A Particularly Vicious Rumor, Self-titled LP

Listen to APVR on our compilation.

It was a real thrill to watch these guys perform last week in Austin. We Austinites got to see a real live New Orleans crowd transported into our own scene because of the hurricane evacuations, and the often-vacant Carousel lounge became a packed house of fantastic southern transients, a dark carnival world of dancing refugees lounging in the parking lot with their open containers as if Texas rules had been suspended that night for A Particularly Vicious Rumor. On tour with Crooks and Nannies, they also played with another New Orleans staple named Ratty Scurvix. A truly strange and amazing night.

I had met them only two weeks earlier on their home turf. Melvin's in New Orleans--now underwater--was the dive bar where I first heard Crooks and Nannies and met Kid Twist and Miss O. from APVR. Former Austinites themselves, they sent me their self-titled LP which drew me immediately back into that dark New Orleans dancing underworld. To see them play it live and watch Carousel break out into a gloomy jazz dance spectacle was to fully understand songs like "Kuruku," where Miss O. sighs, "Oh me, I'm unravelling ever so slowly..."

A Particularly Vicious Rumor is a two-person operation with Miss O. on piano and vocals and Kid Twist on drums. But the effect both recorded and live is a completely full sound spectrum (and swell for dancing.) The piano parts are influenced byt the world of jazz around them in New Orleans but there is something dark there; references to dissolving, drowning, spinning, plummeting, and unravelling all contribute to this gloom, the feeling of things breaking apart or ceasing to exist. O.'s circular ostinatos and Twist's quick, precision rhythms combine to form a sound world of their own, something I'd expect to hear if I were being chased through a carnival (by vampire clowns, maybe) and stumbled into the house of mirrors.

A Particularly Vicious Rumor will be on tour with Crooks and Nannies until mid-October. Check their myspace page for their tour schedule, to hear more music, see more pictures, make friends with them, and all that good stuff.

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