Ladies and gentlemen, STNNNG has reentered the building. After four years of waiting and much, much anticipation, Minnesota’s greatest post-punk band is back with a new record, Veterans of Pleasure. We shot a few questions to the king of the speak-sing delivery, STNNNG vocalist Chris Besinger, to set the record straight on his wicked agenda….
Category: Profile
PROFILE: Chuck Mosley (2017)
Chuck Mosley just can’t stop. Chain-smoking Marlboro Blacks as he sits near the end of an aging sofa, the 80s icon kicks on some rough demos of his latest project, a frontman outing with post-punk band Primitive Race due out this fall. The music cuts angular and jagged, more raw and steel-edged than what you ever would…
PROFILE: Rachel Grimes
Rachel Grimes knew how to play the piano before she learned to walk. “My dad and grandmother played, so I was always sitting beside them following along, watching and listening in wonder at how they could make that magic,” the composer/pianist told me recently from the home she and her husband, educator Alec Johnson, share…
PROFILE: David Grubbs of Squirrel Bait
Originally published in Popdose on July 30, 2014 Before Louisville was associated with Palace, though after, I suppose, Hunter S. Thompson chronicled its seedy decadence during the Derby, there was Squirrel Bait, a nascent punk group of area teens churning out intricately layered but surprisingly accessible post-hardcore gems, a group of seemingly-always-do-wells who drew rave reviews,…
PROFILE: Chris Besinger of STNNNG
Originally published in Popdose on July 21, 2014 Let’s try, okay, to be objective for a moment. STNNNG, a Minneapolis art-punk quintet with its heart on its sleeve and a roar in its throat, is the best thing to come out of Minnesota since Todd Trainer. There; eat it up. The band’s debut, Dignified Sissy,…
INTERVIEW: Curtis Eller
Originally published in Popdose on April 3, 2014 Curtis Eller, banjo-picker extraordinaire, presents listeners with a quintessentially American cause celeb. Few work harder to drum up and rally a crowd with their song-stories, and, though his father was a musician –- more on that later –- his is very much an up-by-your-bootstraps tale. In short,…
Profile: The Wingdale Community Singers (2010)
Originally published in Brooklyn Rail May 2010 Spirit Duplicator, the second record from Brooklyn quartet the Wingdale Community Singers, begins with an enticing simulacrum—not a chord strummed on an acoustic guitar but the naked skeleton of notes that would seem to form that chord. There’s the thrum-thrum of the low E string, followed by hammered-on…
Profile: The ‘Antique-Garde’ Songwriters of New York City (2010)
Originally published in American Songwriter March 30, 2010 “The future’s eternally bankrupt but history provides” Winter was hard on New York City. February 27, a Saturday, started before dawn for Erik Della Penna of Kill Henry Sugar, who rode the A train from his Central Park West apartment to 176th Street to walk across the…
Profile: Robin Aigner (2010)
Originally published in Brooklyn Rail April 2010 Robin Aigner, a vintage dress and boots extending her pint-sized frame, remains in control of the Living Room’s standing-room crowd as the music swirls around her. Ian McLaughlin’s upright bass lurches along, drummer Bill Gerstel doles out spare yet fluid accompaniment, and Brady Jenkins conjures up twinkling piano…
Profile: Nonagon (2009)
Originally published in Delusions of Adequacy June 1, 2009 Nonagon’s songs have a way of popping, no, better yet, of exploding out of stereo speakers, as if they were bottles of pressurized soda water just itching to be uncapped. On No Sun, their self-released and hand-assembled debut CD, angular guitars tear through the landscape, bass…
Profile: Pinataland (2004)
Profile: Pinataland (2004) Originally published in Delusions of Adequacy Sept. 27, 2004 You wouldn’t know it from listening to their unique and breathtaking debut – a collection of endearing history portraits and sometimes-elegiac narratives titled Songs for the Forgotten Future Vol. 1 – but Pinataland is actually a group of living, breathing musicians, not some…
Profile: Bonni Evensen from Snowy (2003)
Originally published in Delusions of Adequacy Sept. 22, 2003 For those looking for the surface of life to imitate art, I’m sorry to report that Bonni Evensen, the singer-songwriter behind the atmospheric pop ensemble Snowy, is anything but cold or wintry. Anyone who has a copy of Snowy’s debut CD, Lilywhite, knows that Evensen has…
