Caspian Hat Dance: Masters of the Face-guitar and Smack-smack-drum

Hey Keith...Here's a return volley.

Yesterday you turned me on to Den Flygande Bokrullen. Another foot stomping band I've been wanting to hoist pints in honor of is the Caspian Hat Dance. You can here lots of sample tracks at their Myspace Page, YouTube & their home page. In particular, check out the fine "Russian Hora" on MySpace page. According to their website, the Caspians play "original and traditional gypsy music, klezmer music, misbehaved drunken village wedding music, southern italian pizzica, and pretty songs sung in Roma on Bolivian mountaintops." Yeah. that.
Caspian Hat Dance - Russian Sher [2007.2.3 utrecht]


So, as I've demonstrated many times, I love bands self-indulgent self-descriptions. They do absolutely nothing to convey what a band sounds like, but speak volumes about how a band thinks about their music and what they want us to associate with their music. The Caspians have one of the best I've seen lately (this is swiped from their Myspace page)..

You arrive just as the sun is setting and the landscape is getting dark. You wonder briefly how you ended up at a remote village wedding in Rumainia but can't seem to remember. Half the guests are crying, half are laughing, most are drinking and every last one is dancing. The bride is delirious, the moon is gently relentless and the tambourines are spinning you around and around. The musicians play for hours on end, stopping occasionally only to suck on a bleeding finger. At first it looks like chaos. On closer inspection, it's irresponsibly happy, carefully painful music. On closer inspection yet, it's really just chaos. You are vaguely aware of someone's legs getting tired, and it doesn't seem to matter any more that your memories are sad. Just before you pass out under a tree, you hear yourself mutter a phrase you never heard before: 'Caspian Hat Dance' ..."

That's poetry that is. Where's my bottle of Gentleman Jack?