FORMER GHOSTS (Usa, Upset The Rhythm) / PARENTHETICAL GIRLS (Usa, Tomlab) (1 Viewer)

[skinny wolves]

Skinny Wolves Presents

FORMER GHOSTS (Usa, Upset the Rhythm) / PARENTHETICAL GIRLS (Usa, Tomlab)
& Guests

Thursday 20th May
Twisted Pepper, Middle Abbey St, Dublin

Doors 8pm
Tickets 12e (w/ booking fee to be included) from http://www.tickets.ie/skinnywolves, Road Records, City Discs

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FORMER GHOSTS (Usa, Upset the Rhythm)
http://www.myspace.com/formerghostssleep
http://www.formerghosts.com

"Former Ghosts is a new synthpop project from Freddy Ruppert, formerly of This Song Is a Mess But So Am I. The band is also comprised of Xiu Xiu’s Jamie Stewart and Zola Jesus’ Nika Roza. Ruppert is the lead songwriter on this brutally gloomy, Joy Division-esque project. The title of the debut, Fleurs, is a reference to the white-flowered iris (Iris germanica). " - lastfm

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When Freddy Ruppert first put a copy of Former Ghosts's Fleurs in our hands, he wouldn't let go. He told us, "I need to tell you something." He said that he had performed a little experiment when he had finished recording. He said that the album was drenched in reverb and he had gone out of his way to measure it. He measured the amount of reverb on a few percussive hits, the sustain on a few single synth notes and chords, and long echos on the vocal tracks. He told us that after doing some calculations, he predicts that if you were to clip out the actual sound from the instruments on the album, leaving only the reverb, and then lined each track of reverb up, one after another, the reverb should stretch out for 8 and 3/4 years. He said "Think about that." Over eight years of music folded, stacked, toppling and dripping down over itself. An album dense, not just with sound but emotion - an album so heavy, that the disk itself almost seems to weigh five pounds.

And this isn't just talk. He wasn't just trying to psych us out. With 'Fleurs', Freddy Ruppert, Jamie Stewart and Nika Roza - known collectively as FORMER GHOSTS - have created an album so intense that we sometimes find it hard to listen to. And we say this in an effort to compliment them - their ability to render the themes of the album - heartbreak, death, love, needing, wanting - so sonically accurate that they replicate those feelings in the listener.

The album sweeps through you with its sweet melodic side, sprinkling in sharp, chaotic, discordant moments - as if to punish you for having enjoyed yourself, for having let your guard down. "Dreams" plays through with melodies and textures reminiscent of early synth-pop, kept alive with the warm heart-like thumping of the synthetic kick drum. Freddy's (This Song is a Mess but so Am I) vocals crawl low through the hallucinatory soundscape, led on by the gentle buttering of Jamie's (Xiu Xiu) back-ups in the chorus.

Nika (Zola Jesus) enters the album on "In Earth's Palm" - picture Barbara Streisand laying in the street at night, covered in hot tar, with her legs broken, still managing to sing powerfully, beautifully. The intensity and virtuosity of her voice torques the dynamic of the entire album into an unexpected shape. And it's here, as a powerful feminine counterpart is added to the vulnerable male figures at work, that the fragmented sensation of having more than one lead singer plays out. Love is the most emotionally tangible embodiment of all things delicate - love is confusing and violent. The multitude of voices are both a reflection of and a creation of the themes of loss, confusion and unexpected joy - they are sensations as disjointed, multi-vocal and diverse as the emotional experiences offered here.

Jamie's influence on the album enters obliquely, buttering some of the albums harder edges, organising the sometimes disoriented moments of glitch and electro-mania. He plays an unfamiliar role - softer, more understated (in his particular context) - but in his familiar style. Starring solo on "I Wave", you're drawn into the springy synths, cushioned by his smooth voice - the track is almost a reprieve from heavier textures found elsewhere in the album.

We're glad that Freddy told us what he did before we listened. To be warned that time would seem distorted as we took in 'Fleurs' kept us from believing that we were falling into psychosis, and let us know that we were simply writhing in musical ecstasy.

