Bachelorette 1st Dec/Lovers 9th Dec Upstairs @ Whelans

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Details on upcoming Bachelorette & Lovers shows below. Cheers folks!

BACHELORETTE + guests
Thursday 1st Dec
Upstairs [at] Whelans
Tickets €8 on the door/€9 adv

Bachelorette is the solo recording and live performing project of Annabel Alpers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhMSDoXA7U4

Annabel is from New Zealand but currently based on the east coast of the USA. She cut her teeth in cult bands such as Christchurch’s psychedelic surf outfit Hawaii Five-O, Space Dust and the Hiss Explosion, then went on to complete post-graduate studies in computer-based composition at the Universities of Canterbury and Auckland in New Zealand. After her studies, Annabel returned to what she loved best – making psychedelic pop music – and Bachelorette appeared on the scene in 2005.

Her breathtaking live set developed around a ‘band’ of 3 old CRT monitors, which were borrowed from acquaintances or picked up from recycling stations and thrift stores in each town. On stage, the CRT ‘band’ simultaneously displayed waveform patterns and other synchronised visuals corresponding to separate recorded instruments, as Annabel sang and played along with them.

Though Bachelorette’s third full-length record was written on Earth – Oxford, UK; Tripoli, Libya; Millwood, VA – it is more at home gliding through surreal galaxies and swimming through a matrix of coolly illuminated neural networks. But these journeys are the same – both echo with an aching solitude, the conditions that Annabel Alpers needs to dream up her minimalist electro psych pop. And even when local sound waves enter her work – as cathedral chimes did in Oxford — they return in swathed in a lunar halo.

The album is epic from the beginning. Hovering over a fluttering blanket of voices, a ghostly vision of the future is distilled with the same seductive inevitability of a Greek oracle. Our destiny set, Bachelorette gestures toward an alien solar system. Here, some planets shimmer, shrouded in an emerald light, another finds a civilization forever in the trance of a gorgeous mechanical heartbreak. Still other planets are pummelled by asteroids of distorted sounds and dissonant, unmusical space trash.

Mixed by Nicholas Vernhes at Rare Book Room (Animal Collective, Beach House) in Brooklyn, these twelve tracks are built on minimal synth grooves, strummed guitar, innocent whistles wondering through cold hallways, and occasional accompaniment on drums. But all are guided by Bachelorette’s ethereal lead vocal. This album’s greatest triumph is that its abundant pop melodies displace any heroic presumption associated with such an ambitious journey. Whether wandering through your labyrinthine, echoing consciousness or embarking on an interstellar marathon, you’ll want to sing along.

Lovers + Guests
Friday 9th Dec
Upstairs [at] Whelans
€10

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0m-5k_7Dd4

Loud and proud, Portland, OR based Lovers is a band of emotional intensity and complexity. Their new album Dark Light begins with singer Carolyn Berk’s confession, “every time the music starts, I can feel my aching, shaking heart”, and from there, Lovers embark on a spiritual journey of inspired three-part harmonies, deep introspection, and next-wave humor. Since 2001 songwriter Carolyn Berk has established her unique voice as Lovers with four acclaimed, haunted and heart-broken previous albums.

Lovers (celebrated lyricist Berk, synth-programmer and performance artist Kerby Ferris, sequencer and percussionist Emily Kingan) craft an intimate portrait of female friendship, sexuality, and evolution as an infinite process. The three first encountered in 2002 after Berk’s near-fatal van explosion while on tour with an earlier incarnation of the band. Emily Kingan, then on tour with classic Portland feminist hardcore band The Haggard, invited Berk to join the bill. Ferris was their roadie. Years later, Kingan organized a meeting for her two friends and future band-mates in South America, where Berk was travelling and Ferris was living at the time, performing in various experimental electronic projects in São Paulo’s thriving music scene. The result was sisterly love at second site, and prophetic premonitions of the creative collaborations to come. Says Berk about Lovers presently: “We are like sisters. We are sisters.”

Dark Light, recorded at Portland’s beloved Type Foundry studio with Badman label owner Dylan Magierek (Mark Kozelek, Thao Nguyen & Portland Cello Project, Star****er) is the first for Berk, Ferris and Kingan together.

Says Portland’s Willamette Week, the new record marks “a change in Lovers philosophy that takes the band from being a singer-songwriter’s outlet to a full-on synth-driven pop group, and it does so masterfully.” The result is an expansive sonic landscape of colorful wonder and hope, and an interactive and engaging performance that strives to leave audiences inspired.

“Carolyn Berk’s songs are full of breathless melancholy and a sinking, infinite sadness. In them you hear hints of the circus-fuineral magic-realist run-on folk song of Neutral Milk Hotel, the dreamy twilight grandeur of Mazzy Star, Bright Eyes’ last-gasp soliloquies, and the ghost-haunted majesty of Magnetic Fields’ loneliest highways. But I’ll be damned if Berk isn’t a more entrancing spell-caster that any of them”. - The Boston Phoenix

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Bachelorette tomorrow night!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CE_2bJuSKbY