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Gig Review

Piney Gir
Shortwave Cinema, Bermondsey

Article written by Ged M - Nov 6, 2011

As venues for album launches go, a cinema is probably one of the less likely places, but the compact Shortwave in Bermondsey, showing Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure after Piney’s performance, seem very appropriate to Piney’s artistic intentions. The show starts with a poet, and mime from the Juggling Spinster, who turns out to be neither but is surreally funny, before the main attraction.

Geromino is probably the best album that Piney has released. The yodelling and Doris Day melody at the start of ‘The Gift’ make you think that this is regular Piney, channelling the apple-pie influences of her Midwestern formative years but then the band explode into a carnival blast of sound and it feels like Piney Redux. Their expedition to Rob Campanella’s studio in LA seems to have given the band a new set of American influences, from the 60s folk-rock of ‘Would You Be There’ to the garage-rock riffs on ‘The Longest Day of Spring’ and the Sir Douglas Quartet-style twangy tex-mex of ‘La De Dah’. There are also more elegant arrangements (Campanella’s studio was apparently a treasure trove of esoteric instrumentation) so that the trumpets and tango rhythms of ‘Say Goodbye’ put you in mind of Beirut. Country Piney might still be in evidence but the weird wheezing sounds on ‘The River’ suggest that, while she’s “just a girl from Kansas City”, she has samplers and synths at her disposal now.

But the peach of the songs, and one of the top Piney tunes of all time, is ‘Oh Lies’. Presented tonight both live and as a scary video (it is 48 hours before Halloween after all), it’s a soulful 60s-sounding mid-tempo pop ballad a la Lesley Gore or Dusty that rips into your cerebellum courtesy of a pounding piano riff and a killer melody. It overshadows all tonight, repays repeat hearings, and tops off another great performance from the always efflorescent Piney.

Links:
http://www.pineygir.com/
http://damagedgoods.co.uk/band/?c=Piney-Gir
http://www.myspace.com/pineygir