WHAT’S ON NOVEMBER: Snarky Puppy Announce Immigrance Tour coming to Barrowlands in November
Snarky Puppy, the three-time GRAMMY-winning genre-defying collective, have announced they will tour the UK in November 2019, in support of their album Immigrance. They will appear at Glasgow Barrowlands on 16th November.
“The band is so excited about bringing 11 new songs to the UK on our upcoming tour. Of course we’ll be mixing them in with material from previous albums (including some very old songs we haven’t played in years), but it will be really special sharing the new ones with the audience who first welcomed us to Europe in 2012.” says bandleader Michael League.
The video for new single ‘Bad Kids To The Back’ was inspired by films like Richard Linklater’s Waking Life, Ralph Bakshi’s American Pop and Disney’s 1937 classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and utilizes rotoscoped visuals to turn an in-studio performance into one of the wildest animated videos you will see this year. Animator/co-director Michaël Alcaras drew frame-by-frame over live footage of the band recording the song in studio (shot by the video’s other co-director, Stella K), and turned it into an eye-popping four minutes and forty-five seconds. The Snarky horn section suddenly have animal heads; band members shoot lasers from their eyes and tall buildings dance along to the song’s hypnotic grooves.
Like their last album, 2016’s GRAMMY-winning Culcha Vulcha, Immigrance is a studio project, and it features most of the same musicians. And though it shares that project’s ace musicianship and dynamic, kinetic spirit, it is also rawer and moodier than its predecessor. Several of the compositions put a new-found emphasis on delivering simpler, streamlined impact, and bassist, composer and bandleader Michael League, as producer on the album, left in the tiny flubs and unvarnished textures that accompany great organic performances.
Throughout its countless gigs and dozen previous albums, Snarky Puppy’s not-so-secret weapon has been diversity. After all, what better way to make all-embracing music than to utilise musicians from every corner of the U.S. in addition to Argentina, Japan, Canada, the U.K. and elsewhere? So with Immigrance, Snarky Puppy is essentially practicing what it’s preached all along. “The band itself is a representation of what we’re trying to express musically,” League explains. “That people from different places can bring their various strengths and experiences, and how that can be beautiful and cohesive.”
A touring dynamo who have played to thousands of fans at shows on six continents, Snarky Puppy recently hosted the GroundUP Music Festival on Miami Beach, FL on February 8-10th, with a line-up that included Snarky Puppy on all three nights (performing songs from Immigrance live for the first time), David Crosby, Andrew Bird, Tank and the Bangas, Lalah Hathaway, Richard Bona and more.
