Terror Pigeon Dance Revolt!
Founded in late 2007 as means for one man to yell about his romantic mishaps, The Terror Pigeon Dance Revolt! has blossomed into a real juggernaut of epic dance floor revelation.
What do they sound like? It’s sorta dance-soul music, like synthed out Otis Redding covers on fast forward. Dance music with too many cooks in the kitchen, but in a good way, so not too many cooks, maybe just an above average amount of cooks. That is to say, there are sweet beats: your ass wants to shake, but there’s also like four vocals and two horn lines happening too, making for a unique, dense, dance floor throw down that’s suitable for both club rock outs and secluded headphone listening. But perhaps more than both of these, you’ll find yourself wanting to be listening to this music at a Halloween party with all your friends, because before TPDR were trying to make your head bob or your ass shake they were trying to make your heart feel something. Whether they’re singing about a new romance, old friends, or a magical thing that happens when the roads are too icy for professors to get to school, TPDR are singing about something that you’ve felt, and doing so with a humor and sincerity so often lacking in indie music. Scenes and events are set up so perfectly that on a late night, driving in your car in the middle of nowhere you feel every emotion they’re singing about deep down in your gut: you’ll be getting chills on the subway during your morning commute. These songs will make you long for every boy or girl you almost kissed in high school, chuckle to yourself about how stupid and great your friends are and make you want to go camping, stay up late, dance on your fire escape, have a potluck dinner, jump in piles of leaves, French kiss in the back of a movie theater and finally go out and cut down a real Christmas tree this year.
And if listening to this band on CD makes you feel alive, seeing them live will set you on fire. Terror Pigeon live is sometimes four people and sometimes forty, but it doesn’t matter, cause you won’t know who’s in the band anyways. Everyone dances, everyone gets a costume, everyone sings. And don’t worry, only half the people know any of the lyrics so you won’t feel left out: the sing alongs are easy and they’ll teach them to you. The show is happening on the stage and in the audience. There are people running around with big light up robots on their backs, others wearing disco ball hats, a hairy man dressed as a giant pumpkin, streamers, aliens, football players from the movie Mac n’ Me on a TV dancing to the beat, a dude butoh dancing, it’s like Halloween and junior prom and new years and Christmas at once. There’s a lot of glitter and strobe lights and it’s entirely probable that at some point you’ll be handed a mic and told to go for it. And that’s the idea: that you go for it. Cool has been abolished: for 25 minutes you can’t fuck up. You can scream and sing and roll around on the floor and it’s okay. To quote them “No one here looks more stupid then we do so don’t worry about it!” And you can totally just stand up against a wall and watch too if you want: there aren’t rules. It’s not, “you have to go crazy,” it’s “you can.” And that freedom leads to a real liberation, an all encompassing fuck everything dance party hailed as everything from kid playtime gone wrong to the least self conscious act at CMJ to a religious awakening.
And all this razzmatazz hasn’t gone unnoticed. In addition to getting a plaque once they’ve also been written about by a bunch of important magazines and newspapers, including the New York Times, New York magazine, NME, Nylon and more. Perhaps most impressive, besides the plaque, was their winning the Diesel:U:Music World Tour competition last year. Selected from amongst thousands, Diesel flew them around the world to play in big stadiums in Japan and historic nightclubs in France. This rather surprising move, (wait, good, deserving bands can actually get giant handouts from monster corporations?!) catapulted them into the spotlight, giving them much-deserved exposure.
Ever diligent to their mission to “tour forever,” they’ve already logged over 35,000 driving miles this year, touring from coast to coast twice in support of their debut album released this past May. After a successful European tour in October they returned to the studio where they are hard at work on their sophomore album, which is slated for release in May of 2011!
