For your Consideration...
JULY FOURTH TOILET
PRESENTS BALLS BOOGIE FEATURING ME AND BOBBY MCGEE, PLUS!: KENTUCKY
WHORE AND MANY OTHERS!
- What is the album? One third hard driving basement boogie, one third faux Eastern but 10,000 miles up experimental instros, one third wonky ballads, one percent je ne sais quoi, and zero bullshit.
- July Fourth Toilet may just be the most lucid yet visceral musical act in existence!
- Legendary long-time West Coast Canadian musical act July Fourth Toilet has been doing it their way since 1994.
- July Fourth Toilet have made it their mandate to never perform the same show twice. Show themes for this multi-piece, multi-instrumental co-ed bargain basement technicolour variety revue have included thirty second songs and medleys, as well as tributes to tea, candy, Davy Jones and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, “Their Satanic Majesties Request”, September 11th, and legendary songwriter Paul Williams (with Paul Williams himself enjoying the show from ten feet away).
- July Fourth Toilet ritualistically combines and transcends pop songcraft, versatile musicianship, performance, non-musicians, and pure improvisation to create their unique and inimitable sound and persona.
- Named by Gregg Turkington and John Singer of the anarchic and confrontationally comedic experimental two piece Zip Code Rapists.
- They have performed with the Sun City Girls, Zip Code Rapists, Caroliner, Bobby Conn, Destroyer, The New Pornographers, Three Day Stubble, Old Time Relijun, Mecca Normal and other top acts.
- Their first album, self released, was intended to make people feel warm inside with its sense of soft experimental psych-pop. Entitled Something For Everyone it received critical raves and was treasured by those who got a chance to hear it.
- Tell us more about this new album! For their follow-up album July Fourth Toilet set up a series of obstructions to overcome in order to create greatest listenable unlistenable album of all time using an old semi-generic budget label record as a loose template. Some of the best art and entertainment is created from barriers.
- What about the music? July Fourth Toilet begins their obstacle course of an album with an eery rendition of the most common song they could think of: Kris Kristofferson’s “Me And Bobby McGee.” What follows are original numbers beginning with five hard driving boogie rock tracks with G Funk keyboards. To maximize listening pleasure and recording efficiency, the band used the same backing track of one of those songs and added new lyrics and vocals et al to create an entirely new song (“Thanks Drugs”). This is followed by four or five experimental non-rock based tracks created by different teamings of members of July Fourth Toilet. It all ends in a lush ballad of hope and renewal, a gentle, shaky exhale from such relentless themes of unbridled machismo.
- The album is wrapped up in the unwieldy title July Fourth Toilet presents Balls Boogie Featuring Me And Bobby McGee, Plus!: Kentucky Whore And Many Others. So many factors were important, July Fourth Toilet wanted every song to be well crafted and to have the album flow in a new (utilizing restructured fragments of old) and unexpected manner on rather different pinpoints of the musical map, to have it all be cohesive to the unsuspecting, a story of overcoming difficulties for the listeners’ enjoyment.
