NAKED GIANTS start the Barro Fest 2023 with a huge download of Rock out of this world in El Valle de Antón, Coclé, Panama

 

NAKED GIANTS start the Barro Fest 2023 with a huge download of Rock out of this world in El Valle de Antón, Coclé, Panama

Today, January 27, 2023, the NAKED GIANTS start the Barro Fest 2023 with a huge rock discharge to abduct the Diablos Cucuás in the Anton Valley, in Coclé, Panama. The rock monsters from the city of Seattle in Washington, United States have been gaining seats and are now international. Michael Rietmulder describes them in the Seattle Times.

It's been two and a half years since Seattle's Naked Giants released their steamy-headed debut album South By Southwest (remember music festivals?), but it might as well have been twice as many years as a band.

Over a two-year stint, the frenetic garage rockers pulled double duty on the road with Car Seat Headrest, opening for Seattle indie-rock heavyweights and joining Car Seat's touring band as their crowds poured in. they grew from clubs to theaters. As leg after leg of the tour passed, the hard-hitting young trio turned up for several concerts in their hometown, sounding ever sharper and louder. It soon became clear that the Naked Giants were no longer the same green 19-year-olds relaxing in the studio while recording their "SLUFF" LP.

In the age of COVID, an airtight live set doesn't go as far as it used to, but with their weeks-long follow-up album "The Shadow", Naked Giants certainly bear the mark of a band that grew. in the back of a Sprinter van.

“We're a little more calculated,” says bassist and vocalist Gianni Aiello. "We started out just playing for fun, we'd just jam and rock out and that was all we needed."

There are certainly plenty of high-octane rock-outs on their second album. The rowdy surf-punk number "Walk of Doom" will leave Rainier's club floors covered one day, as will the boisterous "High School (Don't Like Them)." But the Seattle powerhouse trio, complete with guitarist/singer Grant Mullen and drummer Henry LaVallee, push themselves in a series of new directions, to varying degrees of surprise, on the record produced by The Decemberists' Chris Funk.

There's glamorous synth-heavy dance rock and leg-stretching stoner rock that sets up a hazy, dreamy sendoff to "Song For When You Sleep," all peppered into an album that never feels too giddy. The biggest bend is the U2-inspired ballad "Turns Blue," informed by repeat listens to "Joshua Tree" in the van. “I realized that 'With or Without You' is one of the great songs of the 1980s and I tried to copy it a bit,” says Aiello.

The new look is the result of the band (and their managers) challenging themselves "to try to dig deep into what we want to say with each song," says Mullen, and those days on the road playing the most introspective tunes of Car Seat Headrest, a band in the midst of an exploratory phase of their own. That and the added distance from the band members' teenage years also found vocalists Aiello and Mullen being a bit more intentional with their lyrics, "understanding that it doesn't have to be just a fun, pointless party all the time", says Aiello.

"With 'SLUFF' or 'Everybody Thinks They Know (But No One Really Knows)', we were just doing these fun, silly songs," he says. “But now, as adults, we are dealing with things that really affect us, like the overstimulation of social media and the ever-developing political mess in which we are directly involved.”

Speaking of trouble, the days of living without concerts and without touring have not been easy financially for the band, as independent artists earn most of their income by playing shows. To help soften the blow, Naked Giants recently became one of 10 Seattle acts to receive $5,000 grants through Black Fret Seattle, a non-profit meant to support local artists. Naked Giants performs Wednesday (8pm, Sept. 16) as part of a virtual concert series sponsored by Black Fret Seattle and Nectar Lounge, the Fremont club that has been one of the city's most committed quarantine streamers since the closure. Through mid-November, the exhibit features fellow grant recipients Stephanie Anne Johnson & the Hidogs (Sept. 23), Smokey Brights (Sept. 30), and The Grizzled Mighty (October 2).

Not exactly the real-life celebration local fans expect from one of Seattle's best live bands. But that was life in the middle of a pandemic.

“Suddenly we have no idea what we're doing,” says Aiello. “We have gotten used to So much to the way the industry works: you put out an album, you tour, you're selling your [expletive] along the way to make money. All of that is completely gone now. It's an experience like a fish out of water."

And now in 2023, in Panama, they come as if they were aliens to the already famous Barro Fest in Panama. As Gianni the vocalist says, "we are living a WOODSTOCK in Panama".