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HOT GIG TICKETS

GROUPER + Thank You + Silk Flowers

Thu 5th Nov 2009

Upset The Rhythm presents
GROUPER
+ Thank You
+ Silk Flowers

Doors 8.00
Silk Flowers 8.40
Thank You 9.30
Grouper 10.15

Grouper - aka Portland, Oregon-based Liz Harris - might have achieved a significant fan base thanks to the whispering, near ambient vocal crusades of her debut album 'Way Their Crept' and its follow-up 'Wide', but those with a careful ear would have heard slightly more trapped beneath her fuzzy chain of effects. Using delicate song structures, which are at once both familiar and alien, somehow we hear her words cry out hauntingly over stripped down guitar lines and looped environmental recordings. New album 'Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill' (released on Type Records) marks a departure of sorts for Liz, which sees her turn down the fuzz-boxes that caged (and to some degree defined) her sound and allows her voice to ring out above everything else. It is an album steeped in the world of dream-pop, a genre pioneered by the likes of 4AD's Cocteau Twins and This Mortal Coil. There is something to Grouper's music that defies time, makes you sit up and listen in an age in which we're told that recorded music is disposable. These are the future soundtracks to love, despair and ultimately hope.

Thank You is an athletic rhythm / action unit from Baltimore, made up of Jeffrey McGrath, Michael Bouyoucas and Elke Wardlaw. They are three free individuals, subsumed into a collective form that spits out dank, skittering tracks filled with light and dark. Musical ideas are introduced and have conversations with one another, each track filled with new articulation and insight. The basics of drums, organ and guitar build the foundation, but are augmented by whistles, cowbell, hobo harmonica, snappy loops, car horns and whatever else might be at hand. The band has been building up a reputation via their live shows, which have left audience members joyful, overwhelmed and ready to spread the word. A seeming telepathy occurs onstage, a musical dervish, a union. Their new EP 'Pathetic Magic' was released on Thrill Jockey last month.

Silk Flowers is the sound you get when you take two friends from the band Soiled Mattress & The Springs and another friend from Car Clutch and Corpse Kisser and mix them all up and give them a good shake. It sort of borders the line of Kraftwerk on a four-track meets "Cough/Cool" era Misfits... we know that sounds insane, and it is! The group have a new album on PPM and two 7"s to date, but have clearly defined that same alley of darkwave synth-pop in thrall to the likes of Joy Division, Depeche Mode or John Carpenter. Much like Cold Cave or Former Ghosts, Silk Flowers could be considered the dark heart of hypnagogic pop's undead body.

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