Terry's Dolmen (with Songs for Sleepnig Dogs, Jay Gonzalez)
Buvez
585 Barber St.
Athens, GA
Oct. 12, 2025
Following his utopic DIY tour of the North East corridor documented in Midbrow here, Philadelphia-based musician Tyler Maxwell is headed South on a less idealistic mission: To survive as a working artist amid housing hardships and financial uncertainties at home. Follow along here as he writes about life as a performer and audience member traveling through Georgia, West Virginia and the Carolinas over the next few weeks in search of new sounds and scenes — and in lieu of, at times, a sense of security or stability.
Just as I more or less booked my entire August/September tour around TradMAD, the traditional music and dance camp in Massachusetts, this trip was organized around the central pillar of getting to play with Terry’s Dolmen in Athens. This was the pinnacle event, the organizing principle, the distant opportunity seized with aplomb: I have a chance to play a show with Terry’s Dolmen. Guess I better get my ass down to Athens.
Terry’s Dolmen is the excellent new nom de plume of Graham Ulicny. Probably best known for his time in the band Reptar, it’s fair to say that the quality of Ulicny’s songwriting at this point far exceeds his renown or imprint, unfortunately. I’ve said to anyone willing to listen that his band Thick Paint’s sophomore album, TP2, is easily one of the closest-to-perfect rock albums of the decade, with “Don’t Let Me Fight It” being as near to a “Once In A Lifetime” as anyone’s produced, the shame of course being that barely anyone has heard it. But goddamn it rips, goddamn it invigorates. Ulicny’s the kind of artist that his own bandmates talk about in hushed tones, as if pinching themselves at their good fortune to play this music, hesitant to disrupt the cosmic balance. That the Terry’s Dolmen album is just as good without being in any way a retread knocked me for an honest loop. The band just completed a short run of shows, including in Tallahassee, where Ulicny will be moving soon, away from Atlanta, to pursue a nursing program. What this means for Terry’s Dolmen – or Thick Paint, or any other projects bearing his signature – is up in the air, for now, but in the short term, our gig together would be their last for at least a good stretch, with the earned flavor of a victory lap.
Watching a band so tightly crowded together on a small stage in the back corner of Buvez, the audience mostly seated or standing comfortably apart, put me in mind of witnessing a painting’s or sculpture’s unveiling. The eye takes the whole scene in: the proximity of bodies on stage itself becomes part of the subject of the work, their closeness eliciting a sympathetic warmth as though I, too, was in the band. (Or maybe it just triggered memories of one of the bands I used to be in.) Crammed stages, literally overflowing – their percussionist forced to set up on the floor – disrupted the assumed division between band and crowd, and on a night where the music was otherwise somewhat hermetic and solitary, the energy Terry’s Dolmen brought out hit even harder, a shift in the night’s dynamic. Live, the band swapped the album’s nylon string guitars for rich, raucous electrics and driving rhythms, the crooked counterpoint flow of “mud and spit” reframed by an amphetamine energy, as though we were watching the E Street Band tackle the Nebraska material with first-time’s-the-charm zeal. Set (and album) closer “What I Have” was, live, a true hair-raising barnstormer, its chorus delivered full-throated by the whole band, with the passion of a last will and testament, its melody diamond-tough like a folk song: “What I have is in my mind, and you can’t have it.”
Would I have loved to hear something off of TP2, as a treat? Of course. Would I have benefited from more time with the album before seeing the band tear through amped-up and loud, rocking, three-guitared renditions? Definitely. But with the palpable joy on the band’s faces as they belted these songs together, Ulicny’s stentorian voice cutting through like a blade, live and fleshy: how could I complain?
