Guernica

Hello person with an obvious interest in music. This is a short and semi-sterile, fully-detached biography of the music project named Guernica. You can send me yours if you feel like it, it only seems fair to me you get the opportunity as well. A more elaborated and personal biography is available online, if you would be interested. With more exhaustive information on who we are as people and where and who we've played with, for example.

So what have we here? A Brussels-based independent, guitar-oriented awesome foursome re-releasing their first record (mini-lp of half an hour) in the beautiful domain which we know as the modern nation-state France. I intentionally write independent because I am sincerely annoyed how much of a fashionable and meaningless marketing term it has become. I mention guitar-oriented in the sense that interlocking, arpeggiated guitars are very prominent in the songwriting process. Although I am an 80's man myself, people seem to place us amongst 90's indie and college rock. Especially Pavement is a recurring comparison. Which I think is fine, I personally don't like Pavement but hey, people need references and if they like Pavement who cares, right? Other bands include Blonde Redhead, American Football, Unwound, Trail of Dead, Fugazi of the late 90's, Sonic Youth of the mid 90's, ... There are others, but they make little sense to me.

We have a varying intensity in the structure of our songs but there is always a certain flow to keep it coherent. We love to hide the complexity behind such a flow. A trained ear will notice, but most people will not hear that there is at least one modulation or time signature change (or interlapping) every single song. The lyrics are not coming from a pretentious philosophy student (as one critic put it), they are simply sardonic and examine more associations than just teenage lust or romantic relationships. Or at least more thoroughly. A literary laureate, I want to elevate the writing of lyrics to a more challenging level. We also like to challenge ourselves, that's why our live shows differ from soft, whispery chamber settings to full-on noise freak out fests. It appears that we are not too hard for those who like it softer and not too soft for those who like it loud and hard. A band for both the Madonna and Minor Threat fan.

We're not keen on selling ourselves to someone, but that is actually THE point of promo texts. In that respect, it's worth mentioning our long EP or short LP, "Who are your songs for?" is selling out as I write. Only months after its initial release in Belgium on the Vlas Vegas imprint and that in these downloading days (which we encourage, by the way). We were also genuinely surprised and honoured that the national press gave us a warm welcome. That wasn't necessarily a goal whereas it is for most other bands, to us it just sort of happened. We were named Download of the Week, Band to Watch, Monthly Candy, etcetera by the papers and the radio gave us daily airplay in the winter. It's quite unique for a belgian band to reach Studio Brussels "5 Artists of the Moment" status, but we received the honours two weeks in a row. Alongside for example Santogold but also your fellow countryman Alan Braxe who couldn't be more worlds apart from what we do, but hey, I think it's totally hilarious and just great.

All the reviews (from Metro to small blogs) were positive to very positive and all shared the eager looking-forward to our next record. I hope you will like it as well, miss or mister. We're very glad and thankful Michel from Greed has taken the effort to introduce us in France. Okay, that's it for me. Thanks for reading and take care!

The Michael 
June 2008