Band Plug: Jukebox the Ghost

Jukebox the Ghost are a couple of guys who met at GW and started a band that plays catchy, cute, keyboard driven songs with creative lyrics ("The sun is just a supernova turned the other way around"). I saw them at Chums (the venue at my school) last night, and their stage presence was so energetic and playful, I almost felt bad for their headliner, Say Hi, who couldn't capture the "crowd's" (aka 20 people) attention nearly as well.

They have a comedic song about the apocalypse, and several songs involving handclaps. How could I resist?

Get their music before you hear it blasting out of the nearest Urban Outfitters.

Sounds like: Pale Young Gentlemen, Born Ruffians, Vampire Weekend

Noah and the Whale Interview

I knew I would love British band Noah and the Whale from the very first verse of the first song on their new album, Peaceful, the World Lays Me Down, which was just released in August. Their catchy folk-pop is exactly what I love, and lyrics like:

"Last night, I had a dream
We were inseparably entwined
Like a piece of rope made out of two pieces of vine
Held together, holding each other
With no one else in mind
Like two atoms in a molecule
Inseparably combined"

make the lyrically obsessed fangirl inside me nearly cry with happiness. Noah and the Whale are a fun and clever band with unmeasurable potential. I would recommend them to anyone who enjoys love, The Lucksmiths, color coordinated outfits and/or joy. I was able to have a brief phone interview with Noah and the Whale's Charlie Fink yesterday thanks to my new amazing friends at WBRS (thank you so much to Andrea Fineman)!

Noah and the Whale's US tour starts next week, I advise you to check it out.

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In several interviews with you that I’ve read, you seem to take offense to being labeled as twee. Do see twee is a negative term?

I do think it can be a detrimental term, I don’t think it has to be, and if that’s something you aspire to then maybe it’s not. I just don’t think it’s true [about our music] and in terms of what we are trying to do perhaps it does slightly undermine it. In England now that comes up less and less and I think people have got their heads around it now just about.

What is your songwriting process like?

Usually I write the songs and then I bring them in and sort of when I bring it into the studio is when it comes out, and kind of evolves, you know? So it’s a staggered process perhaps.

So is the songwriting mainly your responsibility or do you start with an idea and then the rest of the band helps out?

No, it’ll come in fully formed, but it will develop.

How did you get involved with the Take Away Shows?

I’m not really sure actually. We sort of bizarrely met them for the first time at South by Southwest, and they did some filming around us, which I’m not sure has come out yet. Then they sort of invited us to come to Paris and do some filming while we were out there. It’s amazing, we just think that they are like, the best thing. It’s incredible the films they make, we love it.

How did you feel about that experience?

It was honestly one of the most fun experiences of my life, doing that filming, it was great.

I noticed your take away show was a lot longer than many others I have seen, which was cool.

Yeah, they told us we’re the only band they have ever filmed twice, which was pretty exciting.

On one of your takeaway shows there is a brief clip of you playing the song Black Cab by Jens Lekman. What do you like about his music? Is Jens an influential songwriter for you?

Yeah, definitely, I think when I first started writing out the songs we were going to play he was a big influence. I think that album [Oh You’re So Silent Jens] is just a phenomenal album. I could tell you specifically what I like about it… his lyrics remind me of Jonathan Richman, they both can be quite funny and poignant at the same time.

Obviously when you do things like the Take Away Shows, it’s in a very intimate setting, and it seems you work well as a band in that setting… but do you prefer playing shows like that or do you more enjoy the festival-type experience of larger shows?

I personally prefer the more intimate shows. But obviously it’s just a different thing, right now in England we’re starting to get dragged out to play for bigger crowds or whatever. I saw Bonnie “Prince” Billy play at a 3,000 capacity venue in London and he manages to make that venue feel like he’s playing to 300 people. I think everything is what you make of it. I think it’s more in how you approach it. I think honestly there are some challenges to playing both, they have different limitations.

Your song 5 Years Time has gotten a lot of airplay and popularity in the UK, but in the US most people still haven’t heard of you… this seems like a common phenomenon. Do you have any ideas about why the culture in the UK is more accepting of a wider variety of music?

I wouldn’t say that in England there is a bigger acceptance of a wider variety of music… I think where we sit on the charts or the radio or whatever, the bands we sit next to aren’t really anything like us. I don’t know, I think it’s the same, I think there are some great bands that get only sparse coverage and a sparse fan base, I think it’s just like your artists, but I’m not really sure. I guess the one difference is that radio is a bit more diverse and a bit more powerful in England than in America. I think that getting on the radio here is a bigger deal.

