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FIST CITY - Hunting You OUT NOW ON CASSETTE !!!!!!

greatescapefestival:

Fist City is heading to the UK to play the Great Escape Festival in May. swell times

check out more UK tour dates HERE

BORING KIDS!

New music video coming soon!

satanic weirdo cult-pals getting demonic up on some fire…

PS - fancy homepage all launched n stuff

x

Going to the UK! xoxooxox

UPCOMING SHOWS:

UPCOMING SHOWS:

  • Sat, Jan 19th: “Songs the Master Taught Us” Live-recorded covers show; Fist City, Teledrome @Tubby Dog. Calgary, AB
  • Thur, Jan 24th: Fist City, Teledrome, Bash Brothers @ Champion Jacks. Abbotsford, BC
  • Fri, Jan 25th: Fist City + More (details TBA) Vancouver, BC
  • Sat, Jan 26th:  Fist City, Teledrome, Bash Brothers @ Fan Tan Alley. Victoria, BC
  • Sun, Jan 27th:  Fist City, Teledrome, Bash Brothers @ Noise Floor. Ladysmith, BC
  • Friday, Feb 8th: Music Calgary Presents: HighKicks, Fist City, Lab Coast, Miesha & the Spanks @ Broken City. Calgary, AB

blahblahpat:

Went and saw FIST CITY last weekend, along side with The Famines. All around awesome show. : )”

mini-review: LP

Fist City “It’s 1983 Grow Up!”


(Black Tent) Raggedly elegant punk with new wave elements, an occasional sip of surf guitar, and some (gasp) 90s indie rock sprinkled in. Really good singing voices elevate already great songs to great+ level. I’m glad I could fit this fist!

Review - RAD Vinyl

radvinylrecords:

Fist City- It’s 1983 Grow Up! (Black Tent Press)

Buy it here: 

http://blacktentpress.com/item/22/FIST-CITY-Its-1983-GROW-UP-LP-CD

Black Tent Press made a good call when they pressed up 500 copies of “It’s 1983 Grow Up!” by Canadian punkers Fist City. Twelve jet fueled, short and to the point pop songs clouded in a lo-fi basement show sheen is the outcome. Catchy hooks for days with the best coming from “The Creeps” with the simple but effective “you give me the creeps” becoming instantly infectious. The signature punk rock snarling guitar and riotous drumming stay burning throughout the album, If you are a fan of classic groups like the Ramones and Sex Pistols or even newcomers No age you will find something to love about Fist City. The deranged psych surf stylings of “Endless Bummer” and the fist pumping “Never Bored” are just a few of the highlights that make for and endlessly spin worthy lp. 

Review - The Daily Choice

NOVEMBER 27, 2012 
The Daily Choice : Fist City – The Creeps

by 

I don’t know what a fist city is, but all of my images feel pretty wrong and awful and my therapist always says I should share the wrong and awful stuff, so here it goes:

1. A city where all the buildings aren’t buildings but fists with giant meaty, sausage fingers. There’s hair all over the knuckles and everyone’s offices are in the gross sweaty web-part between the curled fingers. Architects are pissed.

2. The urban equivalent of that game you played in high school, ‘The Gauntlet’, where a bunch of people stood across from each other in two lines and you’d run through and they’d hit you and kick you and when you made it to the end you got to become a part of the line and hit and kick other people. I guess by “game” I meant senseless act of pointless violence that only children can come up with. And this is a whole city of that.

3. Oh and lets not forget about old fist city. Yeah, you know what I’m talking about.

None of this even starts to describe Fist City though. This Fist City isn’t painful or architecturally awkward, oh no, it’s good natured punk rock deeply imbued with what sounds like the early stages of The Spin Doctors. Clearly that sounds like an insult, but it isn’t. This is peppy upbeat punk with just a taste of the boppy goodness that made 90s rock ‘n’ roll so goddamn earnest.

Fist City’s new album It’s 1983, Grow Up! is out now on Black Tent Press.

Weird Canada :: Review

November 20th, 2012

New Canadiana :: Fist City – Buried b/w Cryptic Transmissions

Fist City  Buried b/w Cryptic Transmissions

Yet another great band rides into my pinheaded eastern consciousness on the gust of a Chinook, and I like them awfully a lot. Fist City continue the national tradition of dirty and inventive acts bursting from the region, with their latest release channeling a singular sound through two songs that feel totally different. No easy feat. “Buried” is a classic surf-stomper in a shadowy vein with siblings Kier and Brittany Griffiths’ Jello-Biafra-meets-Kristen-Hersh vox lending a leathery urgency. “Cryptic Transmissions” lives up it its title — a blast of post-punk that boasts an almost malignant electricity. The same guitar tone that lent “Buried” its Batusi magic has now crawled into a sharper hollow zone. The tune feels frantic and breathless and desperate and at the same time perfectly dead.Pretty magical.

LP REVIEW:

November 8, 2012 by Jason Dean

Fist City : It’s 1983, Grow Up!

