MUSIC: An evening with Geordie Greep

Description

An evening with Geordie Greep Tuesday, September 23 Doors 7pm / Show 8pm $22 Members / $25 General Admission Advance / $30 GA Day of Show (plus fees) All ages / Standing --

Is The New Sound a tonic for these times? Let’s ask Geordie Greep. “Music can be so much more than learning to play the same as everybody else. It can be anything you want. With recording The New Sound, it was the first time I have had no one to answer to. Being in a band (black midi), we often have this ‘we can do everything’ feeling, but you are also kind of limited in that approach, and sometimes it’s good to do something else, to let go of things.” Geordie’s debut solo album boasts a brand of high quality, all-embracing alternative pop fun not heard in a very long time, walking the line between the ridiculous and brilliant with a teflon-coated aplomb. How the record came about is a thing to marvel at.

Over thirty session musicians were involved in its making, on two continents. Greep says, “Half of the tracks were done in Brazil, with local musicians pulled together at the last minute. They’d never heard anything I’d done before, they were just interested in the demos I’d made. The tracking was all done in one, maybe two days.” The spirit of Greep’s increasingly febrile and furtive soliloquies simultaneously calls to mind both Frank Zappa and Frank Sinatra, with a healthy dash of Scott Walker sprinkled throughout. The instrumental title track is a jazz-funk workout that could double as a soundtrack for a TV series or the intro music for a Broadway musical. Brass, wah-wah pedal and bass stabs, choruses and polyrhythms, all fizz and tumble around the place creating a sense of excitement and expectation. Tracks often oscillate from whispers to shouts, and start and end on a bang.