Almost Always
(Tomboyfriend)
Hotel Supermart
(Tomboyfriend)
Anything Can Be Loved
(Tomboyfriend)
The End of Poverty
(Tomboyfriend)
Big In Afghanistan
(Tomboyfriend)
Romantic Shut In
(Tomboyfriend)
Hardboiled Wonderland
(Tomboyfriend)
Karaoke Singer
(Tomboyfriend)
Goldfinch Gluespoo
(Tomboyfriend)
Lovesickness
(Tomboyfriend)
MEDIA RELEASE
MEDIA RELEASE - TOMBOYFRIEND - DON'T GO TO SCHOOL
"It's one charming motherfucker. But a motherfucker nonetheless."
- SaidTheGramophone.com (on single "The End of Poverty")
After a long, merciless tease, the first Tomboyfriend studio album, Don't Go to School, is coming from Blocks Recording Club, the Toronto co-op label that's home to Owen Pallett, Fucked Up, Bob Wiseman and Kids on TV.
Tomboyfriend is a "performance-art whirlwind" (Eye Weekly) led by Toronto poet-songwriter Ryan Kamstra that plays politically charged glam-rock about androgyny, karaoke, the wealth divide, Esperanto wars and what to do about romantic love.
For the task, Kamstra recruited a small army of other artists, not necessarily trained musicians, from a mix of Toronto's diverse cultural scenes. “It was important for me to make a 'community band' that was viable as music and still had artistic pretensions on top of that,” he says. “The songs mutated with the performers.”
With his compound-eyed storytelling sensibility and shamelessly theatrical singing, Kamstra can be at once heart-rippingly moving, intellectually vicious and absurdly camp. He's abetted by the teen-runaway cabaret vocals of illustrator Marlena Zuber and the Elton John-gone-Gaga keyboard stylings of painter-critic Sholem Krishtalka, along with a changing cast of scientists, burlesque performers, lesbian boxers, graphic designers and more. Together they flagrantly abuse Auto-Tune and rip off Beatles choruses. Nothing is sacred but everything is sanctified.
Spin magazine has put Tomboyfriend's stage show - often including ragtag costumes, fake blood, pigeon masks and participatory dance moves - in the ranks of Dan Deacon and Of Montreal. The New York Times Magazine selected its 2008 YouTube video (by visual artist Margaux Williamson) as one of the best things to see on a screen that year.
Critics and blogs have compared the band to Le Tigre or called it "smarter than Roxy Music, and younger," and Owen Pallett chose their single "End of Poverty" as one of his Pride soundtrack picks for the summer of 2010.
Mix and mastered by Matt Smith (Nifty, Les Mouches), Don't Go to School includes a universally relatable boy-meets-girl/world-comes-to-end epic ("Almost/Always"), a poignantly grotesque ode to a boy hustler ("Goldfinch Gluespoo"), a manic fit of first-world hubris ("Big in Afghanistan"), the catchiest single ever written about enterprise zones and urban planning ("The End of Poverty") and eight more shout-along mini-masterpieces.
Tomboyfriend will play hooky from their multifarious day jobs and hit the road to support the record in 2011. Dates to be announced. For further data, press links, video and more, visit Tomboyfriend.com.
