Coming Soon...spiky Garage Rock From Japan!!

madouva

eX-Girl
(female Japanese 3-piece)
plus guests THE CHALETS, BOXES and A LAZARUS SOUL
Friday 12th July // Temple Bar Music Centre
Doors 7.30pm, adm €11.50 (inclusive of booking fee)

eX-girl (originally Kirilo (bass, vocals), Chihiro (guitar, vocals) and Fuzuki (drums)) formed in Japan in 1997. Staying true the punk rock rulebook, eX-girl - with no musical training - intensively toured the domestic underground scene. By 1998 they had not only attracted the adoration of a clued-in audience, but also the attentions of producer Hoppy Kamiyama (favourably compared to Brian Eno). Together they produced eX-girl’s first album release, Heppoco Pou . The album was the key that admitted them to A-listed airplay on American college radio stations. In its wake, eX-girl undertook an extensive tour of the U.S. Returning to Japan, the band maintained momentum and recorded both their second album Kero! Kero! Kero!, and the follow up acapella adventure Big When Far, Small When Close in 1999. Hoppy Kamiyama retained production responsibilities on both albums.

With eX-girl’s increasing exposure (via a frantic international tour schedule) the list of bands in their support reads like a who’s who of weird and wayward tune mongerers: Olivia Tremor Control, Gong, Kevin Haskins of Bauhaus, Love and Rockets and Gary Lucas (ex-Captain Beefheart). In particular, eX-girl were courted by Mike Patton (ex-Faith No More), and toured Europe supporting his pet project Fantomas and released their fourth offering Back to the Mono Kero on his Ipecac label in 2001.Chihiro departed eX-girl shortly after, with Keiko (formerly with Super Junky Monkey) assuming guitar playing duty. The band marked her arrival with their fifth long player Revenge of Kero Kero. Like other artists on the Ipecac label, eX-girl harbour no respect for musical genres. They playfully bridge the stripped-down sound of garage rock with sound collage and other avant-garde affections like choral chants and harmonious mouth music. Dipping their toes in the science fiction thematics of prog rock, eX-girl profess themselves as natives of the planet Kero Kero. During live performances, the frog like inhabitants manifest themselves to earth dwellers as super-distorted psyched-out punked-up bewigged dayglo go-go styled plastic princesses. Comparatively speaking eX-girl are the mock turtles in a musical soup containing such vegetables as Devo, Zappa, Melt Banana and Cornelius.

THE CHALETS
Shiny, brand-new band The Chalets are only six months old. Unfortunately, they only have a combined mental capacity of a child of the same age. Comprised of members of The Warlords of Pez, former members of Palomine and Baba Snooks, and some other talentless chancer, their aim was to create beautiful harmonies with shouty bits thrown in to stop them looking gay. Of course, they sound nothing like what they imagined, but what are you gonna do?

BOXES
Boxes: a band. Three of them. A spiky-headed one, a bald one and one with a beard. They play fast until their arms get sore and they laugh a bit when funny things happen. Think Big Black. Great men for the pints. Used to be in different bands when they were young. Now they’re ancient: doctors say they should keep going for the sake of the families. They will make a CD soon. We can all buy it and jump up and down on the beds. And Boxes can go off and do whatever they want to do, living happily ever after.

A LAZARUS SOUL
…are Brian Brannigan, Joe Wilson, Tony Hegarty and Fin O'leary. The brainchild of Brannigan, ALS take Brian's beautiful songs and make them even wider, bigger and brighter. Pure energy.