Yeah, definitely, whereas here it’s becoming increasingly unpopular to listen to the radio.

Yeah, and from what I understand it’s only a small selection of bands that get played on the radio [in America].

What artist would you love to play a show with? Why?

Uh, tough one. I mean obviously Bonnie “Prince” Billy would be good, wow, that’d be unbelievable, quite tough though, I mean if they didn’t like you, what would you do? Maybe if we could get Neutral Milk Hotel to reform and play a gig…

What is the favorite show of the ones you’ve played so far?

Some of the festivals this summer have been really special. I think for me one of the best gigs I’ve ever done was this gig we played in London at this venue called Bush Hall, which is only 300 capacity, and at the time we’d never brought in a big crowd, just for us, you know? And it was almost Christmas, and it was just amazing, it was just really special, you know like seeing your music connect with people for the first time, properly, that was a very special gig.

What kind of music did you grow up listening to? How did you get into playing music?

Well I guess my mom used to play a mixture in the car, between pop and folk, so it would be like Buddy Holly, The Beach Boys and Dylan. I think when you take them out it’s like the instant hook of the melodies of The Beach Boys and Buddy Holly, and the rhythm when you are a kid. And I think that Dylan has the melodies that even when you are a kid you can appreciate, but honestly, the lyrics didn’t really have the same effect back then. But I think from that came some kind of like accessible rhythm and melody that is in our music


What direction are you going to go in for your second album (musically)? Will it be a departure from the style of the first?

It’s pretty different; I mean it’s hard to tell now. I mean the funny thing is when bands go in a different direction often the songs aren’t that different, the melodies aren’t that different, they’re just playing around with soundboard or whatever. The funny thing about Dylan going electric is that a lot of it was just his acoustic songs readapted, like Baby Let Me Follow You Down and stuff like that. So I think we did play around with sounds we haven’t used yet, and the lyrics are a lot more personal, the first album is quite broad. It doesn’t feel unnatural, and it feels like a pretty straightforward move for us, but it’s definitely different.

Ok, well thank you so much, I’ll see you at your show in Boston!

Brilliant, looking forward to it.

Interview: Le Loup (4.5.08)

Last year, Le Loup released their debut The Throne Of The Third Heaven Of The Nations' Millennium General Assembly, one of 2007’s criminally underappreciated albums. The band’s frontman, Sam Sitkoff, wrote it long before he had a band, not knowing it would become a public work.

Since then, Le Loup has become known for their bombastic live performances and incredible energyy. Before the band’s show in San Francisco on April 4, I sat down with Sam and discovered a great deal about the story behind his project’s unusually cohesive album.

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The album’s very long title shares its name with a piece of art in DC (where Le Loup is based). What is that piece of art, and why did you choose it as the album’s namesake?

It’s a piece of art by a man named James Hampton who never really intended it to be a piece of art. He was a janitor, and he would collect bits of trash and broken furniture and take them back to his garage. He would spend all night covering them in gold tin foil and assembled them into a very delicate shrine. At the end it was over 140 pieces. He died before he finished it, but it was intended to be a testament to the return of Christ to earth.

There’s a piece of it in the National Portrait Gallery in DC and it was first thing I saw when I went there. To me it was the most compelling piece in the museum, especially because it’s part of a beautiful kind of story. This man was buoyed by his faith and worked tirelessly for fourteen years until he died. It was a complete labor of love, but there was a very fine line between his artistic genius and flat-out insanity. On a very simple level, I could really relate to what he’d made because when I started the album, I wasn’t expecting it to become a big thing. It was pure luck that someone noticed it. And I was making it from things I found-instruments that were lying around and my computer and some other stuff. It was personal and something I’d made for myself.

The band was initially just you. How did you form a recording and touring group?

Well at the beginning it really was just me and my best friend. I would come up with songs on my computer and then send them to him over email. I wasn’t planning on making anything of it. I put it up on MySpace on a whim one day and it got a really good reception-the people from Hardly Art and Sub Pop contacted me, at which point I realized I wouldn’t get any farther if I didn’t have a live show.

