Two Brothers Summer Festival lineup announced, includes X Ambassadors known for hit song “Renegades”
X Ambassadors headline this year’s Two Brothers Summer Festival at RiverEdge Park in Aurora. The group is widely known for their 2015 hit “Renegades.”
Hey, hey, hey. All hail Two Brothers. Their annual Summer Festival, a craft beer and music festival at RiverEdge Park in Aurora, is bringing some big indie names to the John C. Dunham Pavilion this June.
Entering its ninth year, Two Brothers Summer Festival 2017 is sure to offer a great experience for those passionate about great beer, great food and great music. This year’s festival will feature its biggest music and beer lineup yet, including the annual release of Two Brothers Hop Centric Double IPA, among others. Proceeds from Two Brothers Summer Festival 2017 will benefit local charities, Make-A-Wish Illinois and Giant Steps.
Here at the magazine, we want to thank Chris Bauler who does an amazing job bringing popular indie talent to our city.
We hope to see everyone by the river on June 2 and June 3.
FRIDAY, JUNE 2
Gates open at 5 p.m.
Savoir Adore 5:30 p.m.
“Savoir Adore” is French for “to know love” – a lofty moniker, but an idea that’s always been at the heart of the band’s romantic, imaginative pop music. Led by Paul Hammer, the ever-evolving Brooklyn based project continues its journey through magical dream worlds and vivid musical landscapes. After two years of writing and recording, the band will return with their latest collection of songs, The Love That Remains, later this year. And with it, we find the band at its most mature, honest, and ambitious. “When we were in Brazil in 2014, I learned the phrase Saudades, which describes a deep longing for someone or something as an almost physical entity. The idea of love as a supernatural, physical thing was a very interesting and inspiring idea to me. From there the album became about rediscovering love, in every way, finding it again in the world, with someone else, and with yourself. Whereas our last record was the story of two, I found it fitting and necessary to write this from a very personal, singular perspective.” And at the end of the day it’s about a lot more than that too – Love, loss, and the often inescapable darkness of memories. It also takes off from where Our Nature, the band’s critically acclaimed second album, left off. “Lovers Wake,” the album’s first single and lead off track is the story of someone trying to escape a dream and an addiction to suffering through a fantasy that doesn’t exist. Savoir Adore is not a new band. But in many ways, this is a new beginning.
Savoir Adore’s story has been building for a long time, but in many ways, their magical journey has just begun. The Love That Remains is the first part of a new chapter in the band, a chapter that finds the band more focused, experimental and ambitious than ever.
Blind Pilot 7 p.m.
“The past isn’t finished with us yet. Love can be like that, too. A couple of years ago I found love in different forms leaving my life at once. In a single month I lost my closest group of friends, my 13-year relationship ended, and my dad was diagnosed with cancer. I had just stopped touring to write the next Blind Pilot album, but instead I was watching each of my plans unthread as a new season pulled forward relentlessly.
“Avoiding suffering, is avoiding real happiness too. My reason to tell this story isn’t because it broke me and pinned me breathless. There was suffering, but those two years, as I moved to my hometown to help my parents through my dad’s sickness and eventually his death, also brought me true closeness, a deeper will to care and hope, and many moments of beauty I can barely describe.
“This album came from love for my family, my town, my friends, my community. We don’t have to be so afraid of loss. We can speak and share its name, knowing we are together in it. If these songs are invitations to talk about loss and death, the invitation is to talk closely of the courage we find when we face loss honestly, cracked open and unsure of what we will become.” – Blind Pilot’s Israel Nebeker
Blind Pilot’s ‘And Then Like Lions’ on ATO Records is the third LP from the Portland, Oregon-based sextet consisting of frontman Israel Nebeker, fellow founding member Ryan Dobrowski, Luke Ydstie, Kati Claborn, Ian Krist and Dave Jorgensen. The album was produced by Israel Nebeker and Tucker Martine (The Decemberists, Neko Case, My Morning Jacket), and was written and composed by Nebeker. It comes five years after the band’s well-received ‘We Are the Tide’ and three years after Nebeker thought he’d be starting the songs that would become the band’s third album.
Blind Pilot has performed on Ellen and The Late Show with David Letterman, at the Newport Folk Festival, Bonnaroo, and Lollapalooza. The group has shared stages with The Shins, Local Natives, Andrew Bird, and more. The project began in 2007 when Israel and co-founding member Ryan Dobrowski went on a West Coast tour via bicycle. Blind Pilot’s six members recorded for this new album and will tour through 2016.
Saint Motel 9 p.m.
The year before making their breakthrough with a mainstage performance at Coachella and the chart topping single “My Type,” Saint Motel had planned to host an event of their own called “saintmotelevision” — a multimedia spectacular of music, dance, comedy, art, and more that was shut down by authorities before it even took place. “That crazy mixture of worlds and ideas is something we’ve always gravitated toward,” says front man A/J Jackson in reflecting on the original saintmotelevision. “We’ve always been fans of strange combinations, and that glorious yet doomed event became a symbol of all that.” So when it came time to create their forthcoming full-length debut for Elektra, the band reclaimed the name saintmotelevision and, in the end, dreamed up an album as magnificently kaleidoscopic as that mythic party itself.
Featuring production from the likes of Lars Stalfors (Cold War Kids) and Tim Pagnotta (Walk The Moon) — as well as from Jackson, in and around the band’s own studio in downtown L.A. — saintmotelevision builds off 2014’s My Type EP with a sound even more expansive and artfully genre-blurring. And with its effervescent melodies and shapeshifting grooves, the album emerges as a beautifully alchemized piece of alt-pop, every bit the “channel-surfing odyssey” its namesake was meant to be.
Lead single “Move” serves as saintmotelevision’s opening track, a psych-rock-tinged dancefloor anthem with a chorus so catchy that — during Saint Motel’s raucous sets at summer festivals like Lollapalooza and Bonnaroo — audience members instantly shouted along despite never having heard the song before. In the lyric video for “Move,” Saint Motel have also unveiled their latest undertaking as a decidedly visually-oriented group: the so-called “virtualizer,” which combines 360° animation and virtual reality technology that allows each viewer a chance to experience the music in a fully immersive manner.
SATURDAY, JUNE 3
Gates open at 3 p.m.
Opening Act: 4 p.m.
The Way Down Wanderers 5:15 p.m.
KNOX Hamilton 7 p.m.
Fueled by the similar staples within their collective musical taste, the members of Knox Hamilton blend laid back guitar riffs and catchy bass lines with rhythmic drum beats and soaring vocals to produce a sound that’s as likely to make you want to visit the beach as it is to move your feet. The Great Hall EP is a culmination of the bands eclectic musical sensibilities, as individuals, and their combined infatuation with indie pop rock, as a band. The EP could easily be trimmed to simple, commercial-length soundbites, but it could also accompany you on a cross-country road trip.
X Ambassadors 9 p.m.
X Ambassadors released their debut full length album VHS (KIDinaKORNER/Interscope) in June 2015, where it debuted at #7 on the Billboard Top 200 chart and has since been certified gold by the RIAA. The set was produced by Grammy Award-winning producer Alex Da Kid and features the platinum selling, #1 Alternative radio song “Renegades.” New single “Unsteady” is currently climbing the charts and was recently certified platinum as well. X Ambassadors and Tom Morello teamed up for the song “Collider” which appears on VHS 2.0, the deluxe edition of VHS released this summer. “Collider” was ESPN and ABC’s 2016 Road to the College Football Playoff Theme Song.
