Sims + Lazerbeak with Bight Club

This show has been rescheduled due to weather for Fri, July 22, 7:00 pm.

Restless and passionate but with an unflinching realism at his core, Sims has seen enough of life to know there are no easy answers. His second full-length release, Bad Time Zoo, out February 15th on Doomtree Records, reflects this rapper's ongoing quest for solid understanding in a society on the brink of dystopia. For Sims, it's been a long road.

Andrew Sims grew up in the working-class Minneapolis suburb of Hopkins, Minnesota. He found solace in rap and R&B music, nurturing a love for mainstream hits as well as then-underground artists such as the Wu-Tang Clan. He soon found a gift for rhyme and begin channeling his aggression into feisty, kinetic wordplay.

His rap habit quickly grew from playground cyphers to recorded projects. In high school, he met a local producer and rapper named P.O.S. who would sell him beats for $30 a pop and let him record at his house for free. Eventually, their home-recording experiment blossomed into a full-on musical enterprise that would pull in other aspiring artists and help put Minneapolis hip-hop on the map.

Enter Doomtree. Hailing from the same untamed Minneapolis indie music scene that spawned both punk legends the Replacements and, 20 years later, hip-hop powerhouse Rhymesayers, Doomtree has become one of the most trusted and influential names in grassroots hip-hop.

Since its birth in 2002, Doomtree has grown from a CD-R-slinging, fast-food-fueled DIY collective into a tightly knit, business-savvy operation. In addition to Sims and P.O.S., Doomtree's roster includes some of the most daring artists working in hip-hop today: Lazerbeak, Dessa, Mike Mictlan, Paper Tiger, and Cecil Otter.

In a genre that all too often rewards imitation over innovation, Doomtree's artists strive for originality without sacrificing mass appeal. As a result, fans of Doomtree have come to expect uncommon hip-hop delivered in clever, club-rocking doses, and Bad Time Zoo will not disappoint.

Setting himself as spokesman for a generation fraught by vapid commercialism, political cynicism, and the paradoxical power of technology to both connect us and drive us apart, Sims seeks a path out of the disappointment that plagues modern life. 

But while he casts himself as an alienated prophet, make no mistake: Sims' message is of empowerment, hope, and badass beats. The results are epically infectious. Bad Time Zoo is not so much a hip-hop album as a teeming, beat-driven urban wilderness.

A pop-culture omnivore, Sims cites influences that range from the sci-fi of Ray Bradbury, to the films of David Lynch, to the 1940s graphic novels of Will Eisner. But most of all, Sims listens to the world around him.

"I draw a lot more from human interaction than I do from music," he says. "I listen and try to understand how people function."

Like all good writers, Sims has an ear for what makes us human.

We hope Bight Club will be able to join us for the rescheduled concert date of Fri, July 22. We will confirm this once we have connected with them.

Fresh off a Vita.mn Are You Local? best new band victory and an attention-grabbing South by Southwest stint, Bight Club is back with their debut LP "Dreamworld Vs. Minneapolis."

A brash, creative burst of dynamism, Bight Club distances themselves from both the underground hip-hop status quo and Midwestern humility. With MC Jeremy Nutzman's ability to shift from spitfire verses to grooved-out soulful worldplay over beatsmith Tony Rabiola's electro-orgy tracks, it's clear the twosome is more parts "Stankonia" than "Lucy Ford."

Sounds like:

Outkast, MGMT, LMFAO