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Animator John Dunn has made a wonderful 'video' animation for Need New Body's 'Pen', from the 'UFO' album. Click on the image left to view John's creation. |
Bam! Crash boom screeech! (Ting!) = Need New Body. Difficult to define and
eccentric to experience, this band is a phenomenon for your senses. For the sake
of your dancing shoes, for the love of explosive beats, and to remember why exactly
is it you love music, Need New Body is an important outfit for this day and age of
the musically redundant, mundane and regurgitated. The Philadelphia group, risen
from the ruins of cult art-rock band Bent Leg Fatima, makes deranged, ferociously
eclectic music where the wheels always seem about to come off. And that's meant
as a compliment. They're not just unpredictable there's an element of danger to
the band's experiments with genre and free noise.
Hand-picked by David Pajo of Slint to play at February’s All Tomorrows Parties
festival, and described by Vincent Gallo as “What !!! (chk chk chk) should have
done”, Need New Body’s debut UK tour
proved to be an un-missable experience. All being well, they'll be back over here again in
October, for a longer UK/European tour.
Zappa and Beefheart are almost inevitable as points of reference, because Need
New Body make music with a great deal of spontaneous humour and an almost
improvisational style, that seems to draw from vaudeville, free jazz, and various
ethnic sources, as much as it does the fundamental tenets of pop music. You can
also feel the heavy influence of the weird, hypnotic splice and drone of '70s
Krautrock throughout the band's songs. If all this genre-hopping and experimentation
sounds overwhelming and pretentious to you, well, you've just got to hear it to
understand that it's not; somehow Need New Body manage to sound totally organic and
weirdly accessible.
Animator John Dunn has made a wonderful 'video' animation for Need New Body's 'Pen', from the 'UFO' album.
Click on the image left to view John's creation.
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'Where's Black Ben?' LP (Pickled Egg Records Egg 55LP) "Need New Body are all over the place. They are climbing out the windows of the high school cafeteria. Screaming from the rooftop of Philadelphia house parties, they are dancing wild and reckless. One thing is for certain: Need New Body want to have a good time. And not in a crass, I wanna-party-with-you sleazy scum of the earth sorta way, but in the ridiculous hair, art school dropout, drunk on a forty of malt liquor deal. From the artwork of their latest and wildest effort Where's Black Ben?, it's hard to know what to expect: after all, it's a hyper color and ghetto fabulous art collage featuring a band member sporting, of all things, a Goofy (yes, the Disney character) hat. I should have known from that little detail alone that I was in for a treat" [Advanced Alternative Media] Philadelphia's Need New Body are masters of fractured and unbridled brilliance. They make music that is held together with layered organ sounds, vintage synth bits, insane and bizarre lyrics, dance beats, and pop delights. Their third full length runs the musical gamut from folkie little ditties like "Poppa B" and "Pervudia", to wild and frenzied numbers like "Brite Tha' Day." There are snatches of noise, ruckus and recklessness, and other times the sounds are delightfully poppy in their free form pastiche. There are extended jams with sing a longs as well as two minute hyper spazzy freakouts. One highlight is an ode to Philadephia's South Street with horns and party time lyrics about the record stores and antique shops of this famous street. The common thread of this band is an appreciation of experimentation, of letting loose, getting down, and going wherever the road may lead them. It's done proud, freak flag high, eccentricities for all to see, and chock full of enthusiasm. 'Totally Pos Paas' (MP3) 'Outer Space' (MP3) 'So St Rx' (MP3) 'Eskimo' (MP3) Listen to Where's Black Ben? on Last.fm |
UK: £15.00
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'UFO' CD (Pickled Egg Records Egg 48CD) "This Philadelphia sextet rise thorned mad and glowing from the cold dead ashes of Bent Leg Fatima. Delivering their 2nd full-length album of enthused schizophrenic invention and anarchy. These guys are so off the rail, they make Sun City Girls seem one dimensional by comparison. Safe to say, they (and many others) would not sound like this had Captain Beefheart or Faust (for instance) not existed, but they are also informed by so much more that they remain beyond description, and wholly breathtakingly engaging" [George Parsons, Dream Magazine] 'Show Me Your Heart' (MP3) 'Hot Stuff' (MP3) 'Popfest' (MP3) |