I put up a Craigslist ad. All it said was that I was looking for a band and I needed it fast. A bunch of people showed up to the first audition, and by audition I mean “Come into my living room and talk about shit.” Those are the same people who are now in the band. We had about two months of practice until we realized we needed a bassist and a drummer, so we sent out another ad. A month later we had our first show and two weeks after that show, Hardly Art signed us.

Bigger bands seem to be more numerous these days. What do you like about having a large group?

It’s very much about theatricality. A live show should be visually arresting and overblown; that’s why you go and see music. When bands just sit there and play what’s on the album, I’m left feeling that I could have stayed home listening to their record and felt just as satisfied. Being up on a stage is theater, and I think I should act like it. So getting that many people on stage is a very easy, kind of quick and dirty way of achieving kinetic energy and making it captivating.

The other element is that the album was super-layered. Every song had thirty or forty tracks. I knew that if I wanted any sort of fidelity to the original music in the live show, I would need a bunch of people. Originally I wanted fifteen people but seven people showed up initially, and it turns out that organizing practices for seven people is about as much stress as I can handle. I would not wish a fifteen-person band on anyone.

One thing that’s very evident on the album is a theme of apocalypse. Where did that come from?

It’s funny because I didn’t even intend for that to happen and still, to a certain extent, I don’t see it as much as other people do. There are definitely a few songs where it’s apparent, the most obvious being “Outside of This Car, the End of the World.” That song is actually based on a very simple experience I had driving through this really industrial town late at night and feeling kind of alone. It wasn’t supposed to be a very literal translation of the world ending, so much as an interpretation of something I saw.

Those themes do crop up, though, and it’s due in a large part to how personal the album is. I was dealing with a huge transition – getting out of college and into the real world – and not really knowing what to do or where to go. So my way of dealing with it was blowing it out of proportion in my head and hyperbolizing it. The music was my way of turning it into a form I could handle.

Another things about the album that’s very apparent is how cohesive it is, both lyrically and in how the songs are ordered. Was that intentional?

Most of the songs were written spontaneously-I’d feel the need to write something and it would just come out. Once it became clear that it was actually going to be an album I got more deliberate about bringing back themes and variations. A few musical and lyrical phrases come up throughout the album. It’s mainly because I think an album ought to be more than a collection of songs, even if they’re really good songs. It needs to be a cohesive unit. My favorite albums are the ones that bring back certain ideas and play around with them a little.

What are some of the albums you think fall into that category?

Smile by Brian Wilson is one of the main ones for me. Yellow House by Grizzly Bear. Pretty much everything Sufjan Stevens does. Animal Collective is probably the band that most consistently impresses me in that way. And of course In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.

Do you look to take inspiration from that music?

I try not to. When I was younger, there were times when I would hear an album and I’d say “I want to make something that sounds exactly like that.” But then I realized that you can’t be creative with that attitude because it invariably ends up sounding like a crappy version of the original album-at best. At worst it just sounds like shit. But I can’t say that I don’t draw from that, everybody does. I try to keep an objective stance. Listen to it, love it, but try your damndest to go your own way. That ends up being a lot more validating. Unfortunately I can never hope to be as weird as Animal Collective. But that would be so awesome. It would probably take pounds and pounds of mushrooms and constantly talking to God.

Are you classically trained in music, or has it mostly been something you do for yourself?

I studied classical piano for thirteen years, but I don’t play it much onstage because I like to be mobile when I’m performing. I spazz out and jump around, which is impossible to do if I’m stuck behind a keyboard. Instead I sing and I play banjo very poorly.

Do you use your classical training consciously when you’re writing music?

I can’t really escape my training, so I still approach music the way I was taught. But I also haven’t practiced piano or read music or had lessons for seven or eight years, so I’ve been able to get away from the classical approach a little. It helps when I’m writing songs on instruments I’m unfamiliar with.

So you write all the parts for the songs.

For the album, I wrote all the parts because I had most of the songs already finished. But with the new stuff, the process is more collaborative. What I’ll do now is take a very rudimentary skeleton of the song to our practice and I won’t give much direction. The band messes around for a while with rhythms and atmospheres and we see where it goes. It’s a lot more spontaneous.

How’s the news stuff coming along?

Very slowly. We quit our day jobs to go on tour, which feels great. You should try it sometime.

Unfortunately, right now I don’t have a day job to quit!

Oh! Well, then what you should do is get a day job and then quit the next day just to know how it feels. It’s amazing. Going on tour, we get to see all these amazing places and meet new people. It was also nice to play in Portland, which is where I grew up. But…what were we talking about?

