I was shocked – shocked – when I saw this on the A.V. Club homepage:
New “supergroup” featuring Justin Vernon, P.O.S., members of Megafaun and The Rosebuds, et al., looks awesome, awful, awesome again
Just the combination of Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon and P.O.S. sent my brain into overdrive. So, I hopped over to Jagjaguwar to get the full details:
From the moment anyone heard Olson, Coulter, and Hurlburt’s rough version of their first composition “The Gaudy Side of Town,†they wanted in on it. To most of the players involved, this genre of music was quite foreign yet entirely familiar. Olson knew this, and began calling upon an eclectic cast of contributors whom he thought would share his vision, and relish in the idea of exploring uncharted musical territory within them. The first people to join the cause were North Carolina’s Megafaun (Joe Westerlund, Brad Cook, Phil Cook), and with them came Ivan Howard (The Rosebuds), and Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon and Mike Noyce. By mid-2009 the studio sessions were becoming more and more frequent, bouncing back and forth between April Base and Olson’s bedroom. In Minneapolis, Olson brought in Rhymesayers rapper P.O.S and his fellow Doomtree artist Dessa, psych-rockers Jake Luck and Nick Ryan (Leisure Birds), song-birds Channy Moon-Casselle and Katy Morley, jazz-saxophonist Michael Lewis (Happy Apple, Andrew Bird), retro-pop duo Maggie Morrison and Grant Cutler (Lookbook), and slide-guitarist Shön Troth (Solid Gold).
The group is called GAYNGS, the album is named Relayted and it’ll be released on May 11.
Anyone curious as to why this already makes for an album of fantastic possibilities just needs to take a peek at the videos by some of the artists involved, which are posted below.
Bon Iver:
[youtubevid id=”JfAS6nwYc9g”]
P.O.S.:
[youtubevid id=”XGufRiMnpGI”]
Megafaun:
[youtubevid id=”jkPw5a2zqRQ”]
The Rosebuds:
[youtubevid id=”RjHNGXAmA4k”]
Solid Gold:
[youtubevid id=”YQq3ZQER7_w”]
And that’s just a fraction of the musical elements and individuals involved in GAYNGS. Exciting, right?
I really hope these super groups (GAYNGS, Monsters of Folk) aren’t foreshadowing the death of indie rock. I mean, they seem kind of counterintuitive to the whole raison d’etre of the music.