UK: £10.00
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'UFO' LP (Pickled Egg Records Egg 48LP) Vinyl LP has now SOLD OUT. "Need New Body have been strutting their disco-punk-cum-Beefheart-nonsense for a few years now, and this is their second LP, following 2001’s self titled debut. Criticising what you don’t understand is tough, and that being the case I’m finding ‘UFO’ particularly hard to pin down. I could wax lyrical for days about all the little nuances to be found throughout these 23 tracks, including squealing delights like Tittie Pop (In Japan) and Make Gay Love Not War, and I could at least attempt to deconstruct the pop art-esque cover ‘til I was blue in the face through exhaustion, frustration, and simple lack of understanding. But I won’t. I can’t. I just can’t, for all my attempts, even begin to get a grip on this record – it’s all over the place! There’s a little vaudeville in there, smatterings of jazz, and a healthy dose of snotty punk. Drums are few and far between, but the rhythm never stops for a breath. Vocals are spluttered as much as they’re sung, and the whole experience is something akin to riding all the rides at Alton Towers at the same time. Backwards. Drunk. I’m quite up to speed on music, and this doesn’t sound like much of it. Sassy stuff indeed" [Mike Diver, Comes with a Smile] 'Show Me Your Heart' (MP3) 'Hot Stuff' (MP3) 'Popfest' (MP3) |
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'Need New Body' CD (Pickled Egg Records Egg 30CD) "From the ashes of Bent Leg Fatima comes Need New Body. Astonishing double album of space jazz / krautrock inventions. This 22 track CD is a vitally weird and engaging work. Tiny babies of Beefheart, Sun Ra and Sun City Girls, squealing in delight and doing mad Busby Berkeley choreography on a layer cake the size of a skyscraper" [George Parsons, Dream Magazine] '20$sh' (MP3) 'Tittie Pop' (MP3) 'Gamble On' (MP3) Listen to Need New Body on Last.fm |
UK: £10.00
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'Need New Body' double LP (Pickled Egg Records Egg 30LP) "You can forgive Need New Body the odd excursion into post-modern tomfoolery, because for the most part, their hour long debut is sublime tumbledown glitch jazz. NNB front like Tom Waits spoiling for a scrap, and lurch like Captain Beefheart off his head, but never let the plot get too far out of sight. Sure, there's free-jazz pomps and parps, sellotaped to clumsy electronic noise and abstract flashes of fuck-knows-what, but at heart is the belief that you can dance to this music. And you can dance to it, especially when the angles are less obtuse, and a groove grows from the flowing experimentalism" [Jimmy Possession, Sleazenation] '20$sh' (MP3) 'Tittie Pop' (MP3) 'Gamble On' (MP3) Listen to Need New Body on Last.fm |
UK: £17.00
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Icy Demons 'Fight Back' CD (Cloud Recordings) Icy Demons is a new band featuring bass player/producer Griffin Rodriquez (Bablicon, Need New Body), drummer Chris Powell (Need New Body), and Chicago instrumentalists Dave McDonnell (Bablicon), Dave Moyland & Matt Schneider. An epic journey into the nether regions of pop music, hallucinatory chamber jazz, and mid-70s German-style electronics, the rich / warm sound of the upright bass is perfectly captured within the exquisite orchestrations featuring layered woodwinds, occasional vocals, and complex percussion patterns. Pickled Egg have a limited number of these CDs for sale. The artwork includes a full-colour fold out poster. "Fight Back is one of the most astounding and creative discs of 2004, defying predictable structures, sounding effortlessly formless while meticulously constructing its own internal language. The mood is transcendentally psychedelic. The rhythms set the vibe, off-kilter and varying throughout. The music is intrinsically rhythmic - swinging, even - though it never merely grooves. There is always a sense of movement, of progression, of being led logically from one idea to the next, guiding the listener through some very mysterious sonic forest of wondrous exotica" [Jesse Jarnow, Signal to Noise] Temporarily out of stock. 'Icy Demons' (MP3) 'Bitter Moon' (MP3) |
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