The new stuff, quitting day jobs..

Right. For now we’re musicians, which is an impressive way of saying we’re completely unemployed and kinda broke. I guess it’s a little rough. But I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Interview: Holy Fuck (3.1.08)

It’s unfortunate that people can’t seem to get past Holy Fuck’s name. If they learned to, they would find a band that makes great electronic music without the use of electronics. Keeping it old school is one of the many things Holy Fuck are good at. They’re also good at what they do-music-as well as being great friends and generally cool dudes.

After the band’s show at Bottom of the Hill on February 29 for Noise Pop, the four members (Graham, Brian, Matt, Brad) and I trekked upstairs to the green room and talked about a great variety of the things that keep the band going. Among them are friendship, spontaneity, and what they claim is the ultimate wonder food: pita and hummus.

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You guys have so much energy on stage. How are you not dead by now after touring for so long?

Brian: Nachos, hummus. Hummus is the wonder food of the world. If we didn’t have hummus on this tour we wouldn’t get this far. Actually I have some on my table.
Graham: That’s the best thing about playing with tables. I used to play guitar, but with tables, you can keep a lot of stuff up there. Pencil holder, stapler-Brian’s doing his taxes up there. Actually, we’re playing a really long game of risk. Travel risk-you can get it.
Brian: I think we should bring Battleship up there. We can have the audience help us by yelling out positions.

How long did it take to get the chops down to improvise onstage?

Graham: This far? Three years. But it’s still a challenge every time. Tonight was pretty good, but I screwed up one song because my keyboard wasn’t in tune. I thought you were playing this note (makes gesture of fingers on fret board) as the root, but you were actually playing this one. So I got all messed up. I made it up.
Brian: Well, three years in and we still don’t know what key some of our songs are in.
Graham: You still don’t even know what the root note is.
Brian: I don’t know what a root note is at all.
Graham: It’s part of a plant. A musical plant.

So you do go onstage planning to work off specific songs.

Brian: Yeah. We’ve been doing that setlist long enough now that we need to start changing it up. But inevitably we’ll have to switch it up drastically which will make it worse because our drummer Brad - who is running around right now totally liquored up- that was his last show with us this tour and for the rest we have a new drummer. Our relief pitcher, Matt Schultz is coming in tomorrow.
Graham: This is where I should use some horrible metaphor about the “spice of life” or the “rich tapestry of colors” It’s going to be really weird because we play tomorrow with a different drummer.
Brian: Yeah, and we have a brand-new setlist. We’re going to have to make it interesting to cover up the fact that we’ll be screwing up a lot. Graham’s going to do some juggling, and our sound guy can play some surf music. Matt’s going to be like “I leave for six months and this is what happens?”

You must have to practice a lot, then.

Brian: Never.

So your practice is on stage?

Graham: We don’t have time to practice any other way.
Brian: Much to our chagrin. We’re so busy. I’ve got tons of dinner dates…
Matt: Brian actually has no dates.
Graham: Seriously, though, if we practiced it would suck. We would be boring. It would be frustrating, too-we would nail something totally cool during practice, but no one would hear it besides us.
Brian: We never want to have too much fun just making music with each other because the audience isn’t there to enjoy it. We don’t want to have too much fun playing for each other.

There were a lot of cameras tonight. Is the band producing a DVD or something?

Brian: No, that happens everywhere we go. (Long pause)
Entire band: Uproarious laughter.
Graham: We wish that happened to us! Maybe one day. For now, the marquees can wait.

When I saw you open for Wolf Parade last September, I remember Hadji (of Wolf Parade) came onstage and played with you guys. That seems to happen a lot, the band’s members changing-what do you like about it?

Brian: We like it a lot because we get a chance to work with some great musicians. The weird thing is that we haven’t yet gotten A Place to Bury Strangers to play with us yet. When we started “Lovely Allen” I was looking for James (of APTBS, who opened at the show)
Graham: I think the other thing is that if we didn’t get new faces constantly we might get kind of self-indulgent. There will be plenty of time for that later.
Brian: Hopefully our new drummer will help us prevent that, though we’ve got a lot of this tour left. I keep telling myself “May’s almost here” but it never is. So far away…

You’re going to need a lot of pita and hummus then.

