Pocket Dwellers w/ Slaves of Spanky - Thursday in Kingston!

[skelter]

This Thursday, January 19 at Elixir (14 Garrett Street) - Pocket Dwellers with special guests Slaves of Spanky! Tickets $10 available now at Zap Records, Brian's Record Option, Destinations, Chumleighs, Renaissance, Elixir and online at www.rockcrew.ca

And don't let anyone tell you differently, Pocket Dwellers are a fuckin SICK live band, as are Slaves of Spanky, so missing this show would be tomfoolery.

If there is one item to avoid asking the Pocket Dwellers about, it's their biography. The band are frankly, tired of looking at it and done talking about it. Draft after draft is passed around seven strong collective. The calmly mannered, evenly dispositioned crew search for words they feel accurately reflect the intentions of the band and not just try to fill a page with empty semantics. The Pocket Dwellers always have something on their minds, always have something new to say. They move too fast to be trapped by the words of the past.

In anticipation of the release of latest installment in the Pocket Dwellers journey, ‘PD-ATRICS.’ a joint label venture between Blue Note/EMI Music Canada, Dennis 'DEkNOW' Passley Jr, offered; "The band is comprised of seven equal parts, we all contribute to the writing and the running of the band. This past year was all spent writing and recording ‘PD-ATRICS’ with the notion that we had to make a record that nobody thought we were capable of making." When the group, comprised of NiGel (MC/vocals), Sheldon Moore (DJ), Dennis Passley Jr. (tenor sax), Christian Mckibbon (guitar), Johnny Griffith (alto/soprano sax), Gordon Shields (bass), and Marco Raposo (drums) - started working on ‘PD-ATRICS’ in 2002, the guys had a game plan to "refine the music" so more people could get into it. "It was a goal of ours to make sure that we could appeal to the common denominator," says Dennis. "In the past, what we basically focused on was making sure our live show as tight and then we just took that and translated it to our record," adds NiGel. Self-produced by the Pocket Dwellers at their own studio, and engineered by Sheldon, who also came up with the album title, the clever play-on-words, ‘PD-ATRICS’. "Coming from one place and going somewhere else and the idea that there was a rebirth in the band of how we conceived and how we put our game plan together," says Marco. "The tie with ‘PD-ATRICS’ allows us to bring people up with our new sound," expands NiGel, "so we're nurturing people on the new Pocket Dwellers."

In early 2000 the band began shaping their second album, Digitally Organic and recruited multi-Juno award winning Michael Phillip Wojewoda (Barenaked Ladies, Rheostatics) on production detail. It was a cohesive meld of the bands varied influences and was infused with at times opposite yet easily co-existing musical approaches. It has become the norm for the band to consistently test and push beyond any set musical boundaries. With hundreds of performances across Canada under their belt, these guys know they can entertain any audience. The Pocket Dwellers have opened for a very wide range of different musical acts, including such notable performers as Maceo Parker, Kardinal Offishall, The Roots, Fishbone and jazz great Charlie Hunter. They have also performed at a broad range of festivals around the world, including The Montreux Jazz Festival. Pocket Dwellers will continue to tour extensively in the coming year to support their new record. The lead single and video, from ‘PD-ATRICS’, "Trust Us," is strongly anti-establishment, and socially aware, both visually and in lyrical content. "We're all in this together," NiGel explains further. "If we blow up the world, then we all get blown up. If some people are enslaved in the world, then we're all slightly enslaved. And whenever we're pointing the finger, we're still pointing the finger at us."

Marco takes the last word on the new album, "We didn't have to change what we were, to make PD-ATRICS, we just had to focus it. We went for a specific sound. For the most part it's more hip hop sounding then our other albums, but it still has that Pocket Dwellers way of including all styles. It represents our objective to continually blur the lines of music."

Slaves of Spanky are Kingston’s velcro shoe-wearing, shit-hot RAP jam superstars. MCs Chuck Badminton and Cap't Footbags wear fresh helmets and bust forth with lightnin' hot RAPS while the funk is brought by Suganutz (Rhodes, synth, Alphabet desk), Speedgrease (electric upright bass) and Marf (drums). The beats and grooves from the band keep the rumps shaking vigorously, but it's the MCs in the spotlight with a high-energy and goddamn hilarious performance that never ceases to be anything short of incomparably fun. Check out the pork-chop bling action and the rockin’ synchronized leg lifts in mid rap.

Chuck and Footbags started the SOS Crew as two rappers and a drum machine in the small but sexy town of Tamworth, Ontario in 1996. Realizing that digital gadgets (especially watches and computers) were on the way out, SOS became a live band, bringing in a local jazz/funk trio (Suganutz, Speedgrease, Marf) to supply the hot RAP rhythms. Now, it’s two MCs and a backing band of schooled funkateers fuelled on cheeseburgers and donuts, and Slaves of Spanky have become fresher than TV's McGyver at the peak of his short and lucrative career. DAMN.

www.pocketdwellers.com

www.slavesofspanky.com

www.elixirnightclub.com

www.cfrc.ca

www.rockcrew.ca

[Mavericks]

Friday January 20th, 2006

Pocket Dwellers

Camp Best Friends

@

Mavericks bar

www.mavericksbar.com

Doors at 8pm

19+show

221 Rideau St.

Ottawa, ON

613.562.3941