As collaborations go, Icy Demons are not exactly unprecedented. Featuring Need New Body drummer Pow Pow (Chris Powell) and Bablicon bassist Griffin Rodriquez (known here as Blue Hawaii), as well as three Chicago musicians sporting their own clever nicknames, Icy Demons' Fight Back! is really more the consummation of an old friendship than a new deal. Bablicon featured heavily on Need New Body's 2001 debut, and there was always bound to be a serviceable halfway point between the bands' respective freeform melting pot and frenetic exertion. Which is all good background, to be sure, but what I really want to know is, if the demons are icy, has Hell frozen over? Because they all look kind of chilly on the album cover (which, incidentally, folds out into an awesome six-panel icy demon family portrait on the reverse of the liners).

The album art is weirdly apropos for the music contained within-- the hodgepodge of funky little demons in all kinds of strange colors looks a lot like how the band sounds. Their music is dense, weird and full of strangely hued interludes. It's tempting to call the music a grab bag of styles, but the twist is that these guys are combining styles that never really had names to being with.

The odd falsetto vocal melodies that Powell whips up usually spring from an instrumental line buried somewhere in the music, often on a cello or one of Dave "Thousand Rabbits Running" McDonnell's many reed instruments. On "Manny's", his melody is indirectly doubled by guitarists Matt "Young Master" Schneider and Dave "Moylando Calrissian" Moyland-- but rather than simply duplicate his vocal line, each guitarist weaves his own slightly dissonant line beneath that roughly follows the same arc, giving the verse an odd Beefheartian flavor. The song later takes off into a prolonged instrumental fantasia led by McDonald's clarinet and Powell's jazz-inflected drumming.

Rodriquez's history as an Elephant 6 cohort and the ban.......
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Chicagowska grupa Icy Demons ugruntowała swoją pozycję w Stanach po udanych występach na dużych festiwalach w roku 2008, jak Pitchfork i The Wire’s Adventures In Modern Music oraz wspólnych koncertach z Arcade Fire, Dirty Projectors, Slint, of Montreal, Yeasayer, !!! i Pit Er Pat. Trzon grupy stanowią Griffin Rodriguez (Blue Hawaii), Chris Powell (Man Man, Need New Body), a podczas występów na żywo wspierają ich muzycy Tortoise, Prefuse 73 i Sam Prekop. Muzyka zespołu jest wysokoenergetyczna, bardzo melodyjna i zawiera w sobie elementy takich gatunków jak krautrock, whimsical psychedelia, electro, afro-funk czy electric jazz.

As collaborations go, Icy Demons are not exactly unprecedented. Featuring Need New Body drummer Pow Pow (Chris Powell) and Bablicon bassist Griffin Rodriquez (known here as Blue Hawaii), as well as three Chicago musicians sporting their own clever nicknames, Icy Demons' Fight Back! is really more the consummation of an old friendship than a new deal. Bablicon featured heavily on Need New Body's 2001 debut, and there was always bound to be a serviceable halfway point between the bands' respective freeform melting pot and frenetic exertion. Which is all good background, to be sure, but what I really want to know is, if the demons are icy, has Hell frozen over? Because they all look kind of chilly on the album cover (which, incidentally, folds out into an awesome six-panel icy demon family portrait on the reverse of the liners).

The album art is weirdly apropos for the music contained within-- the hodgepodge of funky little demons in all kinds of strange colors looks a lot like how the band sounds. Their music is dense, weird and full of strangely hued interludes. It's tempting to call the music a grab bag of styles, but the twist is that these guys are combining styles that never really had names to being with.

The odd falsetto vocal melodies that Powell whips up usually spring from an instrument.......
more