| CLICK HERE FOR OUR ELECTRONIC PRESS KIT! "Imagine a smorgasbord of Cab Calloway, circus
sideshow, KISS, cabaret, Hee Haw and Robert Johnson served up at Andy
Kaufman's bat-mitzvah. A joyous mixture of the absurd and sublime, the
eight-piece ensemble gracefully blends a musical amalgam of Hokum Blues,
Hillbilly Swing, Country and Hot Jazz." W hite Ghost Shivers won best "Novelty" band at the 2007 Austin Music Awards, and placed in six other categories, including best Jazz, Bluegrass, Experimental, None of the Above, Female Vocals(Cella Blue), and Horns(Jonathan Doyle). White Ghost Shivers won best "None of the Above" band at the 2006 Austin Music Awards. In the March 2006 issue of Playback St. Louis. KDHX named the White Ghost Shivers one of the top 10 most important acts playing SXSW 2006. White Ghost Shivers' Live on the Radio named #13 best album in the Austin Chronicle, January 2006, Christopher Gray White Ghost Shivers performed at the 2006 Austin City Limits Music Festival. NEW RECORD REVIEW White Ghost Shivers--- Everyone's Got 'Em (Chicken Ranch) Too bad HBO canceled Carnivle, its supernatural drama wherein God and Satan used Depression-era showfolk as chess pieces, because Austin's White Ghost Shivers would've been naturals for a cameo. Born in Storyville's hot-pillow houses, gangster-clogged Chicago gin mills, and backwoods hillbilly hoedowns of the last century's earliest decades, WGS' bawdy sound is Americana in the raw, with an appetite for sex and sin as lusty as their Dixieland-derived licks. Yet it's somehow hard to imagine the Preservation Hall Jazz Band breaking into "Orange Blossom Special" like the Shivers do on "Shivers' Stomp," or mouthing the X-rated lyrics of "My Land." (Somewhere in South Austin, the Asylum Street Spankers are smiling.) When the lights go dim, the frisky trumpet-clarinet-fiddle-banjo-kazoo-accordion-upright-bass interplay there are eight Shivers in all cedes centerstage to Cella Blue's cat-on-a-hot-tin-roof vocals, torching up ballroom belly-rubbers "Weed Smokers Dream" and "Strictly Ornamental." Best enjoyed with a shot of rotgut hooch and a puff or two of that old debbil weed, two subjects the Shivers are hardly strangers to, Everyone's Got 'Em is a hot-blooded tribute to a less constrained time and place, and a reminder that the vices that created such wonderfully boisterous music have hardly disappeared. (CD release: Friday, April 28 @ Parish) -Austin Chronicle, Christopher Gray EVERYONE'S GOT 'EM The instrumentation on Everyones Got Em is period-correct: saxophone, prominent banjo, upright bass and acoustic guitar; theyre all played with equal parts precision and abandon. The title tracks jittery rag is chock-full of cheeky humor and old-fashioned vibe. My imagination instantly conjured up the singing frog from that old Looney Tunes cartoon, warbling as several monocle-wearing Monopoly bankers jitterbugged along, fingers wagging. That was during the opening song, mind you. The bands mixture of pathos and humor shines on Mama Said which features brassy female vocals intoning morbid lines like In the end the worms will have their say, all the while inducing Happy Feet. Its certainly the peppiest rumination on death, the devil and retribution Ive heard in awhile. The Ghost Song creeps along on a brooding clarinet line and trudging rhythm, while the narrators quavering, almost strangling vocal describes the haunting of someone who once performed a terrible deed. The staircase-climbing-and-falling accordion adds to the almost visual depth of the instrumentation, which effectively conveys a gothic oldness and coldness. Its still a hoot, though. The jarring My Land is hilariously disorienting, as a retro-genteel rag is overrun by the ribald modernity of its lyrics, which (among other things) mention mullets, Camaros and liquor store robberies. The White Ghost Shivers give the impression of a particularly aggressive 20s-era band transported to the present and realizing the ruckus they make is not only novel but also highly entertaining - so they naturally step up the energy level another notch. Yiddish fiddles rival modern guitar leads, manic banjos pump out feverish rhythms and horns leapfrog and argue throughout the faster numbers, leaving the listener more breathless than the players. The album is hyper and dense but features a good amount of variety. Kazoos accompany an endless barrage of double entendres in Toot Your Whistle, which makes one wonder if folks were anywhere near this randy back in the day (maybe Princes great-grandpappy). Likewise, Shivers Stomp puts lots of sugar in the hooch at a would-be barn dance, where the band appears to be hosting a nihilistic mass hookup. The Shivers swing while the cows run off and nobodys in any shape to care. This music is serious fun. Everyones Got Em contains more lyrical and instrumental tweaks than I
can count, but everything coalesces to serve the songs. Its a clever,
dark and comi-tragic ride made more palpable by the quasi-antique setting
and arrangements, and, if the bio materials are any indication, the bands
visual presentation rivals the music. Austin, watch out. THESE SPIRITS OF DECADES PAST WILL GIVE YOU THE
SHIVERS W hite Ghost Shivers won best "Novelty" band at the 2007 Austin Music Awards, and placed in six other categories, including best Jazz, Bluegrass, Experimental, None of the Above, Female Vocals, and Horns. White Ghost Shivers won best "None of the Above" band at the 2006 Austin Music Awards. In the March 2006 issue of Playback St. Louis. KDHX named the White Ghost Shivers one of the top 10 most important acts playing SXSW 2006. White Ghost Shivers' Live on the Radio named #13 best album in the Austin Chronicle, January 2006, Christopher Gray White Ghost Shivers performed at the 2006 Austin City Limits Music Festival. |