duggup

Artist: The Boggs
Website:www.myspace.com/theboggs
Track Name: Arm in Arm
Playback: Flash
Download?: No

Post Punk? Gary Glitter Glam? Nope. the Boggs are a group of street musicians from Brooklyn, New York who met while performing on subway platforms and decided to move their act indoors (much nicer in winter and the guitar strings don’t rust as fast). They scored a record deal after playing a series of shows at punk venues and making their name with a manic live act.

But their music is not punk, well maybe the attitude. The Boggs take the whole American musical heritage, you know … bluegrass, folk, blues and country, throw them into the air and watch where they fall, then gather up the pieces and take them all down to their raw essentials and then push out lo-fi gems. This is a band that doesn’t really care about high fashion sound, these guys are so lo-fi that the original Hammond field recordings sound like a Telarc Master Recording. The Boggs create their music with acoustic guitars, drums, banjo, mandolin, washboard, harmonica, accordion and fiddle. They have instruments and they aren’t afraid to use them.

Here are The Boggs playing “Arm in Arm” Live…

And here is their record label hype… Gigantic Music

Moving across genres and borders as easily as a dial moving up and down the AM band, The Boggs have spent the past six years defining, refining, building up, and breaking down their take on proto post folk garage punk folk punk blues and disco. Founded in 2001, principle member Jason Friedman has kept the band moving through a number of incarnations, with time off for the occasional side endeavor – a move to Berlin to focus on a series of large scale drawings, for example, or directing a video for sometime tour-mates The Rapture.

I am rather taken with them, and love the fact that they saw the current boundaries of the indie scene… and kept on going.
Worth a listen

thatch is fascinated by guitars, music, guitars, production, silly noises, guitars and used to be a musician. Did I mention the thing about the guitars?
Email this author | All posts by thatch |