Jon Hanna would rather fiddle around on his laptop than talk to other people, but when Kanako Pooknyw started hanging out at the house he shared with one of her friends sometime prior to 2009, she wouldn’t let him hide. After a few months of smoking and playing board games and crafting, the idea of a band seemed to make sense. Pooknyw played drums and Hanna played guitar, so they really only needed a bassist, and before long they scooped up Pooknyw’s pal Abigail Ingram and became Broken Water.
The trio definitely digs alt-rock from the 80s and 90s as well as the vibe of their hometown, Olympia, but that doesn’t mean they’re a group of flannel-clad nostalgics. They’ve honed a distinctly haunted post-punk sound, and their upcoming album, Tempest, came from thoughts on “Russian punk-rock poets, the ocean, drowning, the Occupy movement, touring, nightmares, dreams, memories; relationships to privilege, substances, and other powers.” Tempest follows last year’s EP, Peripheral Star (TMT Review) and 2010’s TMT fave Whet LP, and you can check out the first single, “Drown,” here.
In case you were wondering (and I’m positive you were), Olympia had the world’s first soft-serve ice cream machine. I’m thinking when Tempest comes out on May 29 via Hardly Art, we should all get Blizzards to celebrate.
Tempest tracklist:
01. Drown
02. Coming Down
03. Orange Blossom Stains
04. Yanka Dyagileva
05. Underground
06. Thread to Connect
07. Paranoid
08. River Under River
09. Chantal Seder
10. When You Said
• Broken Water: http://www.myspace.com/brokenagua
• Hardly Art: http://hardlyart.com
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