Aural Fix: Rubblebucket

Confetti canons and afro-beat horn blasts. Rose-petal extraterrestrials and a young singer whose thirst for life makes us all feel a bit sluggish. These are a few of my new favorite things since discovering Brooklyn’s bombastic psychedelic-dance band Rubblebucket out at Treefort Music Fest this spring. This band makes me wonder if Fela Kuti and Talking Heads secretly had a love child at one point thirty years ago: half polyrhythmic big-beat crossed with David Byrne’s quirky sense of the catchy. They closed out the festival at Treefort, and the enthusiastic murmuring leading up to that show could not have prepared me for the uninhibited joyride that is their live performance.

Lead singer Kalmia Traver is a fountain of youth with plenty of libations for all. Within the wide range of her voice she expresses more shades of the idea “life is fucked, let’s enjoy ourselves!” than I believed existed. And as a recent survivor of ovarian cancer, her love for life is all the more undeniable. This is a band that champions the party and the funk, but manages to sneak in just a pinch of the bittersweet to make that fun all the tastier. Although these guys have been around for eight years, they’ve largely been quarantined to the blogosphere. But with the 2014 release of their latest full-length, Survival Sounds, which enlisted John Congleton’s production magic to make it a tad more accessible, they’ve tightened up their hooks and look headed towards the success they deserve. »

– Ethan Martin