The Suffers  •  Fat Tony  •  DEM Roots atLast Concert Cafe
Saturday, December 31
Doors 8:00PM
Show 9:00PM
21+

“How do we heal from this?” Kam Franklin asks on The Suffers’ explosive new album, It Starts With Love. “How do we heal?” Written in the midst of a tumultuous stretch that saw the Gulf Coast Soul powerhouse reinvent themselves personally and professionally, the record is a fierce, defiant ode to resilience and commitment, one that reckons with racism, misogyny, and the ugly underbelly of the music industry even as it celebrates growth, evolution, and self-acceptance. Mixed by GRAMMY-winner Adrian Quesada (Black Pumas, Prince), It Starts With Love is an album for survivors, for the doubted and the written off, but it’s delivered with the kind of faith and conviction that ultimately transcends pain and anger to land on something far more triumphant.
Founded in 2011, The Suffers built a devoted local following in Houston before breaking out with their 2015 debut EP, Make Some Room, which helped land performances everywhere from Letterman to NPR’s Tiny Desk. The band followed it up in 2016 with a self-titled full-length that yielded similar acclaim along with star-making performances at Newport Folk and on The Daily Show. By the time the group released their 2018 sophomore effort, Everything Here, their arrival as critical and festival favorites was undeniable, with NPR praising the “multidimensional, multicultural possibilities of their take on soul” and The Guardian hailing their “adventurous” blend of ”70s R&B, disco, jazz, and contemporary gospel.”

Somewhere between DJ Screw and Bad Brains, De La Soul and Scritti Politti sits Houston’s native son, Fat Tony. For the last decade, Anthony Lawson Jude Ifeanyichukwu Obiawunaotu has been everywhere: from star-making turns on the first A$AP Rocky mixtape to hosting shows on Viceland and Super Deluxe, to co-founding a DIY culture magazine to playing every worthwhile rap party in America and burning the stage down every single time. A singular and experimentally-minded rap artist adept at both traditional regional styles and indie pop, hardcore thrash and melodic candy-painted bangers. He is punk in the platonic sense of the word: experimental and subversive, but also funny, whimsical, and virtuosic.
Over the course of more than a half-dozen LPs, and countless other short-form gems and collaborations with everyone from Das Racist to Bun B, Fat Tony has reimagined and blurred the boundaries of hip-hop. There are a few things you can depend on in this schizophrenic world. About once or twice a year, Fat Tony will drop an album and it will sound like nothing that he has done before. There’s a spirit of creative restlessness and intelligence that runs through his deep discography. He is a national treasure, one of those rappers destined to seem forever underrated until you ask around and realize that everyone in their right mind likes Fat Tony. He is the Whataburger of rappers: if you know you know.
Raised in Houston’s historically black and culturally radical neighborhood, the Third Ward, Tony’s mom and teachers educated him from the get-go about how this was the regional cradle for the Black Panther Party — and how BP hero, Carl Hampton, was murdered by the Houston Police Department. It was an environment where social awareness and Pan-Africanism were always around and celebrated. His childhood home was filled with records—country music, King Sunny Adé, and Jimmy Cliff from his father’s collection, his mother’s classical music, rock, and soul, and his granny’s gospel. Then as a teenager, empowered by the internet and his discovery of independent artists like E-40, Bikini Kill, and Bad Brains, Fat Tony began recording and distributing his own music. Heavily influenced by renowned Texas rappers like UGK and Scarface, Fat Tony started playing and organizing live shows at a time when there wasn’t much of a scene for young artists in Houston. He started booking bands of all types from all over, hand-making flyers for the shows and mailing them to addresses nabbed from the Carnegie Vanguard High School student directory.
His dedication to Houston’s rap scene earned him Houston Press Music Awards’ “Best Underground Hip Hop Artist” in 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2013. Primed for more national audiences, Fat Tony began taking his music on tour and collaborated with more artists around the country. His sonically unpredictable and emotionally vulnerable music has garnered praise from Pitchfork, The Fader, and Noisey. His achievements in rap have pushed him out of his comfort zone into other performance and hosting opportunities on TV and the Internet. This fall, Fat Tony releases Exotica on Carpark Records. It heralds his most visionary work yet, an ode to the art of storytelling through music. A rich and compact iteration of rap short fiction that firmly establishes him as his own one-man genre, the preeminent post-modern griot shooting game.

dem roots music is a nu-reggae, uplifting contemporary reggae ensemble blending jazz, and latin overtones.
The center and founder of the group, singer/songwriter Louis Morales, didn’t want the name to be the identification of the band, but be more about the music and the experience.
Dem first appeared in 2016 as Morales’ stage name, when he was playing gigs in his hometown of Galveston, TX. He quickly began to collect musicians into his project, leading him to today’s solid cast of six: Pat Kelly (drums) and Kevin B (lead guitar) of The Suffers, Liam Haney (bass) of Houston’s Third Coast Roots, Selphilips Taveraz (drums), and Allison Lopez (sax).
As the world was locking down at the start of 2020, Dem’s Pat, Allison, Sel, and Louis joined forces with Austin musicians Dane Foltin (bass, Lion Heights), Jeremy Carlson (keys, Lion Heights), and Mario Salazar (lead guitar) to Tall Sky Studios in Austin, where they recorded their first album. Citing it as being a positive but strange experience to record during shut-down, the band quickly realized that the overarching message of the music was about understanding yourself – a phrase that everyone can relate to.
Shortly after recording, and upon returning to Houston, Louis found the final members of his crew. Stay tuned for information on their album release parties in Houston, Austin, Galveston, and beyond.