Dave Segal on Sir Richard Bishop:

Sir Richard Bishop & His Freak of Araby Ensemble, Oaxacan

(Crocodile) As part of Seattle's Sun City Girls, one of underground music's most revered bands, Sir Richard Bishop usually played guitar while masked and costumed. He, brother Alan Bishop, and the late drummer Charlie Gocher gained a reputation for upturning conventional notions of live performance. At a Triple Door show earlier this decade, for example, they hit golf balls into the crowd, spouted virulent anti- American sociopolitical commentary while roaming around the elegant dinner theater, and wore Osama bin Laden masks during the height of his reign as Most Wanted Terrorist.

Sun City Girls' live unpredictability also funneled into their recordings, which varied wildly in style and quality. Omnivorous genre hybridizers and assimilators of many nations' musics, Sun City Girls toggled between iconoclasm and reverence, while filtering everything through a warped beatnik/mystic sensibility that unfailingly provoked strong reactions. At their best (Torch of the Mystics; 330,003 Crossdressers from Beyond the Rig Veda; Bright Surroundings Dark Beginnings), SCG made some of the most transcendent, third-eye-popping music ever

Also in Up & Coming:

VNV Nation, War Tapes

(Showbox at the Market) I thought Hamburg, Germany—based VNV Nation were glowering industrial-electronic ruffians, judging from the stream of promos I used to receive from genre stronghold Metropolis Records. But while I wasn't paying attention, VNV Nation drastically changed. The duo's new album, Of Faith, Power and Glory, sounds like a slightly more masculine Erasure and Dead or Alive, with melodramatic melodies redolent of new-wave bands like the Call (I hate that I remember them) and much modern trance. VNV Nation are unabashed romantics who use heroically galloping rhythms and sincerely overwrought strings that beg for big-budget Hollywood scenery to accentuate. It's a rich sound, for sure—maybe too rich. DAVE SEGAL

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