The Gowns sound awfully good to me – composed of former members of Mae Shi and Amps for Christ, the now-Berkeley art-rockin’ combo is playing tonight at 21 Grand, opening for BARR, Marnie Stern, and Old Time Relijun. Atmospheric, willing to test those everchanging limits defining a pop song, punky in ways that Good Charlotte wouldn’t understand…oh hell, I’ll just let the Gowns’ Ezra Buchla tell it the way he sees it for himself, Erika Anderson, and Corey Fogel:
I am writing from Highland Park, Los Angeles, a city in which I am a (permanent?) visitor. Erika and I lived here two years ago, when we began playing together as Gowns or the Gowns. It was an attempt to synthesize several of our musical interests: the formal minimalism and elasticity of folk music, the abrasion of Crass-era anarchist punk, the directness and lyricism of grunge rock, and the alienating, arguably anti-human time-bending techniques of modern digital signal processing.