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PARENTHETICAL GIRLS (Usa, Tomlab)
http://www.myspace.com/parentheticalgirlsband
http://www.parentheticalgirls.com

"His legs gave way like pages from a pop-up book�"

Formed in 2003 by then-principle constant Zac Pennington, Portland, Oregon's Parenthetical Girls have since evolved into a functioning ensemble, the core of which includes multi-instrumentalists Jherek Bischoff, Matthew Carlson, Edward Crichton, and Rachael Jensen). They are regularly augmented by a fluid cast of additional collaborators. The group has released two full-length records on Pennington's own Slender Means Society imprint. Their new and third album "entanglements" comes out in september 2008. (((GRRRLS))) have toured extensively in the U.S. and Europe, sharing stages with the likes of Deerhoof, Patrick Wolf, Xiu Xiu, The Microphones, and Casiotone For the Painfully Alone.

Parenthetical Girls have traded in their small-screen sincerity for a bold and blustering Technicolour - a lush, longing and lusty celluloid schmaltz they call Entanglements.

An orchestral song-cycle of grand sonic ambition, Entanglements is an eleven-song, linear narrative of ascendancy, adolescent sexuality, quantum mechanics, consent and other moral ambiguities - all set to an elaborately orchestrated olio of Modern Classical and timeworn, traditional American pop forms.

Borrowing string-swept sentimentality from the likes of Van Dyke Parks, Scott Walker, Jack Nitzsche, and Burt Bacharach, Entanglements draws colourful lines across the expanse between these orchestral pop antiquities and the more formidable strains of modern classical composers - its hues distantly reminiscent of names like Krzystof Penderecki, Philip Glass, and Gavin Bryars.

Drafted in fits and starts over the course of the last three years, the seeds for Entanglements were initially conceived by Parenthetical Girls founder, Zac Pennington as a conceptual/orchestral follow-up to (((GRRRLS))), the band's self-released debut.

When the task proved too daunting for Pennington alone, the project was abandoned in favour of a more sonically direct approach; a tact that would eventually produce the band's critically acclaimed sophomore record, 2006's Safe As Houses.

Following years of fluctuating ranks, Pennington at last drafted what was to become a permanent line-up, multi-instrumentalists Matt Carlson, Eddy Crichton, and Rachael Jensen, along with constant studio collaborator, Jherek Bischoff (The Dead Science, Ribbons). Aided immeasurably by Carlson's classically trained hand, the group set about eschewing Indie Rock's propensity for orchestral dabbling by forgoing the "Rock" almost completely. As a result, Entanglements is foremost a modern Orchestral Pop record - its motifs dissected and appropriated from a century's worth of sources, and reconfigured anew into something altogether different.

Recorded between Seattle, WA and Portland, OR over the course of two strenuous months, the Entanglements sessions gathered upwards of fifteen classically trained/experimental musicians to realize the songs' dense and dramatic arrangements, as laid to paper by both Carlson and long-time (((GRRRLS))) producer/engineer Bischoff (with additional assistance from Dead Science frontman Sam Mickens).

"...a creepily pretty presentation of female reproductive power as a kind of montrosity: its women are protuberant, seeping, layered apertures. This is the world in which girl-puberty and menstration are accursed, as opposed to how the onset of male sexuality is usually construed to be heroic." -Pitchforkmedia

"Brutally honest, upfront and totally captivating, Safe As Houses... sounds more like a performance piece than a rock and roll album. This is far more cultured than that. It feels more like a piece of art than a piece of fun. It should be performed in rooms filled with naked statues and giant frescos instead of dingy rock clubs. It should be enjoyed by all of you looking for something new, something fresh and something completely different to what else is out there at the moment." -Incendiary Magazine

"The whole album is terrifying, harrowing, flower-wrought. Get it." -Said the Gramophone

"This isn't easy listening, but it ought to be compulsory." -Las Vegas City Life

 

[Unicron]

Bugger already have Wolf Parade tickets that night. Love Parenthetical Girls though. If the set times work out I might try to make both gigs.

 

[skinny wolves]

Bugger already have Wolf Parade tickets that night. Love Parenthetical Girls though. If the set times work out I might try to make both gigs.

Curfew for this gig is around 10.30pm or so

 

[Unicron]

Curfew for this gig is around 10.30pm or so

Oh cool, I'll probably be able to see PG so.