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Bottle Up and Go

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Location: Middletown, CT

Website: http://www.myspace.com/bottleupandgoband

Bio: BOTTLE UP & GO formed in the dank basement cage of a peeling wooden-framed house on the campus of Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT. Take ... (more) a closer look at the scene that surrounds this small and unassuming liberal arts school and you'll see a burgeoning musical environment that strikes the balance between high art and primal energy.

"I believe there is something pent up at our school," says BOTTLE UP AND GO drummer Fareed Sajan. "People want something loud, but still intelligent and doused with meaning or, perhaps, a tradition that is larger than what is current to our times."

Sajan and singer/songwriter/guitarist, Keenan Mitchell, took inspiration for BOTTLE UP AND GO from chain-gang blues, slave-song howls, murder ballads and bootleg whiskey. "Indie sometimes falls to the mercy of being too soft spoken and heavy on the melodic emphasis. It somehow doesn't have the primal urges and roots we want. Adapting blues in a punk/post-punk mindset is something that feels natural to us."

BOTTLE UP AND GO's live show features Keenan's grating, art-damaged slide guitar work and impassioned, frothing-at-the-mouth vocals, with Fareed pounding heavily and crashing into the drum set to fiercely accentuate rhythmic intricacies. Keenan notes that their music is "loud and drunk and direct.” He adds, “We like to see people standing up right in front and moving their bodies." This is certainly not the cheap, white boy blues you've heard a million times before and winced at. It's the primal call of tradition; echoes of Charlie Patton, Blind Willie Johson, Leadbelly and even Hound Dog Taylor... filtered, fucked and warped by the insanity of our modern age.

Documenting music this raw required an equally raw approach. The songs that would become the These Bones EP were recorded at the Eclectic Literary Society, an old mansion on the campus of Wesleyan. Keenan and Fareed set up their instruments on opposite ends of a huge ballroom with a wonderfully natural, reverberant sound and fired through all the songs in six drunken hours. "I think a few hours in the studio captures our sound better than a few months” says Keenan adding, “What could we practice for that long?" BOTTLE UP AND GO emerged from the mansion-turned-studio with a recording capturing the immediacy and passion of their live performance; the true sound of musicians without being glossed over by studio band-aids or digital tricks.

Mitchell's tales of heartache, hard times and hard partying remind us all of how little have changed in the past 100 years of western music. "I guess nothing ever changes, really," adds Fareed "people still get drunk, and fight and cheat and fall in and out of love." These familiar themes resonate on entirely new levels in the 21st century, as technology has left us more lonely, alienated and depressed than ever before, leaving culture to die a slow and painful death. After all, wasn't the blues THE original cry to be heard amongst tyranny and oppressive forces? If nothing else, BOTTLE UP AND GO are paying homage to blues, embodying its particular expression in the face of darkness.

This is more than just the blues, its depression. (less)