Kid Congo & The Pink Monkey Birds Announce New Album 'That Delicious Vice' Due Out April 19th On In The Red Records
Playing Select West Coast Dates In January
Wolfmanhattan Project Summer Forever And Ever and Kid Congo Powers and The Near Death Experience Live in St. Kilda Albums Available Via In The Red Records
Kid Congo Powers' Some New Kind Of Kick: A Memoir Available Through Hachette Books
Photo by Luz Gallardo
Just back from a sold out tour of Europe and the UK, Kid Congo & The Pink Monkey Birds announce a new album, 'That Delicious Vice', their fifth for In The Red Records, and marks the band’s first as a three-piece. Recorded in the scorching summer of 2023 in Tucson, the album includes a collaboration on two songs with LA Chicana punk icon, author, and singer of The Bags, Alice Bag, and will be released April 19th. More details to be revealed in the New Year.
The band are playing select West Coast dates in January as follows:
1/5/2024 - Long Beach, CA - Alex’s Bar
1/6/2024 - Los Angeles, CA - Lodge Room
1/7/2024 - San Diego, CA - Casbah
1/10/2024 - San Francisco, CA - Great American Music Hall
1/11/2024 - San Jose, CA - The Ritz
1/13/2024 - Tempe, AZ - Yucca Tap Room
The past 12 months have been a very busy time for Kid, releasing two albums on In The Red Records; Summer Forever and Ever, the second full-length by Wolfmanhattan Project, Kid's supergroup trio with Mick Collins and Bob Bert, plus Kid Congo Powers and The Near Death Experience Live in St. Kilda, featuring the singer-guitarist in concert in Australia.
Additionally, Kid released his much-anticipated memoir Some New Kind of Kick, via Hachette Books. The book covers the musician’s youth as a queer Mexican-American teen in the Los Angeles punk rock scene and his work in such legendary bands as The Gun Club, The Cramps, and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Cave called the book “a gem…bursting with humor, heart, and good grace.”
Summer Forever and Ever succeeded Blue Gene Stew, 2019’s debut by the Wolfmanhattan Project, a collective unit co-starring two other musicians familiar to In the Red listeners: singer-guitarist Mick Collins, front man of the seminal Detroit-bred garage units The Dirtbombs and The Gories, and drummer-vocalist Bob Bert, whose skin work has distinguished albums by Sonic Youth, Pussy Galore, Lydia Lunch’s Retrovirus, and Jon Spencer and the HITmakers.
Recorded and engineered by Mark C. of Live Skull at his studio, Summer Forever and Ever finds Powers playing piano and the Kaoss touch-pad effects unit and Collins playing synthesizer, in addition to their usual instruments. The album reflects the same eclectic mix of musical styles heard on the debut. References and sometimes even direct quotes from sources as diverse as the Andrea True Connection, Captain Beefheart, the Count Five, and Eurythmics leap out of the speakers.
Kid Congo Powers and The Near Death Experience Live in St. Kilda was a rare appearance at which Powers was backed by a group other than his longtime combo The Pink Monkey Birds. The November 9th, 2019 show at the titular Australian city’s MEMO Music Hall was mounted to launch Nine Parts Water, One Part Sand: Kim Salmon and the Formula for Grunge, the autobiography of the singer-songwriter-guitarist of the famed Antipodean band The Scientists (whose most recent album Negativity was released by In The Red in 2021).
The hard-rocking group that ended up backing Powers on the show flashed some storied credentials of their own. Guitarist Harry Howard is the brother of the late Rowland S. Howard of the Bad Seeds, and played with Rowland in Crime and the City Solution and These Immortal Souls. Harry’s partner Edwina Preston is a keyboardist, a member of ATOM and the tribute unit Pop Crimes (playing the songs of Rowland S. Howard), and a well-known novelist and nonfiction writer. The group’s other couple, bassist Dave Graney and drummer Clare Moore, are well known Down Under for their earlier groups The Moodists and the Coral Snakes.
The evening featured the Pink Monkey Birds’ “LSDC,” “Black Santa,” and “La Llorona,” The Gun Club’s “Sex Beat,” and The Cramps’ “New Kind of Kick” and “Garbage Man.” The Near Death Experience’s repertoire was represented by “The Only One, “”She Doesn’t Like It,” and “When He Finds Out”; the latter song was penned by the late Spencer P. Jones of Beasts of Bourbon. The night also included an eclectic batch of cover versions: East L.A. rock ’n’ roll heroes Thee Midniters’ “I Found a Peanut,” ‘60s girl group The Shangri-Las’ “Sophisticated Boom Boom,” and proto-punk noise terrorists Suicide’s “Diamonds, Fur Coat, Champagne.” The rousingly received MEMO Music Hall gig served as a homecoming for ex-Bad Seed Powers, who also played a legendary Aussie tour with the Gun Club in 1983 as The Scientists’ opening act.
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