Mucca Pazza with April March & Julien Gasc, Grooms, Soft Landing
Apr 28, 2011
upstairs
Doors @ 7 PM
$12 Adv
Mucca Pazza is the marching band that thinks it’s a rock ‘n roll band.
The group is a collection of shameless band nerds wielding instruments
of incongruous traditions, sometimes in competition, often in
cooperation. Many of them played in traditional marching bands in high
school. Others wanted to but couldn’t because they played violin or
accordion, and no one had yet come up with the amplified helmet. With
speakers strapped firmly to heads, their rambunctious live show has
brought them to such acclaimed venues as the Late Show with Conan
O’Brien, Lollapalooza, and a fleet of canoes floating down the Chicago
River.
Their music skips from genre to unnameable genre, never
settling in one place for long, but held together by the band’s
unmistakable sound and irresistible energy. To their credit, they only
have one march in their original repertoire, their other music includes
zombie-mambo, snake-charmer-metal, gypsy-reggaeton, punk-classical, and
some demented arrangements of Dmitri Shostakovich, Bela Bartok, and
famed Egyptian composer Kemal El Tawil.
They play everywhere:
from punk venues to orchestral halls, from public parks to public radio,
from diva palaces to dive bars. Some have called them “circus punk,”
some say they’re “geek love,” but no one calls them dull.
