The Melismatics – Rendezvous Bar
Feb 14th
The Melismatics are a nationally signed act from Minneapolis. This indie-pop band is full of high energy and good times
Ha Ha Tonka opens tour with blistering show in KC
Feb 13th
For a band that regularly name drops Dostoevsky and sings about socio-economic hardships in the south, you think Ha Ha Tonka would destroy anyone that stood between them and a simple trivia contest.
With six bachelor degrees between their four-piece band, they should have easily won the Record Bar’s weekly Thursday night trivia. After enduring over an hour of wrong answers and missed opportunities, Team Tonk finally pulled out enough responses to end the night in a respectable third place.
“Hell of a way to start a tour,” Lead singer Brian Roberts joked. “It’s going to be all downhill from here, right?”
For a band that tallied over 150 shows last year, the Kansas City via The Ozarks group uses nights like this to build morale and to simply have fun.
“We’re a group of brothers,” Guitarist Brett Anderson said. “We make it through all of this every night and we take it as far as we can. It always feels good to be home though. We couldn’t kick off a tour any place but here in our hometown.”
The band has been steadily gaining national attention with last year’s Novel Sounds of the Nouveau South including an appearance at Lollapalooza and several glowing reviews from the likes of SPIN and Rolling Stone. With this tour, they will cross the country twice and make an appearance at this year’s SXSW festival in Austin, TX. This could be the tour that breaks them out of the Midwest for good.
But of course, the first show always sets the tone of how the rest of the tour goes. From the first notes of Pendergast Machine and on, the band was already approaching the manic energy of a band in mid-tour form but doing it with the intensity that is needed to convey some of the rather dark themes of their last album.
Ha Ha Tonka didn’t pull any punches in recreating the rich, harmonic sounds of Novel Sounds. The band huddled together around the front mics to put a four-part harmony together for Hold my Feet to the Fire which was met with an fifth voice from the near capacity crowd. Even with the band’s deeper catalog cuts from Buckle in the Bible Belt, the crowd kept up with nearly every word.
Even with their last album a mere six month in the rear view, the band was already pulling out over five new songs for the crowd.
“We aren’t recording or releasing an album anytime soon,” Roberts said. “But we always have to keep working and moving what we want people to see forward. Always.”
When this tour finishes in April, the band will be taking a short hiatus before hitting the road for a second leg this summer, including possible stops on the summer festival circuit.
“It is always incredible to see crowds that big and to hit that kind of audience,” Anderson said. “Incredible and strange. [laugh] If we can get there again, it will be fantastic.”
With the phenomenal ability to weave tales of the south from a time nearly forgotten and to make it relevant and above all, personal, to today’s audience, Ha Ha Tonka will be able to take that inevitable next step into the national spotlight.
Ha Ha Tonka tonight @ The Record Bar
Feb 4th
Myself and Dave Hon will be covering Ha Ha Tonka at the Record Bar tonight. We will be doing live updates via twitter throughout the show. Self described as “foot-stompin, indie-rock” this band hails from Springfield, Missouri and is starting to gain national attention with their breakthrough album Novel Sounds of the Nouveau South.
Tickets are still available, doors open @ 4. Ghostly and Tom York open.
We will post our coverage Friday including pictures and interview with the band. This is not a show to be missed guys.
picture courtesy of hahatonkamusic.com
Obligatory first post, from the seventh layer of hello!
Jan 23rd
Posted by Ryan Richardson in Commentary
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I am sitting here in my home office, typing the very first blog post to grace the Griffon News ever.
Man, thats a serious jump in technology for us. Over the last few years our newsroom has accepted that eventually we would start pushing serious content onto our online edition and finally, that is becoming a reality. Since I joined the staff in 2007, we have progressively worked towards producing video and photo packages and now, as you read these words, we are diving head-first into the realm of blogging. Myself and our Editor-in-Chief Alison Norris are taking the lead and putting content into the hands of our readers.
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