Brian: Yeah, maybe a hummus gun. Our sound guy will stand at the edge of the stage and since we can’t really grab anything ourselves he’ll just shoot hummus at us.
Graham: But then we’d need something to catch it with-a pita hat. I think we should make those.

Are you looking forward to the rest of the tour?

Brian: Well, I guess. It’s been pretty good so far but when we went to Mexico I got bitten by a bunch of spiders. Or maybe it was just one living in my mattress. Hopefully that kind of thing won’t happen again.
Matt: We went to great lengths to preserve our safety on this tour. A lot of it involved complicated putting on and taking off of snow tires.
Brian: Actually I’ve got a cold right now. It’s gone through the entire band and I’m the last one. Maybe I got it from the candy Graham gave me the other day. I think they might have actually had flu in them. Little jelly candies filled with disease. We should call them FluJubes.
Graham: Yeah! Mucus-filled FluJubes. People would buy those, right?
Matt: Aw, Graham! That was unnecessary. Let’s never make those.

It's been a long time, long time now....

I have decided to try to save this blog from becoming completely obsolete.

SO. Orders of business:

1. Muxtape is a pretty sweet site. Mine is here. Most of my recent favorite artists are up there.

2. More people should listen to/go see The Ditty Bops. Why they are not much more famous is one of life's great mysteries. Same with Jeffrey Lewis (track on my Muxtape).

3. Spring is the best time for listening to indie pop. Not that there is a bad time to listen to indie pop. Favorites at the moment are: The Lucksmiths (I cannot emphasize this enough), Vampire Weekend, Club 8, and Los Campesinos!

4.

Interview: YACHT (1.16.07)

Jona Bechtolt, aka YACHT, doesn’t like getting pegged as one thing or another. He’s a musician, a photographer, a general tech whiz, and much more. His last album, 2007’s I Believe In You. Your Magic Is Real. concerns everyday life, how we’re only human and at the same time have incredible potential. But that’s only one definition, and he’d prefer to keep things open to interpretation.

Jona is currently on a break from YACHT’s motto of “On Tour Forever,” working on projects in a supernatural town in Texas with his friend and his girlfriend. We spoke over the phone about magic, his live shows, and his super-chill vibe. In the process, we struck upon a genius idea for a TV franchise.
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So you’re in Texas right now. What are you doing there?

On my last tour, these kids in Austin were like “You have to go to this place, Marfa, on your way through Texas.” They told me about this thing called the Marfa Lights, which is a supernatural phenomenon. They’re not like the Northern Lights-they’re completely unexplained. Basically it’s these weird lights that float around and look like they have life to them. It happens every night. We’re supposed to go out tonight and see them.

This town is in the middle of nowhere. Last night we actually had to knock on the window of a motel to get a room, and this woman – the owner of the motel – came out in her nightie. She seemed a little upset, but sort of happy that there was business. It’s a completely weird, surreal place. I’ve never been to a place like this before.

Me and my friend and my girlfriend [voices in the background]-oh well actually they just came back from Alpine, the next small town over -hey, I’m doing a phone interview right now! Anyways, we’re doing this project together that’s really exciting-

Jona’s girlfriend Claire: What are you doing? Stop!
Jona: I can’t tell her?
Claire: No!
Jona: Well, soon enough then. Hopefully we’re going to launch it tonight, but I can’t tell you now I guess. [Note: they did launch it, and it’s here .]We’re out here working, both together and independently. Claire’s writing for a new science show on the Sundance channel. I decided that I want to make two new records. I bought a drum set and a Kurt Cobain-y guitar and started recording. I’m thinking that one of my albums will be shorter than the other, like an EP. Albums are sort of dead anyways.

Listening to the last album a lot, it sounds like you have a lot of faith in people to make the right decisions. Is that something that you hoped people would take away from it?

I didn’t want to set up and right and wrong choices, but instead leave it kind of open to interpretation for people. It’s just my vibe, I’m super-positive and non-judgmental.

The song “It’s Coming to Get You” is so much more negative than the rest of the album.

Well, there was something really specific that inspired that, but I probably can’t talk about it in a public setting. It just came from…{a personal experience}… that didn’t work out the way I wanted it to. The song is actually about karma-that’s the “it” that’s coming to get you. I felt like it was OK to let dark things out in addition to the positive things, with the positive spin of it being karmic. I wanted to focus on it being OK for bad things to happen to people if those are things that are coming back and biting them in the ass.

