By Kashif Stone, Staff Writer

Published in print Mar. 4, 2015

The North Carolinian music scene ignited Friday night at New York Pizza on Tate Street with the presentation of a few local punk rock bands. Lilac Shadows, Nest Egg and Wahya’s performed for an enthusiastic, almost full house.

Lilac Shadows took the stage first and performed songs from their new album entitled “Brutalism”. The entire performance consisted of amplified guitar rhythms and edgy drum beats which kept the audience bobbing their heads in unison. Green and blue contrasting lights set the mood for the 10-minute hard rock performance.

Established in Durham, NC in 2011, Lilac Shadows currently has two guitarists, a keyboardist, and a drummer. The band enjoys performing in the Greensboro area for the networking experience of meeting new people and exposing their music to a different music scene. Shadows is known to spend a lot of time playing at venues in the Research Triangle area (Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill) when they are not working their normal nine to five jobs.

The group’s founding member Sam Logan, said that the band is definitely weirder for the Greensboro area. “We definitely try to take some risk for what we do and keep it interesting for ourselves,” said Logan, admitting that some songs performed by the band are either hit or miss with the audience; however, the band’s ultimate goal is to perform their music for as many people as possible, sell records and have fun. Musically influenced by the post-punk new wave era of late 1970’s British punk rock bands such as Gang of Four, Lilac Shadows has proved to be the a dynamic up-and-coming group in the punk rock world. The performance was well received by audience members as several of them cheered and applauded the band after each selection.

Nest Egg treated audience members to echoes and synthesized sounds, but it was the smoke machine that set the mood for the shows second act. Originally from Asheville, N.C., Nest Egg shut the show down Friday night performing various songs from their psychedelic album.

Each song performed by the group featured hard-hitting drum beats and bizarre synthesizer rhythms that kept the audience glued to the performance. The lead vocalist sang spontaneous off-beat lyrics while the drummer highlighted the performance with incredibly written drum beats. Overshadowed by a thick cloud of smoke Nest Egg is the perfect example of a loud, edgy punk band.

The third and final act was Wahya’s, a male and female duo originally from Greensboro, N.C. This performance featured a female drummer (Lindsey Sprague) and a guitarist (Josh Johnson) who sang together on each song. Created in early 2015, these new kids on the block were musically inspired by Beck compilation albums and new bands evolving in the area.

Wahya’s enjoys the Greensboro music scene because of the large musical diversity of the area. “Greensboro is a college town and the music scene recycles about every four years”, said Sprague. “There are a lot of good musicians here in Greensboro and we are not trying to be good musicians,” added Johnson. Performing with only two members, Wahya’s sets themselves aside from other punk rock groups because they perform and make music simply for fun.