Fist City : It's 1983, Grow Up!About the only thing the Canadian band Fist City has in common with country singer Loretta Lynn, who wrote a song with the same name, is a raw, punk attitude of destroying anything that gets in your way.  Fist City comes out swinging on It’s 1983, Grow Up! with their own anti-authority aesthetic for a different millennium.

Fist City began in Lethbridge, Alberta and the band quickly became friends with Paul Lawton of The Ketamines who also is part owner and engineer at Mammoth Cave Studios, where they ended up recording their debut, Hunting You.  Covered in layers of fuzz, it was their own damaged hybrid of surf and punk.  On their latest, out on cult purveyors Black Tent Records, the band returned to record with Paul, whose own gritty garage aesthetic is a natural match for Fist City’s hyper, guitar-centric sound. But it’s roots still remained in stripped down challenging punk.  Lead singer Kier Griffith eerily resembles Ian Svenonius’ (QRO photos) high register blues and soul vocal style, along with The Make-Up’s (QRO photos) similar combination of disparate influences. But Fist City has a secret weapon in bassist and twin, Brittney, which gives the record it’s distinct, manic sound. Like the revolutionary D.C. band, they’re after something that lies beyond punk, the categorization is merely a way of thinking and an approach to creating outside traditional avenues instead of the typical three chords and anarchy.  Instead Fist City’s destructive streak is turned inward on the track, “Creeps”, in which Kier’s vibrato describes some bad, late night decisions over a bouncy tom beat, a ferocious attack that’s trying to bury the blues pain just under the surface.

Will you drive a little faster? / I want to die in a disaster

The classic story of an attraction for all the wrong reasons with their unusual, cavernous guitar distortion and Kier’s spitfire vocal that seem to come from separate claustrophobic spaces, but always finds ways to snap together in two minute bursts of epic pop-punk.

On “Endless Summer”, Kier delivers his vocals in an ethereal tone… an eerie approach in this devastating combination of cold and calculated jagged rhythms under the guise of this laid back, summer time jam.  This kind of duality might be attributed to working with a twin this closely, they could be just opposite enough to challenge each other’s approach musically, while hopefully remaining supportive in the same band…at least for now.  Evan Van Reekum, on guitar, is positively the driving force behind the album, which is propelled through his exacting energy that compliments Kier’s unique vocal ability. 

They have crafted catchy, easy to love, polished tracks.  Kier is railing against the world with real song craft and a meticulous post punk sound with pop-punk sensibilities.

“It’s 1983, Grow Up!” says a nameless authority figure… as if the year had anything to do with coming of age.   The grainy black and white photo of a brick wall on the cover, and their denim jacket ready logo, tells you this was punk all along.  It just sounds so damn good it’s hard to tell sometimes.

GET BENT REIVIEW

Review: Fist City - It’s 1983, Grow Up!

By Paul Blawat

Fist City did in fact adopt their moniker from the 1968 dust-up by Loretta Lynn. That’s where the similarities begin and end for these Lethbridge (aka “Hell”), AB rebelrousers. Their latest LP It’s 1983, Grow Up! is a complicated madness.

First off: THIS IS NOT A GARAGE ROCK RECORD!* There. What Fist City presents is a rather attuned, balanced punk rock record.** Discordant lightning like opening track “Boring Kids” is an excellent example of a song that reminds me of Jeffrey Lee Pierce’s latter-era Gun Club without sounding really anything like it. It captures that out of tune yet miraculously in tune essence. “The Creeps” is not a Social Distortion cover. It is, in fact, a hook-laden dance number, somewhere along the lines of if Poly Styrene had hooked up with the Murder City Devils.***

“Caveman’s Lunch” and “Fuck” are (rather inexplicably) a (slight) return to the Touch and Go era Man or Astro-Man?**** Then, with seemingly callous disregard for what came before, Fist City channel Sister-era Sonic Youth throughout the jittery, echo chamber that is “Wet Freaks”. In fact, the entire side “B” of the LP seems rather heavily influenced by early 90’s alt-rock (you know what I mean with that stupid term, right?). Hmm. “Blow” is entering Swervedriver territory.***** I love that more than a few bands are now treading those murky musical waters of (not so) long ago. Do I detect some 80s plinky “She Sells Sanctuary” clatter on “Never Bored”? I believe I do.

What a enjoyable, wild trip It’s 1983, Grow Up! is. The culmination of Fist City’s efforts make for one of the most original “punk” LPs I’ve heard in quite some time. Get a copy from Black Tent Press while they’re still around (there’s only 500 copies).

*Really, fuck off with describing every band or album as “garage”. 
** I mean that in the loosest sense possible. Attempting to review an album such as this is a similar task to adaptingBreakfast of Champions into a film. 
***IMPORTANT SIDE NOTE: My deepest apologies to not attending Fist City’s two most recent Winnipeg shows. I suck worse than the Lakers’ bench. Scratch that, the Blazers bench. I would’ve, in fact, danced to “The Creeps”. And I dance to nothing. Nothing I say! 
****My nerdiness doth proceedeth me. 
*****Fuck it. I say go for it.

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