New York’s Meneguar "a very good guitar-driven band whose singer sort of sounds like the guy from The Hold Steady" kick off a 4 date Irish tour next week.
Courtesy of the wonderful Skinny Wolves, New York rockers Meneguar play Belfast, Dublin, Cork & Galway next week:
MENEGUAR
(New York City, USA Troubleman Unlimited / Release the Bats )
NYC’s Meneguar is a very good guitar-driven band whose singer sort of sounds like the guy from The Hold Steady. There is a positive vibe to this melodic (mostly) punk rock, complete with Superchunk-friendly riffs and Les Savy Fav-friendly angularity. They are a band void of pretension that wants to write really good rock songs. If you liked the indie rock of the 90’s, you will like Meneguar. Look for the reissue of their hard-to-find debut I Was Born At Night on Troubleman Unlimted records.
Meneguar started in the winter of 2004. After years of playing together in other projects Christian Deroeck, Jeremy Earl, Justin Wertz and Jarvis Taveniere moved in to a small house in Bushwick and began work on what would eventually become I Was Born at Night. Recorded with their gloves on in an under-heated practice space in 4 hour blocks, the record came out in a limited pressing on May 10th 2005. Since then they’ve toured extensively, released 2 cassettes on Fuck-it-tapes and recently finished a 7 inch for Troubleman Unlimited (OUT NOW!!!). Nicolas Vernhes (Silver Jews, Fiery Furnaces, Les Savy Fav) remixed the album in the winter of 2005 at his Rare Book Room studio in Greenpoint.
‘Intimate’ is a term usually reserved to describe the sounds of you lullaby-pushing troubadours-your Devendras, your Oldhams, your James Taylors-but it’s also a totally appropriate description for the chaotic group sounds of Meneguar. The Brooklyn based quartet makes ramshackle indie punk that lives in the spaces in-between: falling apart and coming together, the subtle melodic and abrasively noisy, the lyrically opaque and the slogan-worthy. The members of the band are also roommates-they make camp in Brooklyn. Over the years, by sharing everything from household chores to the rigors of touring, the group has developed an almost private language, or at least a unique accent that they apply to a familiar tongue. According to singer/guitarist Jarvis Taveniere(who’s also in the band Wooden Wand), the fluency with which they play with ideas comes from the mundane day to day of living together. ‘Being roommates on top of being band mates really form an intimacy that you can’t get from just rehearsing,’ says Taveniere. Insularity is one of the major tenets of underground music-the communal ideal of a scene, the us-against-them attitude, basically the whole our band could be your life cliche. But Meneguar, the insularity is more musical than ideological.
The songs on the band’s 2006 EP I Was Born At Night, sound like they’re starting somewhere in the middle, like you stumbled into the bands practice space by accident. Every time you pat yourself on the back for thinking ‘Somebody owns a Polvo record’ Meneguar switches directions , shifting gears so wildly that you expect the transmission to fall out. Backing vocals come screaming out of nowhere and drones become power pop hooks unexpectedly. Maybe it does sound familial, secretive and intimate, but on ‘house of cats’, when Taveniere sings ‘Don’t let us fit in, don’t let us fit in’, like it’s a gang slogan rather than a chorus, you get the remarkable feeling that you’ve been made part of the crew.’ Chris Ryan-Fader Magazine In late summer/early fall of 2007 Meneguar will release their new full length CD/LP on Troubleman Unlimited and tour the US, Europe and the UK extensively. Also except 2 one-sided LPs on Woodist records. One will be covers of good friend and sometime bandmate James Jackson Toth, aka Wooden Wand and the other will be new songs and sounds recorded by the band at home.
MENEGUAR (NYC, USA / Troubleman Unlimited)
IRISH TOUR
Thursday 27th September // Belfast / The Bunker
Friday 28th September // Dublin / Boom Boom Room
w/ The Dudley Corporation & Crayonsmith
Saturday 29th September // Cork / Club Ping Pong @ Liquid Lounge
w/ Hope Is Noise
Sunday 30th September // Galway / Roisin Dubh
www.myspace.com/meneguar
http://meneguar.net/
http://www.troublemanunlimited.com
SKINNY WOLVES // Dublin, Ireland
www.skinnywolves.com
www.myspace.com/skinnywolves
