Tuesday, October 3, 7pm doors/8pm show, $10 advance/$12 at the door **

Constant Smiles, Survey Channel, 4d.s

Sweeping indie rock/shoegaze, Sacred Bones recording artists

Constant Smiles https://constantsmiles.bandcamp.com www.instagram.com/constant_smiles www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100065463195000 www.sacredbonesrecords.com/collections/constant-smiles

Survey Channel www.facebook.com/survey.channel  https://surveychannel.bandcamp.com

www.instagram.com/survey.channel

4d.s https://4dslip.bandcamp.com https://soundcloud.com/vampiretrick 4d.slop@instagram.com

Over the last half decade, the music collective Constant Smiles has produced a prolific output of acclaimed music, culminating in their forthcoming record Kenneth Anger, masterfully brought to life by engineer Jonathan Schenke (Parquet Courts, Liars, Dougie Pool). The group is known most recently for their much-praised debut album for Sacred Bones records, Paragons, an emotionally resonant offering of indie folk masterpieces that all confront the internal ways we process our struggles with intimacies, addiction and humanity – produced by Ben Greenberg.

Constant Smiles, led by Ben Jones, began in 2009 on his home of Martha’s Vineyard, inspired by the music scene centered around the island’s now defunct community record store, Aboveground Records. They made their live debut as a noise duo opening for Ralph White (Bad Livers) and, working in series, began churning out homemade releases influenced by friends, art film icons, and fellow musicians.

In the time since, Constant Smiles have amassed a discography a couple dozen releases deep, containing contributions from more than 50 members of its extended family. Along the way, the group has shared stages with Molly Nilsson, Black Marble, Oneida, Editrix, Frank Hurricane, Olden Yolk, and Purple Pilgrims; their shows are endlessly unique experiences for which Jones has a tendency of writing whole set’s worth of new material.

“As Constant Smiles, Ben Jones makes swirling, hooky minor chord pop that is pleasingly mopey, but tends to switch up the methodology from album to album. Paragons from 2021 was led with acoustic guitar, but for his second album on Sacred Bones, Kenneth Anger, keyboards are at the forefront, giving things a much different feel. Arpeggiated synths dance around his melancholic melodies, while the driving bass lines feel right out of the ’80s goth heyday. It’s a perfect fit for Ben’s whispery vocals and this excellent batch of grey-skied heartland anthems.” – Brooklyn Vegan

“Solemn, steady, cellar detectives, Constant Smiles’ cool elusive mood casts placid spells over merciful searching, enigmatic passions and rumbling conundrums. Tenacious patience makes, “Paragons,” a rising survivor’s champion companion, each song building upon ascendent defendants conjuring strong longing on bedrock clockwork while stark guitars whose ghostly solos skim weighty bass and dark synths lift with thrift and hopeful focus. Hallowed shadowy scenarios pushing unbendable agendas in whispered persistence, the Ben Jones-led collective hovers between meticulous Krautrock fits and tight dream-emo flights, effervescent sentries guarding and harboring floating innuendo with scissor precision. Evenly breezy in serene freedoms and fleeting machine-tooled soothsaying, this major label debut navigates half-remembered embers from burnt bridges in mesmerizing leveled-headedness, undeterred psychic surgeries meandering in candid analysis but direct in brooding execution.” – Maximum Ink

“Over the course of a dozen-plus albums, the Ben Jones-led collective Constant Smiles have navigated ambient/shoegaze experiments with 2020’s Control, droney chamber pop with 2019’s John Waters, and cold-wave atmospherics a la Black Marble and Drab Majesty with 2018’s Lost. Having self-released many of their projects, the band now offer Paragons under the auspices of Brooklyn-based Sacred Bones.”

– PopMatters

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnkLYsmookY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKmRdIxGVBc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=843HJNqC5ww

Event page: https://www.facebook.com/events/256996053346687