Black Congo, NC

w/ Co Co Ri Co, Grape Soda

Tuesday, Sept. 7 @ Farm 255

Black Congo, NC

Typically, it’s not hard to figure out where a band is coming from. That said, you’d be hard pressed to find Black Congo, NC on a map, geographically or stylistically. The band formed and developed in Charlotte, NC, a cross-section of musicians from psychedelic, art-punk, free jazz and folk disciplines. But BCNC can’t even call Charlotte its home, since bandleader Eric Deines returned to his native Bloomington, IN for a job in 2009.

“Everybody who plays with us had a great chemistry from day one. Even now that I live here, I’ve gone back three or four times for one-off shows—we’ll practice for four hours in the morning, play the show and then I’ll drive back—and even six months could go by between when we’ll do that, and it’d feel like I hadn’t been gone,” he says. “I’m having trouble finding that here in Bloomington—people I can play with as naturally as I do with [Ryan Miller, Brent Bagwell, Bo White, Michael Houseman and Casey Malone].”

The band’s name somehow makes sense when considering the title of its forthcoming double vinyl LP, Live in Miami 1984, [11] cuts of the band’s signature world-music indie-pop. Think Fear of Music meets Graceland. “Because nobody knows anything about our band, I thought, your friends make a record, and you know they’re a bunch of knuckleheads from Charlotte and that they recorded it in 2008, and you’re gonna hear it a certain way. But if you listen to it as some tropical garage band from 1984, you’ll hear it differently.”

Using this slight-of-hand recontextualization allows the listener to focus on the positive, personal messages in the songs. “More than anything, I feel like it’s about being kind of heartbroken a little bit but falling in love with the world at the same time. So, it references [all] of these places in the title: you have Miami, and Africa and North Carolina, and to me it’s sort of like how it feels to fall so hard for the world.” 

— Jeff Tobias