Bad Luck City

---from the myspace profile:--- + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Band Members + + + Vocals: Dameon Merkl// Guitar: Greg Kammerer// Guitar: Josh Perry// Bass: Jeremy Ziehe// Violin: Kelly O'Dea// Drums: Andrew Warner Critic's Choice, Westword August 10, 2006, Dameon Merkl is a dangerously funny man with a penchant for inspired self-deprecation and Bukowski-esque aphorisms.

---from the myspace profile:--- + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Band Members + + + Vocals: Dameon Merkl// Guitar: Greg Kammerer// Guitar: Josh Perry// Bass: Jeremy Ziehe// Violin: Kelly O'Dea// Drums: Andrew Warner Critic's Choice, Westword August 10, 2006, Dameon Merkl is a dangerously funny man with a penchant for inspired self-deprecation and Bukowski-esque aphorisms. Get him behind the mike with his band, however, and he's as menacing and spooky as a walk through Lafayette Cemetery on a moonless summer night. Led by Merkl, Bad Luck City -- made up of percussionist Andrew Warner, guitarists Gregor Kammerer and Joshua Perry, bassist Yassit Arocho and violinist Kelly O'Dea -- crafts lurid tales of lost souls hitting rock bottom in search of redemptive truth, only to realize that such a thing is tantalizingly out of reach. There's an inherent dark, fiery intensity to the music of Bad Luck City (due at the Bluebird Theater this Friday, August 11) that conjures images of traipsing through the worst dive bars imaginable late at night.

If a deeply guttural Tom Waits was backed by Cop Shoot Cop, it might sound something like this.-Critic's Choice,Tom Murphy, Westword 8/06 Musicians have the strange compulsion to dig their own holes and never find a way to crawl back out. Take Denver's Bad Luck City: Its self-titled debut is a thick, mucky quagmire of piss, bile, mean spirits and whiskey-spiked backwash. Like the Mekons dunking the Dirty Three in a septic tank full of blues, the group scrapes slithery violin and slide guitar against wheezing harmonica and piano until the friction starts to stink like a rotting corpse. Singer/bassist Dameon Merkl is the hate child of every great, drunken-fuckup-genius-crooner that was ever ejected from rock's scabby underbelly: Tom Waits, Michael Gira, Shane MacGowan, even Jim Morrison.

His filth-smeared lyrics and guttural low notes trawl the nether regions of consciousness, shoveling up psychic sludge and muddying the waters of reason and sanity. "I must have been born under a bad moon," Merkl grunts like he's exhaling pure pitch. "Bad fuckin' sun and solar system." As dark, dank and dirty as it is, Bad Luck City is worth breaking out the shovel for. -Jason Heller, Westword 11/04 User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License and may also be available under the GNU FDL..