“A one man junkyard army from New York” (LA Weekly),
“Nick
Cave meets No-Wave” (SF Chronicle)
“A house party of unusual artistic coterie” (CMJ 2007)
AND THE FIRST SUBVERSIVE LOUNGE EVER.
The Key Party came to Darren Gaines like someone else’s wife at 3am on a Friday night. Bingo, Sigourney Weaver had a hand in the bowl for him. Musicians
showed up, reached their hand into a bowl and pulled out the instrument they were going to sleep with that night. They picked
pots and pans, toy airplanes, and a washtub bass made solely from parts found within a block of his West Village apartment, they picked anything
broken, borrowed or stolen. That late night affair became a manifesto that was a goodbye to boredom, a goodnight to bands
born of drums and guitars and bass. It became “15 songs of rock and roll poetry celebrating the debauched, the broken,
the drunken and the misfitting” (PopMatters 2007). Gaines’ songs of “heartbreak and unemployment (sung)
with complete conviction… there is no posing here.” (itsnotthebandihateitstheisfans.blogspot) propelled TKP’s
debut CD, Hit or Miss, onto CMJs album of the Day, the SF Chronicle’s Pink Section Download of the Week and numerous
CORE College and Specialty Radio Charts.
But even sleeping around gets boring… enter the Pink Panther and please Mr. Mancini, meet the three
Johns (no, not that John but Prine, Cash and Rotten). The new songs are not your fathers’ lounge or hipster kitsch,
sure there’s a jazz horn section, but that junkyard kitchen sink still clanks like a factory pipe and the punk by way
of Deano still screams DIY. The bittersweet séance, the iconoclastic brew, the orgiastic noises still chill. But it’s
Darren Gaines’ voice of “tattered velvet…” that continues, “his croon oozing around and through
cigarette smoke“ (PopMatters) that again define these new songs. One part manifesto, one part punk-a-rock, one part Gaines “just woke up from that joyous get-together, only to find his head aching and his house
wrecked” (CMJ 2007), these new songs are all parts subversion.
To quote Darren Gaines, “Thank you and good night."
