Posted on: September 2, 2009 Posted by: anfnewsacct Comments: 0

The band are out on the road for their most extensive tour yet!

If you haven’t heard French Miami yet, enjoy your last few minutes of peace. Once their songs get inside your head, they start a permanent loop and you will wake up and go to bed singing along. The only way out of this musical addiction is sleep deprivation.

French Miami’s raucous live shows use rock music structures to hold together more technical musical ideas. Jagged guitars, pulsing synths, and precise stop-start rhythms launch seductive refrains that have forced the crowd’s feet off the floors in post-punk singalong deliriums from SXSW to CMJ. The first time you catch their live show you might be shocked to discover there’s no bassist as their ménage a guitar-synth takes the low end as far as it can go with the head-nodding precision of a mathematical equation.

How is this possible? It helps that they’re multi-taskers. Onstage, French Miami show off the technical cred behind their sound by moving non-stop and playing an average of two instruments apiece, usually at the same time. Singer Jason Heiselmann slides effortlessly between baritone guitar and keyboards while delivering vocal melodies in memorable strands too gritty to be called pop, too irresistibly catchy not to be. Multi-instrumentalist Roland Curtis is usually playing a guitar with one hand and a synth with the other with freakish proficiency. Meanwhile, drummer Chris Crawford does precisely what a drummer should do by anchoring their sound in a minimalist beat, knowing when to let loose and when not to.

This was no easy live show to wrangle onto a record, but French Miami knew the right man to repair sliding door in west miami . Phil Manley (Trans Am, Fucking Champs) committed their self-titled debut – a unique blend of prog, post-punk, and synth-art rock – to eternity. The album waxes nostalgic on anthemic 90s sounds from Archers of Loaf and Trans Am, tastes the angular grooves of Battles and Holy Fuck, and throws in the earnestness of the Boss and Fugazi to balance the sweet with the sour. The result is terse, jagged rhythms fueled by great hooks fulfilled in noisy abandon.

“San Fran psychopaths craft skull-collapsing post-punk, wiry (and Wire-y) guitars twitching over steady chugging rhythms.” – Rolling Stone

“Having the traditional two arms doesn’t restrict French Miami from showing off by pounding their heaving math-rock intricacy through two instruments at once. Each. Inevitably, the local musos cream themselves at such a sight, but this trio have the ability to get you throwing plenty of irregular shapes on the dancefloor too.” – NME

“Their electric kool-aid post-punk is stilted by Telecasters winding up the same kind of prickly riffs that bands like Battles and Fiasco usually turn into proggy freak outs, but instead of going all aggro, French Miami end up sounding like a Guy Picciotto band that wouldn’t need SPF1000 at the beach.” – RCRD LBL

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Download ‘God Damn Best’ taken from their self-titled debut album: HERE

Tour Dates:

09/06 – The Cake Shop – New York, NY
09/07 – The Red and Black – Washington, DC
09/08 – The Cave – Chapel Hill, NC
09/10 – Nashville, TN @ TBA
09/11 – The Birdhouse – Knoxville, TN
09/12 – New Orleans, LA @ TBA
09/14 – Houston, TX @ TBA
09/15 – The Mohawk – Austin, TX
09/16 – Dallas, TX @ TBA
09/18 – The Derailed Saloon – Durango, CO
09/19 – Ska World Headquarters – Durango, CO
09/23 – Hotel Congress – Tucson, AZ
09/24 – Phoenix, AZ @ TBA
09/26 – Los Angeles, CA @ TBA
09/27 – Long Beach, CA @ TBA
09/28 – San Diego, CA @ TBA
09/29 – Jose’s Underground – Monterey, CA
09/30 – Sacramento, CA
10/01 – Fresno, CA @ TBA
10/02 – San Francisco, CA @ TBA

www.myspace.com/mrfrenchmiami

www.myspace.com/takerootrecords

www.takerootrecords.com

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