The Bemsha Swing Unleash New Album 'The Expectation and Experience Of Dissonance' + Compilation

Just when we think The Bemsha Swing are back, they pull the rug out: tonight's album release show at Tāmaki Makaurau's Cupid Bar will be the "anti-bop beat" duo's last gig for the foreseeable future. Half the group is heading overseas to Germany, but the 2.0 formation of Shane Warbrooke (A Crude Mechanical) and Brian Purington (Swallow The Rat) leave the world an overload of riches. They've unfurled eleven track album of brand new songs The Expectation and Experience Of Dissonance, the project's first long player in twelve years (!), plus a sonic document of "previously unreleased and out of print Bemsha material", This is How We Say Everything We Could Never Say.

Including recent SRN hits 'Kintsugi Kids', 'Empty Leather' and latest single 'Destroyed Chords', Warbrooke and Purington tangle strings and smash guitars on The Expectation and Experience Of Dissonance — an album "constructed around a central theme of bringing the experience of traumatic events into one’s overall psyche, and rebuilding the damage with the help of unashamed joy in the minutiae of the personal world." Reliably robotic samples from Artie and The Doctor (both drum machines used by The Bemsha Swing in a former life) bind together and drive onwards the Tāmaki-based pair's cacophony, lurching from spiky post-panic-punk philosophising (sprawling out around the eight minute mark on 'Transfixed_Transformed' and 'Bitte, Sweet') to scorched noisescape balladry.

The Bemsha Swing's accompanying compilation This Is How We Say Everything We Could Never Say is also a tightrope walk of textural rawness and intense focus. Featuring tunes familiar to fans from their now inaccessible Bop! and Communique EPs, the collection also features a generosity of unreleased demos, selected live recordings (including an acoustic performance of 'Dead Eye Kids' on 95bFM) and a wild yet passionate take on 'I Wanna Dance With Somebody' by Whitney Houston. Thats a whole lot of The Bemsha Swing to sink your fangs into until their next manifestation, possibly in the year 2037? Celebrate their vision of 'Radical Sincerity" at tonight's send-off gig, featuring special guests Wrong Things and Moppy!...

The Bemsha Swing Album Release w/ Wrong Things and Moppy!
Friday 2nd May - Cupid Bar, Auckland
Tickets on sale HERE via UTR

'The Expectation and Experience Of Dissonance' and 'This is How We Say Everything We Could Never Say' are out now on major streaming platforms.