Familiarize Yourself

Once there were four kids / they were walking in the park one day / when an old man came up to them and asked / I have three cats called Agatha, Agnus and Albert / I live all alone with my cats, and every day I wonder… / do any of you kids like to play around? / And the kids all said “FUCK YEAH!” / and went back to the old man’s house to party.

And that’s how Bang Bang Eche was started.

So goes Bang Bang Eche‘s story, according to its subjects. The band, which hails from New Zealand, have a very clear goal: to get you to dance your pants off. Their sophomore EP, Sonic Death Cuntttt, features four songs – and their MySpace page many more – that accomplish that goal rather nicely. From “Fist Full of Dollars”‘s eerie buildup (and subsequent synthful explosion) to “Time Mismanagement”‘s irresistible, hooky guitar riffs to “4 to the Floor”‘s  lyrics which urge you to dance until you can dance no more, it’s fun from start to end. Afterall, “eche” is a Maori word loosely translated as “awesome partytimes”.

The musical brain behind the operation is T’Nealle Worsley, whom the New Zealand press has referred to as NZ’s “answer to Karen O” (a statement with which I do not wholeheartedly agree, but I’m writing this article so clearly her musical talents caught my attention). Frontman/vocalist Zach Doney, guitarist Charlie Ryder, and drummer James Sullivan make up the rest of Bang Bang Eche (Worsley plays bass).

They kicked off Fall/Winter of 2009 with a show at CMJ where they did an in-studio performance for Seattle’s KEXP and landed on the station’s list of top 5 perfomances at the music conference alongside Lykke Li and Broken Social Scene. CMJ served as the start to a tour with legs in the U.S., the UK, France, and Germany. After a few local shows, the band heads back to the UK to continue rocking the dance-punk kids’ faces off.

Check out “4 to the Floor” below: