Austin City Limits Festival Preview
Chicken Ranch Records heard about my little project here, and they were nice enough to send me a copy of the most recent White Ghost Shivers album, Everyone's Got 'Em. I popped it in the other morning to give it a listen while I was getting ready for work, and by the time I was thirty seconds into the opening title track, a huge smile was plastered across my face. My sister's reaction was priceless too - the band's blend of jazz, hokum, vaudeville, ragtime, western swing and hillbilly isn't exactly what she normally hears blasting from my speakers before 8 a.m.
According to the band's "mission statement," "White Ghost Shivers have been peeling faces off the unexpecting for 6 years now." The group's MySpace page lists a lineup including members named Curt Ass, Ma Poppit, Smokebreak Slemenda, Cella Blue, Shorty Borgasm, Deathmaster, Doyle, and The Preacher. I would have typed out their massive list of individual instruments and entertaining skills (like chillin', chain smoking and skirt lifting), but perhaps you should just go read it yourself - everything written by or about the band just screams how much fun they're having. They even host an annual Halloween Ball every year - which makes perfect sense when you listen to their album. In fact, I think the only more appropriate usage of this band's music would be for the soundtrack of some of those ghost-filled old black and white cartoons I watched as a kid.
The whole point of this website is to help me (and you) discover new bands that you might not stop to see otherwise. White Ghost Shivers is a band I never thought I would listen to (let alone enjoy!), but after checking them out, you can bet I'll be first in line to see what they bring to the stage in Austin.
