Freeze Puppy 'Animation' Launch
(Sat 25th Jul 2009 / 4pm & 8pm / £3 adv or £5 adv for joint ticket)
Two intimate and highly charged animated Freeze Puppy shows in one day. Both will feature new songs from his newly released Pickled Egg CD called 'Animation', and both will be very different.
The first show at 4pm will be an ultra special acoustic show with unplugged guests joining the Freeze Puppy experience to add extra detail to his exquisite songs. The second show at 8pm will a Freeze Puppy electric set with guitar/voice and densely programmed backing tracks making for an amazingly otherworldly but joyful experience as his songcycle becomes a performance like no other. For this special occasion guest vocalists will join in on selected tracks.
Freeze Puppy's 'Animation' album is a masterpiece. We don't often say that. But this ever so complete, tight and perfect body of songs is so detailed it makes living worthwhile and incredible (he is like a poet in this fashion), it is so unfathomably paced and unlike anything else... it gives you heart thrills, so unnervingly honest and insightful it reminds one of Ray Davies in peak form and so full of outsider pop moments that you want John Peel to be alive to appreciate it fully.
From the first time Qu heard Freeze Puppy way back in the early noughties we knew he was special and this delivers BIG TIME. Bristol this is your finest songwriter since Tricky left for other pastures. It seems natural that a label such a Pickled Egg (Go Team/Scatter/Nalle) has picked up on such a wonderfully open and unique songwriter and performer, giving him the distribution to the world.
It is not just us that thinks this way. Peter Brewis from Field Music deemed it 'A masterpiece'. Below John Stevens tells us more about his back-story and the album....
“An early twentysomething born in London, UK but based out west in Bristol, Tom Wilson aka Freeze Puppy has spent his adult life thus far doing exactly what he did in his teens: surrendering himself to whatever shapes sound could throw at him. Be it pan-generational British guitar pop from The Kinks to Blur, the alluring glitzoid bombast of Broadway musicals, songcraft standard-bearers like Scott Walker, Bacharach and his namesake Brian, Zimbabwean mbira players, celestial Sardinian folk...Wilson has approached the art of listening with a rare democracy, resolving to learn a little more every single time he opens his ears. Allying this to his own precious talent for composition, arrangement and sonic non-sequiteur, he has emerged positing a form of home-produced pop music quite unlike any other you will have heard before. With three mighty impressive progress markers already plotted in the albums ‘Mistaken Identity’ (2002), ‘Heads Or Tails’ (2003) and ‘Joyous Yelps’ (2005) (that’s to gloss over the concept album about Vladimir ‘Lolita’ Nabokov, amongst other unreleased delights...), Freeze Puppy’s path arrives at ‘Animation’ – his most coherent, deliriously addictive song cluster thus far.
Three years in the making and clocking in at a moreishly bite-sized 23 minutes, the title of ‘Animation’ fits in more ways than one. Early impressions suggest an almost cartoon energy to Freeze Puppy’s world and the hyperreal, often poignantly flawed characters who inhabit it through Tom’s smart and concise wordplay (guest narrators include lovelorn drink drivers, imaginary friends, abject loners and serial gamblers amongst other skewed societal misshapes...). Yet listen on, and it goes further: As songwriter, producer and lyricist, Wilson works like the consumate stop-frame animator - hunched over his songs like they were tiny audio figurines, chiselling out their strange, fleeting little lifetimes over a series of acutely poised movements, drawing breath from them through colours, textures and melodies that, given half a chance, will pitch camp in your subconscious for what may prove to be decades. At once audaciously complex and eminently digestible, ‘Animation’ is pop created within limits, existing in joyous disregard of them. The very best kind.”
The first show at 4pm will be an ultra special acoustic show with unplugged guests joining the Freeze Puppy experience to add extra detail to his exquisite songs. The second show at 8pm will a Freeze Puppy electric set with guitar/voice and densely programmed backing tracks making for an amazingly otherworldly but joyful experience as his songcycle becomes a performance like no other. For this special occasion guest vocalists will join in on selected tracks.
Freeze Puppy's 'Animation' album is a masterpiece. We don't often say that. But this ever so complete, tight and perfect body of songs is so detailed it makes living worthwhile and incredible (he is like a poet in this fashion), it is so unfathomably paced and unlike anything else... it gives you heart thrills, so unnervingly honest and insightful it reminds one of Ray Davies in peak form and so full of outsider pop moments that you want John Peel to be alive to appreciate it fully.
From the first time Qu heard Freeze Puppy way back in the early noughties we knew he was special and this delivers BIG TIME. Bristol this is your finest songwriter since Tricky left for other pastures. It seems natural that a label such a Pickled Egg (Go Team/Scatter/Nalle) has picked up on such a wonderfully open and unique songwriter and performer, giving him the distribution to the world.
It is not just us that thinks this way. Peter Brewis from Field Music deemed it 'A masterpiece'. Below John Stevens tells us more about his back-story and the album....
“An early twentysomething born in London, UK but based out west in Bristol, Tom Wilson aka Freeze Puppy has spent his adult life thus far doing exactly what he did in his teens: surrendering himself to whatever shapes sound could throw at him. Be it pan-generational British guitar pop from The Kinks to Blur, the alluring glitzoid bombast of Broadway musicals, songcraft standard-bearers like Scott Walker, Bacharach and his namesake Brian, Zimbabwean mbira players, celestial Sardinian folk...Wilson has approached the art of listening with a rare democracy, resolving to learn a little more every single time he opens his ears. Allying this to his own precious talent for composition, arrangement and sonic non-sequiteur, he has emerged positing a form of home-produced pop music quite unlike any other you will have heard before. With three mighty impressive progress markers already plotted in the albums ‘Mistaken Identity’ (2002), ‘Heads Or Tails’ (2003) and ‘Joyous Yelps’ (2005) (that’s to gloss over the concept album about Vladimir ‘Lolita’ Nabokov, amongst other unreleased delights...), Freeze Puppy’s path arrives at ‘Animation’ – his most coherent, deliriously addictive song cluster thus far.
Three years in the making and clocking in at a moreishly bite-sized 23 minutes, the title of ‘Animation’ fits in more ways than one. Early impressions suggest an almost cartoon energy to Freeze Puppy’s world and the hyperreal, often poignantly flawed characters who inhabit it through Tom’s smart and concise wordplay (guest narrators include lovelorn drink drivers, imaginary friends, abject loners and serial gamblers amongst other skewed societal misshapes...). Yet listen on, and it goes further: As songwriter, producer and lyricist, Wilson works like the consumate stop-frame animator - hunched over his songs like they were tiny audio figurines, chiselling out their strange, fleeting little lifetimes over a series of acutely poised movements, drawing breath from them through colours, textures and melodies that, given half a chance, will pitch camp in your subconscious for what may prove to be decades. At once audaciously complex and eminently digestible, ‘Animation’ is pop created within limits, existing in joyous disregard of them. The very best kind.”