Release New Album, "Truce Opium," Today on Emergency Umbrella * Kickoff US Tour at This Week's CMJ Music Marathon!
Their upcoming second album, Truce Opium, has a better mastery of what to do with their massive horn section, focusing more on ecstatic textures than wild freakouts. - The Village Voice
There are many editions of the Athens, Ga.-based collective Dark Meat, one of which expands to Dark Meat Vomit Lasers Family Band, an assemblage of 18 different musicians that includes members of Gnarls Barkley and Of Montreal. For the band's second album, Truce Opium, Dark Meat has trimmed itself down to half the members, switched labels, and produced a psych-rock album that combines the group's love of the Velvet Underground, MC5, and Crazy Horse with Eastern acoustic instruments, group chants, and throat singing. - Prefixmag.com
Athens, Georgia's Dark Meat sound like all of Athens came out for the fun, baring instruments and smelling of patchouli. And this October you can smell them in your town as they take their sprawling psych-rock act on the road in support of their latest, Truce Opium. And usually, that's kind of what happens: borrowing friends from the likes of Of Montreal, Gnarls Barley, Elf Power and even members of Lil Wayne's touring band, they shy away from neither small stages nor big sounds. - CMJ
Athens Georgia's multifarious psychedelic roadwarriors DARK MEAT have geared up for another get-go of pillage-and-freakout in the name of their newest offering, TRUCE OPIUM. A long period of lineup changes, label complications and heavy touring across North America and Europe has focused the band into a diamond-hard and transformative experience: they've trimmed their lineup to a highly-effective and barely-anemic 9-piece, and, in the process, have organically developed an intense and diverse instrumental chemistry. Truly, TRUCE OPIUM retains all the insane eccentricity, rawness and sonic bombast of their infamous live show, and evinces a sharpened essence and unified vision burnished by the last three years spent spraying themselves across the cosmos in their cramped tour-van.
In terms of heightened vision and sonic-execution, TRUCE OPIUM is a huge step forward for the band -- as it augments their celebrated Albert Ayler, Stooges and Neil Young obsessions with more a abstract, cosmic tack: pronounced Eastern influences abide via the use of acoustic drone instruments like tanpura, bulbul tarang and sitar, prayer-like group chants and the study and reverent application of polyharmonic Sygyt and Kargira Tuvan throat-singing. Last year, bandmembers workshopped, rehearsed and performed at The University of Georgia with a carnatic classical troupe from South India. This amazing and humbling opportunity, along with their involvement in several local improv, free-jazz and noise ensembles have broadened the band's sonic and structural scope.
Deep Krautrock and Japanoise bearings also surface; their perpetual tour-van immersion in the sounds of NEU!, Amon Duul II, Les Rallizes Denudes, LSD and Boredoms push their willfully improvisational passages into weirder, wilder territory. And the vaunted Free Jazz and New Orleans Marching Band influences persist through The Vomit Lasers, Dark Meat's longstanding horn-section. However, where the band once enthusiastically essayed pieces by The Ayler Brothers, Pharaoh Sanders and Sonny Sharrock, the ensemble has now organically assimilated the music's feral energies and rarified colors into its aesthetics of arrangement, dynamic and performance. Make no mistake, though, TRUCE OPIUM, at its twisted heart, is a redblooded psych-rock record, as a lived-in and durable love of Velvet Underground, Yardbirds, MC5, Fairport Convention and Crazy Horse continually and joyously warps main songwriter Jim McHugh's approach to composition and execution. And the passage of material into the raw hands of his seasoned collaborators dually insures that the resultant High Magic will be spirited, raw and unlike anything else you've every heard.
* Dark Meat share members with Of Montreal, Olivia Tremor Control, Circulatory System, Elf Power, Gnarls Barkley, Instruments, Lil Wayne's Touring Band (for real!) and Nymph.
Dark Meat Live!
Th Oct 22 Charlottesville VA Tea Bazaar
Sa Oct 24 Brooklyn NY Union Pool w/ An Albatross
Sa Oct 24 Brooklyn NY Glasslands
Su Oct 25 New York City NY Cake Shop w/ An Albatross
Mo Oct 26 Philadelphia PA Danger Danger w/ An Albatross
Tu Oct 27 Washington DC Black Cat Backstage w/ An Albatross
We Oct 28 Baltimore MD Talking Head w/ An Albatross
Th Oct 29 Charlotte NC Snug Harbor w/ An Albatross
Fr Oct 30 Athens GA 40 Watt w/ An Albatross
Sa Oct 31 Atlanta GA Star Bar w/ An Albatross
Sun Nov 1 Ybor City FL Crobar
Mo Nov 2 Orlando FL Will's Pub w/ An Albatross
Tu Nov 3 Mobile, AL Alabama Music Box w/ An Albatross
We Nov 4 Baton Rouge, LA House Party w/ An Albatross
Th Nov 5 New Orleans LA Saturn Bar w/ An Albatross
Fr Nov 6 Houston TX Free Press Block Party w/ An Albatross
Sa Nov 7 Monterey MX Monterey Festival
Su Nov 8 Austin TX Fun Fun Fun Fest
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