NYC Gil Mantera
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The rites of passage for concert-goers are universal. You’ll never forget your first T-shirt purchase at the merch booth and the first time you see someone smoking weed in public. I myself will definitely never forget the first time I saw Gil Mantera’s Party Dream. A friend put it best this way: “This was either pure genius or the worst crap I’ve ever heard.” It was an experience so surreal – wait, were those banana hammocks? Did they just cover Fleetwood Mac through a vocoder?
I had to rub my eyes and check the Party Dream (what the Village Voice deemed the best SXSW show of 2006) out again, in NYC. What I witnessed was a two-piece, straight-outta-Youngstown, rewrite-the-rules show. Body-rocking chaos ensued to the Casio-fueled beats of ‘Elmo’s Wish,’ ‘Bunz Therapy’ and ‘Buffalo Tears.’ Yes, Party Dream swerves precariously close to cringe-worthy-'tronic at times, but the brothers avoid going off the deep end by not taking themselves too seriously. This is coupled with a thorough understanding of retro-futurist music, which they straddle with awesome guitar solos. Think if Giorgio Moroder was cheating on Kraftwerk with the younger, sleeker Dntel; then they moved to Ohio to birth two corn-fed new-wavers prone to taking off their pants.
Lucky for us, what started out as a one-time practical joke has signed to Fat Possum Records and is now on tour. What are you waiting for?
~Text and Film by Abbey Braden, punkphoto.com
See: Elmo's Wish at the Knitting Factory
Special Thanks to the Knitting Factory
