FRONTIER RUCKUS
Harmonic presents
FRONTIER RUCKUS
& very special guest:
Tickets on sale Monday Jan 21st priced €15 (including booking fee) from www.whelanslive.com, www.tickets.ie, www.ticketmaster.ie & Ticketmaster outlets nationwide. 0818 719 300 – Republic of Ireland customers 0844 277 4455 – Northern Ireland customers 00353 1 456 9569 – International customer
Welcome to Frontier Ruckus, world.
The band has played a thousand-some-odd shows in the past half-decade—across the States and Europe, as well as behind venues, after-hours, aside dumpsters till all requests have been met—but it is possible that this will be your first introduction.
http://www.pastemagazine.com/
Poised to release their third full-length record on January 29th, 2013 (US, Jan 28th ’13 EU), Frontier Ruckus’ Eternity of Dimming—is a 20-song double-album, roughly an hour-and-a-half in duration and over 5,500 words in lyrical length. A helluva time to enter their world, but you’re invited even if you’ve not previously wrapped yourself in the continents of The Orion Songbook (2008) or Deadmalls and Nightfalls (2010). Welcome to the expansive language of songwriter Matthew Milia. Welcome to a raw and unharnessed musicality. Welcome to the snowy television sets and plastic teenage trophies of suburban Detroit.
Eternity of Dimming, the closing chapter of their suburban memory landscape series, is the embodiment of real things, real objects—a realness full of sad gladness and expiration dates. A catalogue so thorough in its literary scope of brutally tender pathos—a candid opening-up of a bottomless domestic junk-drawer, without omission or censor.
The banjo on this record exists because David Jones’ dad bought him that very banjo and lessons when he was 11. The trumpet you hear, dented by Zach Nichols’ friend’s saxophone in junior high band. Snatched by Matthew’s father from a church going out of business,, now imprinting its weight into the living room carpeting where we once rug-burned and tickle-tortured with red faces, is the organ pulsing throughout. Ryan Etzcorn’s thunderous drumming was informed by quick tunes on glimmering punk rock cassette tapes of yore. The main guitar used to write these songs came out of a weed deal in the 70s. The specificity is endless and heartbreaking, right?
Ignoring the cliched trappings of antiqued rural fetish that seem to make tired the modern folk movement, and the urban love-fest which holds the majority of indie-culture enwrapped, Frontier Ruckus instead celebrates and insulates itself within a world that is obsessively suburban— childhoods realistic and recent enough to remain vividly smoldering with intense memory and graphic personal mythology. The world of oversized 90s obsolescence, pinning down weighty love and familial weirdness—elephantine copy machines in the home offices of the briefly affluent parents of grade-school friends, VHS cassettes rotting sun-bleached on early bedroom shelves, tragic birthday parties, aggressive soccer coaches, grandmothers’ oxygen tanks and daytime-TV-time crosswords, porn stashes found behind Taco Bells.
Eternity of Dimming is not of the world that now contains paper-thin computers and full-length records clocking in at 25 minutes. This is the gorgeous and inevitable disintegration of all that we once knew ourselves by, blurring into the graininess of gradual dusk. This is the Eternity of Dimming.
TICKETS
€15 available online from WAV Tickets [Lo-Call 1890 200 078] (50c per ticket service charge applies on phone or creditcard bookings).
Strictly over 18′s, I.D. may be required.
AFTER THE GIG
Whelan’s Indie DJ from 11pm til late or you might even catch the end of Jaime Nanci and the Blue Boys in the front bar (9pm, Free).