AHOY, TOTAL WORLD!
Get your walking shoes on! Total Fest marches into August with exhibitions and events held during the First Friday Art Walk on August 06 from 5 - 8PM (First Friday). We've assembled a few tokens from yesteryear and have branched into the smacktastic world of pinatas. A photo retrospective of past Total Fests will be on display at Taco Del Sol. Betty's Divine will host an evening with wine, treats, Total Pinatas and music by Colin Johnson. We're bursting at the seams to get this party going. Stop by some of the other venues on Friday but be sure not to miss the Total events!!

TOTAL FEST: NIGHT OF JOY

Denver's Night of Joy puts to shame most of the bands that are pigeon-holed as “post-punk” – a phrase that I'm still trying to comprehend. Are we really in need of recycling this category? Seriously, we'd be better served by jettisoning the entire “post” naming fetish. Given the list of bands that typically fall under the post-punk revival umbrella, it's border line insulting to brand a band with it. NoJ – Bree Davies (Teen Pass Out) and Valerie Franz – serves up some great pop power with strong emotive vocals, sitting somewhere between soothing and caterwauling, that challenge simple record store shelving. The energy is refreshing and oddly comforting. Quick, spidery and haunting, Night of Joy brings a bundle of honest, good time, tangible DIY rock. Look out Bro Rock, this shit is asking you to do something new.

MISSOULA REPRESENT: TURNER CAPEHART CANTY
If you haven’t heard Turner Capehart’s voice grace the airwaves of local college radio in the months since the release of his Fugazi produced album Building Your Own Hidden Fortress, I suggest you proceed immediately to his MySpace and get a taste.

Building Your Own Hidden Fortress is the first solo album by Turner Capehart, but I refuse to call it his “debut”. It is a full length, nine part story of beautiful variations and intense feeling. This record sounds like a Shoegaze dream of noise and experimental folk, both electric and acoustic.

I saw a Turner perform at a house show this winter with Julie and the Wolves (also playing TF9) and Travis Sehorn and I was thoroughly impressed by the musician-isto that Turner Capeheart has become. His stage presence is modest among his arsenal of instruments and funky spirit. The house show and a later show at the BSMT restored my hope in the local Missoula music scene that seems to ebb and flow in and out of the valley. The local folk scene has been renovated by Turner’s all-inclusive music making abilities. The track “Fire Season” tells a story with fast speech, fast fingerpickin’ and great accent accompaniments.

He has resuscitated the fish-on-dry-land condition of storytelling music with lyrics that could be read like poetry. Oh where will he go with this? Check up on Turner Capehart at this year’s Total Fest IX.

ONEIDA CONFIRMS!

KBGA 89.9 FM's to thank for the fact that the first band we've got to announce this year is Brooklyn's hard-hitting masters of wild psych-sonics, Oneida. Ten albums into their career, the band seems to still veer around comfortably from slippery kraut-pumped repetition rock to electronic moonscapes and excellent, riffing loud rock and roll with multi-layered vocals, syncopation and an insanely dialed rhythm section. A rhythm section by the way comprising one spastically charged drummer and a equally manic keyboardist. In addition to all of that, Oneida are underground veterans, label people and music self-releasers, ex-Ex Models and parents. They also have a song called Brownout in Lagos. They've got rock records, concept records about the mountains of Swabia, and put out Each One Teach One, which Niki puts on when she needs to get coffee from the UC Market. In short, damn near everything that Total Fest appreciates about a bands culled into a single unit. Welcome, Oneida!

Among other luminaries like Shellac and the Melvins, Oneida played 2009's All Tomorrow's Parties. 2009 also brought about their 10th LP, the epic triple-banger called Rated O on the Jagjagjuwar label. Rated O did some serious time on KBGA's top 30 Chart and made Wantage's best of 2009 List. The record has parts that made us think of Neil Young (like their 2004 Secret Wars LP) and parts that blew our minds wide open. Totalneida.