Some ’80s revivals are awesome, like resurrected Atari 2600 games and post-millennial Duran Duran concerts. Other times, we’d rather they crawled back into the two-liter bottle of New Coke they came from. Gil Mantera’s Party Dream skew much more towards the awesome, but with plenty of sugary, throwaway charm to boot.
Gil Mantera and Ultimate Donny, a pair of blond, Ohio-bred brothers, make up this new wave/electronica outfit whose output ranges between unpolished, electro-trash and R&B-style swoon. Since 2000, the duo have been captivating unsuspecting live audiences by donning brightly colored banana hammocks, bouncing on trampolines, and wrapping themselves in tin foil. On the new studio release, Bloodsongs, Mantera and Donny’s bombastic energy shoots out of speakers like digital bullets from your old plastic Nintendo gun.
Bloodsongs enticingly straddles decades, pairing arena-rock guitars and sounds straight out da’ Casio, with sugary lyrics sung with wildly over-emotive vocals. Sample lyric: “I’m having fun on water slides / I’m feeling great and getting high” (“Bunz Therapy”). Like Electric Six before them, Gil Mantera’s Party Dream rule out no sound or instrument as long as the resulting track gets the party started.
So what is Gil Mantera’s Party Dream? Spandex-clad bodies, rocking the dancefloor to Kraftwerk and shotgunning PBRs in the parking lot.
Gil Mantera’s Party Dream tour dates:
2/24, Cleveland, OH (Grog Shop) 3/15, Austin, TX (Emo’s — SXSW day party)3/15, Austin, TX (The Parish — SXSW)3/18, Tuscon, AZ (TBA)3/19, Los Angeles, CA (Troubadour)*3/20, San Francisco, CA (Bottom of the Hill)*3/21, San Francisco, CA (The Independent)*3/23, Portland, OR (Doug Fir)*3/24, Vancouver, BC (Richards on Richards)*3/25, Seattle, WA (Neumos)*3/28, Minneapolis, MN (7th Street Entry)*3/30, Chicago, IL (Metro)*3/31, Cleveland, OH (Beachland Ballroom)*4/3, Rochester, NY (Bug Jar)4/5, New York, NY (Bowery Ballroom)*4/6, Brooklyn, NY (Northsix)4/7, Philadelphia, PA (First Unitarian Church)*4/8, Haverford, PA (Haverford College)*(* – supporting Art Brut)
Gil Mantera’s Party Dream official site
