WILD FLAG / PEGGY SUE
Wednesday 1st February, 2012
Electric Ballroom
184 Camden High Street, London, NW1 8QP
7pm / £13.50
Map /
Rockfeedback Concerts & DHP present...
The quartet has known one another for well over a decade as tour mates and band mates of varying proportions. If you draw a venn diagram illustrating the intersection of the various groups, Brownstein, Cole, Timony, and Weiss would all be in the same tiny spheres. Playing together felt almost inevitable.
Brownstein and Weiss were in Sleater-Kinney and toured with Timony's band Helium on numerous occasions. Brownstein and Timony collaborated in the late 1990's, on their project The Spells. They released one EP, The Age of Backwards, on K Records in 1999, and played a single live show in Olympia. Rebecca Cole's Portland-based band The Minders was a frequent opener for Sleater-Kinney. Weiss and Cole play together in the 1960's garage-rock cover band The Shadow Mortons.
After the fledgling quartet collaborated on an instrumental score for Lynn Hershman Leeson’s feminist artists documentary !Women Art Revolution!, the ease with which they worked together proved infectious. Further practices resulted in songs, and Wild Flag was formed. What is immediately apparent is the incredible energy of this band, their palpable joy at playing in a room together, and the pure inventive delight in the songwriting. This is music to put an extra spring in your step and to crack open your face with a smile a mile wide.
“there's plenty about watching Wild Flag that'll make your heart sing, Wild Flag are a fun, punked-up rock band from four people who are very, very good at playing in rock bands.” Pitchfork
Populated by images of clocks and calendars, maps, lists and unpacked boxes, Acrobats explores the beautiful but unsettling experience of the road. The combination of stasis and movement. The arbitrary measurements of time by which we are forced to acknowledge change and failure to change. Numbers take on meanings as words lose theirs. Miles, hours, years. Names and places.
Where their debut, Fossils and Other Phantoms was concerned with accepting and even embracing absences, Acrobats – as the title suggests - explores the momentum of human bodies - their forward movement. Bodies dance, hands move, voices are raised. Both musically and lyrically the album attempts a progression while never denying the past.
If being away from home brought them a new lyrical strength and coherence, spending so much time in just each other's company gave them a strong idea of the new sounds they wanted to find, too. Acrobats is a louder, bigger album, played with intent and even ferocity.
“Unique and magical” Artrocker
Tickets for this show are priced at £13.50 and are available from the following link: WeGotTickets
