Whitney K - Vivi! LP (MDR070)

*SHIPS September 8th 2023*

Whitney K - Vivi! (MDR070)
LP/digital

Two Strangers
Not Unlike A Rock
Dire Straits
Ode To The Old Ways
While Digging Through The Snow
Song For A Friend
Intro
Sympathy
Hard To Be A God
Maryland
Trans-Canada Oil Boom Blues

Whitney K and band are back with an electric live album that captures the best from their classics ‘Two Years’ and ‘Hard To Be A God’, including a few nuggets from the back catalog and the unreleased tune aptly titled ‘Dire Straits’.

If ‘Two Years’ was the thunder, the rawness and the spirit, a combination of outsider folk, modern psych, grit, humor and everything in between, ‘Hard To Be A God’ was the sophistication, the dedication, the mind traveling far and beyond… ‘Vivi!’ is the hot sauce missing, the perfect setting, the inevitable gift, really putting the word ‘motion’ behind the poetry, the electricity carrying the rollicking combo, the road opening up literally wide and infinite and the wide-eyed dreams becoming a coliseum standing in front of the chaos.

Recorded live in Montreal upon returning from Whitney K’s first European month long tour, ‘Vivi!’ is a vivid, exuberant and jarring photograph of a band that’s lived to see the force of ‘togetherness’, a ritual, a communion of sorts where emotions run free and into the unknown.

‘Vivi!’ encapsulates everything that makes Whitney K unique, the freewheelin’ songwriting, visions painted with utterly precise strokes, rock’n’roll bravado, sonic interplay, feedback and shimmer, velvet touches and goldmines, Modern Lovers, Television, Fred Neil, Harry Nilsson, Karen Dalton and the jingle-jangle of tomorrow. Played beautifully by Konner Whitney, Joshua Boguski, Marlon Kroll and Avalon Tassonyi, there is no way back, only one way in and it’s positioned crystal clear right in front of us. Alive.

“Yukon Gold. Whitney’s music has the grit and gallows humour… along with a debauched bent suggestive of early Cass McCombs or Lou Reed” ★★★★ Uncut

“Remarkably sophisticated musical blend… Inventing exciting new directions for roots music all along the way” ★★★★ MOJO

“A loveable rascal akin to a Harry Nilsson personality, main-man Konnor Whitney bears a Lou Reed coarse, baritone cadence to carry his folky, sideways coming-of-age messaging.” New Commute

"Strings swell up around him with a gorgeous “Street Hassle” style melancholy" - Aquarium Drunkard

“Urban cowboy -- in a Nilsson/Fred Neil kind of way -- with faded strings beaming in like the sunset between buildings on the Lower East Side.” Brooklyn Vegan