Lovers (PDX) w/Hold Me Luke Allen and Bad Backs

The Starry Plough Welcomes...

Electronic Post Punk, Synth-Driven Songcraft, and Gritty Early Rock and Roll with

HOLD ME LUKE ALLEN (http://www.holdmelukeallen.com/)

Some songs show a heavy 90’s influence (Slint and Rodan come to mind), yet display a revved up, electrified, and pulsing groove that drags listeners into the now. With cool stop/start arrangements, pounding beats, haunting vocal breaks, strange effects and disembodied voices, the most rock driven numbers hit the ear gauzy and dreamily washed out, a little bit shoegazey but still warm and dreampoppy. Other songs slant more to a post-punk sensibility with a more sensual & electronic disposition (the more emotional aspects of Le Tigre merged with the glacial elements of Blonde Redhead, perhaps). The range presented is connected through an undercurrent of seductive and catchy energy that caters to bedroom dancing with a lover or, when you’re both all danced out, the subsequent pillow talk.

LOVERS (Badman Recording Co. from Portland OR http://www.loversarelovers.com/)

Lovers (celebrated lyricist Berk, synth-programmer and performance artist Kerby Ferris, and 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, Starfucker) 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

and

BAD BACKS

San Francisco's BAD BACKS seem to have been born too late, being inspired more by the Rock N' Roll their parents were tuning into than their own generations. Their songs fit somewhere between Richie Valens' hooks and Link Wray's grit. Though nodding to the past they maintain a style all their own. No longer confined by the garage, BAD BACKS ride their own vibe.

9pm  // $8 // 21+