And it also works really well that it’s a dance song-I didn’t notice what it was about until a couple listens in.

Yeah, I thought that it would be more fitting if the package that the negative message came in was pretty and sweet and easy to dance to.

The theme that pervades the album is magic. What kind of magic are you talking about?

It’s all different kinds of magic, open to interpretation. When the record first came out and we were fooling around with the imagery associated with it, I got really into researching magic. I watched DVDs about its history and went to some magic shops. But overall magic as an art form these days is pretty boring.

I did find a couple little cute things, though, that I used as a “one time only” trick in a couple of my shows. There were these confetti-type things that you conceal in your hand, and when you make a gesture that’s like throwing a ball, they shoot out of your hands and look like paper lightning. They were kind of expensive, though, so I only bought one set of ten. I figured it was pretty wasteful and kind of stupid. I don’t want people to think “That’s the guy that’s all about magic!” and be stuck forever in that persona and die after a lonely life. [Note: At this point it was very difficult for me not to make some sort of joke about GOB of Arrested Development.]

I run into the same problem with YACHT being the name of the band. I have to be really careful not to wear funny captain’s hats or sailor uniforms or anything. I have a couple things with nautical embroidery, and I almost feel like that’s pushing it. I try not to wear it too often.

But didn’t you play a show on a yacht once?

It was for the release of the album. It ended up being one of the best experiences of my life as far as shows go. People were just ready to do whatever; we weren’t in the stereotypical rock show setting where I have to be worried about looking cool or think about the super-high stage and the lights. It was mellow but totally crazy. And we were on a boat on a river. I just like to do anything that gets people out of the groove of how you have to act at a show. I want to make it easier on people.

When I saw one of your shows you came out into the audience for a bunch of songs and started a dance contest. That was a nice break as an audience member.

That’s exactly what I like to do, shake things up a little. I’ve been playing around with a couple of ideas for shows that I want to do this year. I’ve been really focusing on coming up with really different kinds of tours. Nothing is solid yet, so I won’t go into detail, but I’m working on making it better. I’m never satisfied with anything – recordings, shows, anything. I never want to do things the same way twice.

Like you were saying earlier about not wanting to get stuck in one thing.

Exactly. If I’m associated with anything, I want it to be fun stuff. That’s it.

Speaking of fun stuff, do you still have that penny suit from the [“See A Penny, Pick It Up”] video?

Actually I don’t! The guy who made it does. His name’s Matt McCormick, he lives in Portland. He likes to bring is friends in when he’s making stuff, and he brought in this guy who’s a set designer for big movies. The guy was really into the song, so he spent two days making that giant penny outfit. It had a whole wooden frame and a backpack frame attached to the wood. It was really heavy – I think 65 pounds. It was a huge chore to do all that running around, especially because I couldn’t really move my legs. I had to hop everywhere.

I thought it was funny how there are all these people walking around who are totally unfazed by you running around in this penny costume.

Well we shot it really early in the morning. I think it was on a Sunday, because there were people coming out of a church. They didn’t seemed to be super stoked about it.

I read that you’re writing a book to be published this year – a sci-fi novel with aliens and stuff.

Wow! I have no idea what that is! You’ll have to send me a link to it.

I will! But maybe there’s a doppelganger Jona Bechtolt who’s a sci-fi author.

I don’t think so, but we should totally perpetuate that rumor. Say something about how I’m writing a book about the Marfa lights and aliens.

And Claire could write a TV version, and it could have crazy spinoffs like “Law & Order.”

Yeah, CSI: Marfa! We’ve got gold on our hands here. Let’s do it!

More new music from Fishbear!

I promise not every blog here will be about my brother! However, the band Fishbear (for which he plays drums, keyboard and does vocals) have just recorded a few songs. I'd descibe their general style as a ska version of Beirut, but they play a wide variety of styles (and have even been known to break out the Pokemon theme song on occasion). The new songs are up on their myspace, and they all sound really great! I'd reccomend the awesomely funky Helsinky Slinky, on which my brother sings vocals, to start out with. Arabian Dance Party is also really fun and definitely has a major klezmer feel to it. Go listen and friend them! If you live around here you should try to make it to one of their shows, they are pretty fun, and this is coming from someone who has (not entirely by choice) seen at least ten of them.

Here is a really shitty video of a recent gig of theirs that I took on my phone. This song is pretty sweet.