. Not a vague statement about supporting local music. Actual humans repeatedly placing time, money, attention, and trust behind something they want to survive.
Barrage created Silver Linings. Their community helped create the conditions required to finish it. On release night, everyone finally got to hear what they had been helping build.
Final Observation: Completion Deserves Witnesses
Humans are exceptionally good at beginning things. Ideas arrive constantly. Songs. Businesses. Books. Albums. Plans scribbled on receipts, stored in phones, or announced confidently at two in the morning. Beginning contains dopamine. Possibility. No failed files. No invoices. No difficult middle section where inspiration wanders off and leaves the creator alone with scheduling, revisions, and consequences.
Finishing behaves differently. Finishing asks whether the human will return after the excitement fades. Whether they will adapt when the original plan becomes unusable. Whether they will keep working after life changes the route. Whether they will tolerate the deeply offensive number of tiny tasks standing between almost finished and done.
Barrage returned.
Again. And again.
They recorded the album themselves. They adjusted when the production path changed. They found another collaborator. They completed the mix and master. They handled the back-end business. They built the release show. They invited the community. Then they stepped onto the stage and allowed everyone to witness the exact moment years of persistence became public.
That is what the raccoon collected.
Not simply photographs of musicians beneath stage lights.
Data from a finish line. Joy behaves differently there. So does relief. So does pride. The body knows when a long task has finally released its grip. The smiles widen. The shoulders lower. The humans become temporarily overwhelmed by the realization that the impossible administrative beast is dead and the art survived.
Then somebody starts another project.
Creatives are poorly supervised.
Silver Linings is appropriately named. Not because every disruption secretly improved the experience. Not because struggle is required for meaningful art. Not because suffering deserves romantic decoration. The silver lining is that Barrage kept going long enough to discover what the work could become. Seven songs. A completed album. A room full of people celebrating. A record of real emotions transferred into music and released for other humans to carry. The album is finished.
The story it enters now belongs to the listeners. Some will hear relationships they recognize. Some will hear challenges they have survived. Some will find language for something they have not yet explained. Some will simply hear a heavy, melodic Kansas City metal album with memorable hooks and excellent structural integrity.
All responses are valid.
The raccoon recommends listening closely. Notice what follows you home.
The room left data.
The raccoon collected it.
Local music is not smaller music. Local milestones are not smaller milestones. The room does not need ten thousand humans for the work to matter. It needs artists willing to make the thing. A community willing to keep showing up. And someone feral enough to collect the data when the finish line finally appears.
Support local music. Support local artists. Support the strange humans brave enough to create things.
Slightly feral. Entirely capable.
— Laverna the Rockin' Raccoon 🦝🖤
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📸 GALLERY:
https://mymidlifecrisiscreativeinc17.pixieset.com/barragessilverliningsalbumreleasewestportbowery/
🎵 LISTEN / FOLLOW BARRAGE:
https://linktr.ee/barragekc
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Filed as: Field Notes • Live Music Photography • Kansas City Metal • Album Release • Community Documentation
Slightly Feral Media
Published by My Midlife Crisis Creative Inc.
Photography • Live Culture Documentation • Community Archiving • Creative Infrastructure
Lawrence, Kansas | Kansas City Metro
Follow for structure. Chaos is optional.
The raccoon had already observed members of Pure American Filth supporting Combo Diablo inside Soundbite Social. Then they crossed into Warehouse on Broadway and became completely feral. They committed fully to the Pure American Filth name and aesthetic. The raccoon means this in the best way possible.
Their drummer, Travis Fittro, earned an honorable mention in a highly specific and deeply respectedcategory: The raccoon’s Top Five Drummers Who Remind Her of Animal from The Muppets. The raccoon just made up that classification system. Yet, this is one of the highest honors available within the Slightly Feral Media classification system.
No Notes. 
At some point, the Hair Gods, the Lighting Gods, and the Guitar Gods held a meeting. Into Existence came, well, into existence.
What the available evidence does support is this: Waking Demons closed Metal Mayhem with a deliberate visual identity, a darker atmosphere, and enough production to make the final set feel like the natural destination of the entire night.
She has tried many times to collect photographic evidence of the stage crew,sound engineers, lighting technicians, cable wranglers, button pushers, problem solvers, and other creatures who appear before the audience arrives and vanish into the dark as soon as someone points a camera in their direction.
raccoon has developed two working theories. They are either fellow raccoons and therefore exceptionally sneaky, or they are vampires and cannot be properly captured by a camera.
The Sound Elf creates orderly circles. Elf behavior.
There are other stagecraft practitioners inside Warehouse on Broadway. The raccoon knows they are there. The images do not always show them well. This is not because their work is unimportant. It is because they are usually standing in the darkest part of the room while making sure everyone else can be seen.
influence is everywhere. They put light behind hair. They put light through smoke. They put light across guitars. They arrange it around musicians in ways that make the raccoon squeal quietly behind the camera.
It is not normal. It is excellent, but it is not normal.
The building remains under investigation. The current working theory is that Warehouse on Broadway is completely haunted. There are almost certainly displaced theater ghosts living somewhere near the stage. They may be assisting with production. They may simply appreciate live music.
Either way, the production values remain excellent.
The raccoon has photographed empty sections of the stage and found evidence of something still happening there. Light remains where light should not be. Cables arrange themselves into suspiciously competent circles. Pedalboards glow. 
People appear from dark corners already knowing which button needs to be pushed.The humans call this the weekend. 
The raccoon has also observed a new species at Soundbite Social. Classification is pending. He appears to have connections to both the Sound Elf and the Lighting Gods. He moves through the same dark spaces. He understands things happening near the stage. He may be a lighting familiar. He may be a sound-adjacent creature. He may be a displaced theater ghost with technical training.He may be human. The available evidence does not yet support that conclusion.
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