Guignol / Nanuchka
Drink The Best Wine First
Fistolo

This was a nice surprise promo to receive along with Smash the Windows. The cover art is beautiful, if not enigmatic (South Asian designs, Arabic-stylized lettering, and Hebrew poetry… together at last), and the two bands on this split follow in Fistolo’s tradition of skilled, soulful, folksy bands.

Guignol creates its songs with a combination of accordion, clarinet, tuba, and trash percussion. The musicians are punk rock orchestra veterans, and throw into their music equal parts klezmer, gypsy, and folk… all while packing the punch of punk rock. They seem to live in Brooklyn. The music has an irrepressible celebratory swing, punctuated by the occasional virtuosic solo. On this particular recording, Guignol has given us two tracks. There is “Agada”, which is adapted from a poem by Jewish writer Halfi and which features a rich, sultry female voice. This is followed up with “Red”, a complex, lively instrumental. The band does a good job of recontextualizing its folk influences: by operating within the realm of centuries-old European traditions and then taking that music into a punk setting, they’ve created something that sounds at once completely familiar and completely new.

Nanuchka’s folk influences are less apparent on their first song, “Free Parking.” The tone here is art-rock, a bit like The Fall or late Wire—punchy guitars coupled with a glamorous, weary-sounding singer (Nanuchka, like Guignol, has managed to find a terrific female vocalist). Although the song sounds nothing like Guignol’s stuff, both of the bands are playing from traditions that I haven’t heard in a long time. In reviving them, the bands here sound new and fresh. I really loved Nanuchka’s final song, “Captain Sensible Calling.” I’ve been playing it on repeat for weeks. It’s a bit more folksy in its instrumentation, although it still possesses some of the glam feel, especially in the opening lines: “Emma Careless, Lucy Nero, as you from crimes would pardoned be. Bonnie Parker, and Clyde Barrow, let your indulgence set me free…” from here, though, the lyrics move on into a religious register. The chorus gives us the line from which the split gets its title: “One night, our Lord tells us to ‘drink the best wine first’”. The song tells us to celebrate, to kick back and drink good wine, but is also deeply aware of life’s more serious things, that celebration itself can be a very serious thing. And that awareness makes the wine taste all the sweeter, right?

This split is perhaps most remarkable for its evenness; Guignol and Nanuchka are both solid bands, and they complement one another quite well. A nice twenty-minute snippet of music, overall; I don’t know if you’ll be as lucky as I was in finding one of my new favorite songs on this CD, but if you’re at all interested in folk-punk or gypsy/klezmer influences, this is definitely worth a listen.