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Greco-Roman Band Breaks New Musical Ground - - Mixes an Ancient Frenzy with Digital Noise & Pretty H
Added: (Mon Aug 06 2001)
Flaming Fire’s new album, Get Old and Die with Flaming Fire, summons the surreal and pagan aural landscape of Fellini’s Satyricon, Angelo Badalamenti and Psychic TV – combining pretty, punked-out harmonies and hysterical chanting with eerie psychedelic tape loops and digital noise. Bringing to mind a strange combination of The Association, the Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows” and Atari Teenage Riot, Flaming Fire has created a new type of experimental psychedelia in their second album that manages to be stirring, catchy and disturbing all at once.
Flaming Fire’s energetic performances are highly theatrical, while also emphasizing the songs themselves, instead of the performers. Dressed like an ancient Greco-Roman chorus, the band opens each performance wearing red togas and masks to hide their individual personalities and stress the ritualized nature of their music. Free songbooks are also distributed to audience members, so they can sing or chant along, and then perform the songs in the privacy of their own homes.
“We wanted to have songs about God and life and death that would work equally as hymns or pop music,” Flaming Fire songwriter Patrick Hambrecht says. “It’s really important to us that our songs could stand up on their own as songs people can sing and enjoy, without us playing them. You can love or hate our music, but I doubt you can listen to our Get Old and Die without humming our songs later, or having one of our songs stuck in your head. And that’s what they’re there for – songs about God, death, life, evil, good, a hostile universe and a hateful cosmos that you can sing to yourself. That’s a pretty important thing for everyone to have, even if you don’t have a chosen religion or attend church. And then maybe when you go home for Thanksgiving or the holidays, you can teach them to your parents and sing them around the dinner table.”
The band’s first album, a noise-bluegrass collaboration with spooky superstar Dame Darcy and avant-rockers Laddio Bolocko, Rock Rock Chicken Pox: Die Grizzly, Die!, won high praise from critics and fans alike and sold out of its first printing.
Get Old and Die With Flaming Fire is available now at Kim’s, Other Music (call 212-477-8150 to mail-order from Other) and Wowsville in New York City and online at www.flamingfire.com. This fall, it will be available nationwide through Morphius distribution. The Flaming Fire song “In the Summertime When Everything Is Holy” will be featured in August on Jane magazine’s website at www.janemag.com/2001/jeff.html. Rock Rock Chicken Pox Die Grizzly Die! is available at Cheapo Records in Austin, Texas.
Praise for Flaming Fire’s last album, Rock Rock Chicken Pox: Die Grizzly, Die!:
“Carefully disguised folk-noise brilliance”
–Will York, Listen.com
“Perfect for fans of the Residents. For those yearning for a listen to something truly unique and unabashedly bizarre, this work’s not to be missed!”
–Madeline Virbasius-Walsh, The Sentimentalist
Contact: Flaming Fire Music
Home of Rock Rock Chicken Pox, Dame Darcy, Flaming Fire, and Banjo Pete
212-696-7278
http://www.flamingfire.com