Gordon Gano has still got it. 36 years ago I saw him at Tuts (that old firetrap on the second floor of the building right next to the Belmont El stop) in Chicago on Violent Femmes’ very first tour. (How did they ever get signed in the first place? Their music has always been aggressively anti-commercial.) At any rate, listen to this new stuff. It’s still grade A.
The one and only Violent Femmes have unveiled details of their much-anticipated new LP, HOTEL LAST RESORT, that arrives via [PIAS] on Friday, July 26. The plaintive and powerful title track featuring the iconic Television co-founder Tom Verlaine is the first song released from the record and is now available at all DSPs.
Bassist Brian Ritchie – who first met Verlaine as a young rock journalist during Television’s final tour in 1978 – reached out to the guitarist and received an affirmative response literally within minutes.
“We didn’t really give him much instruction,” Ritchie says, “but he did exactly what we hoped he’d do. He clearly has an affinity for the song. He must’ve really clued in on the lyrics and he really interpreted them with a guitar.”
“One of the greatest thrills of a long recording career is getting Tom Verlaine to play on one of our songs,” singer/guitarist Gordon Gano says. “It’s just amazing to hear that sound.
The groundbreaking band’s 10th studio album, HOTEL LAST RESORT resides among Violent Femmes’ finest work, simultaneously refining and redefining their one-of-a-kind take on American music, mingling front porch folk, post-punk, spiritual jazz, country blues, avant garde improvisation, and golden age rock ‘n’ roll. Founded and fronted of course by Gano and Ritchie, the group remains as warm, wise and weird as ever before, with such new favorites as “Another Chorus” and “Everlasting You” continuing to mine the vast range of ideas, melodic complexity, and organic sonic craftsmanship that has characterized the band’s body of work since their landmark 1983 debut.
Always eager to push their music forward, Violent Femmes have expanded their ranks over the past decade-and-a-half , bringing percussionist John Sparrow and multi-instrumentalist Blaise Garza into the fold. Both longtime members of The Horns of Dilemma – the band’s ever-evolving cabal of multi-instrumentalist backing musicians – the pair have joined the Femmes on tour and in the studio for the past 14 and 15 years respectively. Sparrow’s novel use of a Weber Grill as a rhythm instrument along with the extreme tones of Garza’s central instrument, the massive contrabass saxophone, bring a stunning depth to the Femmes’ famous sound, imbuing songs like “Paris To Sleep” and “Adam Was A Man” with a striking richness and imaginative edge.
