Results tagged “kulturshock”

Two reasons: Kultur Shock on Friday (with X-Ray Press and Orange Tulip Conspiracy, $10, 21+), Art Brut on Saturday (with Miike Snow and Black Nite Crash, $13, all ages). Local gypsy art punks Kultur Shock are releasing their fourth studio album this year, and are about to jet off on tour in Russia. They don't play Seattle all that often anymore, and they're an insanely wild live band, mixing Sabbath-style guitar riffs with Balkan trad, shredded violin solos competing with lead-singer Gino Yevdjevic's melismatic vocals. As for Art Brut, they were indie rock darlings a couple years ago after an amazing debut record, , recorded in beautiful Salem, Ore. and produced by the legendary Frank Black. Also, like Kultur Shock, Art Brut is a fantastic live band that gives it their all and is best seen in a club.

Last weekend, we were sitting at the bar at Solo (at 200 Roy St., where, coincidentally, Seattlest Happy Hour will be this Monday at 5 p.m.), talking with the owner, Val Kiossovski, who also happens to play guitar for Kultur Shock. We were drunkenly requesting a change in the music, and he obliged by putting on a record we've been listening to quite a lot lately: The Pains of Being Pure at Heart's self-titled debut.

Just a quick note--there's a couple concerts coming up in June that have got us excited, and tickets are on sale this week. Right now, you can buy tickets ($13) for Art Brut's Saturday, June 13 show at Neumo's (all-ages, bar w/ID).

Last Friday, before X-Ray Press took the stage at Chop Suey, we ran into an acquaintance who described them as "math rock, circa 1994." After their set, another friend described them as "intellectual" musicians. Both are fair assessments: we wouldn't credit it as "original," but "skillful"? Hell yeah. Jumping between jerky time signatures, with a jagged, frequently dissonant guitar opposite thundering bass-lines and fuzzy keyboard melodies, X-Ray Press got down old-skool Don Cab-style.

It's hard to believe, but the Dandy Warhols' sixth studio full-length (and the first on their own label) Earth To The Dandy Warhols will be out this August. The tongue-in-cheek Portland alt-rock band plays the Showbox SoDo tonight. Not sure if it would be a better or worse show if longtime frenemies Brian Jonestown Massacre crashed the gig.

Around the Seattlest newsroom, this contributor's distrust of :

We've already mentioned the lovely and talented Jesse Sykes appearing tonight at the Tractor with bandmate Phil Wandscher. Also tonight (and also in Ballard) is San Francisco's Citay at the Sunset. Think Sabbath and Zep meets the light pop touches of Big Star. Here's some footage of them from a previous visit to Seattle:

When the Crocodile Cafe abruptly closed down a month ago, we turned to a friend of ours looking for the inside scoop. Kultur Shock guitarist Val Kiossovski was bar manager down for quite a while (he's now running his own place in Lower Queen Anne, Solo, one of our favorite hangouts), so we figured if anyone knew, he would. Unfortunately, he was busy with problems of his own: rescheduling his band's show.

Last night at the Showbox, we were reminded of something Gino Srdjan Yevdjevic said in an interview with us last year: we don't remember the quote entirely, but it was something to the effect of characterizing "world music" as "shit." Not the music or the musicians, per se, but rather the genre, a peculiarly American way of pigeon-holing and marketing foreign music. Gino understood the process only too well: back in the 1980s, he was a glammy Duran Duran-esque pop singer in his native Yugoslavia. Only when war forced him to flee to the US in the 1990s did he become a "world musician," performing traditional Balkans music in restaurants for disinterested diners under the name Kultur Shock. While he admitted the original incarnation of Kultur Shock could have done well, it's easy to see why he rebelled against the entire world-music cachet by adding punk rock guitar to the line-up and starting to yuk it up as a sex-crazed Eastern European immigrant à la Steve Martin and Dan Ackroyd's "Wild and Crazy Guys."

The first time we saw Kultur Shock, they were opening for Gogol Bordello at Neumo's, and we have to admit, we'd never heard of them. It was an all-ages show, so we were drinking our fill in the Bad Juju lounge next door, until the insane sounds of the band dragged us away from our beers. Quickly we came to regret missing the first half of their set.

Maybe Seattle doesn’t have a river to dye green just for the occasion, but there are still scads of St. Patrick’s Day activities here in the Emerald City. We suppose you could go to the Seattle Center for the big celebration there, but most people would rather be out drinking, so for your Irish pub-crawling pleasure (cover charges as noted):