This week’s Listening Party focuses on DC-based punk/folk/other band Chain and The Gang. Listening Party is a curated weekly column promoting music discovery and encouraging concert-going. Featuring someone we’ve been jamming out to and whom we recommend to the masses, each Listening Party artist has an upcoming show the following week at a local NYC venue. Grab your headphones and read on.
WHO: Ian F Svenonius, Katie Alice Greer, Fiona Campell, Brett Lyman, Sarah Pedal, Brian Weber, Veronica Ortuño, Chris Sutton, Fred Thomas, Spencer Kelley, more.
WRITTEN & PRODUCED BY: Calvin Johnson
THEY SAY: “How do they describe their sound? Something they just found. They dug it up from the ground. Essential to that soil: guitar, drums, organ, saxophone and chants; paying off our collective debt to the universe.”
WE SAY: Ironic gutter punk meets 60’s folk riddled with ideology
FROM: Washington D.C.
ONLINE: https://krecs.com/artists/chain-and-the-gang/
Recent Work: 2012’s In Cool Blood
This band has a little something for everyone, if you like retro music that is. Their music captures the essence of a very strange party you might have stumbled upon in the late 1960s- wandering through folk influences to end up at a quintessential punk moment, turning an ear to hear bongos, sliding down a power pop riff laden with saxaphone to discover a Velvet Underground Cover band in the basement. They’re all over the place on the record and yet still ecstatically cognition of everything they do: “Depend on us for martial rhythms, minimal riffs with maximum fuzz, bass throbs, shrieks, shouts, mutters, and confessions, as well as bewitching call and response tunes to make any indentured work force proud.” One discernable conclusion about this band: they will make for a spirited live show. Tune in to their strange programming next Thursday at 285 Kent with Hunx & His Punx- tickets run $12.