The Pamplemousse Explosion

As Anthony Chase suggests in his Artvoice story on the festival, Infringement can be a chance to broaden your horizons, move outside your safety zone, etc. And so it was that for the first time in my 25 years of living in Buffalo, I found myself inside Merlin's tonight.

I was there to see the Pamplemousse Explosion, a Montreal band that came highly recommended by uber-Infringer Jason of Car Stories. Truly had no idea what to expect, and I was very pleasantly surprised by what I saw and heard: keyboard and drum duo (Anna Luisa Daigneault and Sam Vipond) playing a very catchy batch of musically sophisticated cabaret-ish art songs with a jazz vibe that sometimes took a turn toward punk/hardcore in intensity (well, as hardcore as you can get with electric piano as one of your main instruments). I thought at times of both Bjork and Zappa, though mostly I just enjoyed their thoroughly unique sound, peppered as it was with little flourishes of Tibetan chanting, funny mouth noises, and eccentric lyrics about eggs, dinosaurs, visitors from the future, and other surreal subjects. In less confident hands, this might get annoying or pretentious pretty quickly, but TPE have a wonderfully down-to-earth quality about them, and a playful sense of humor--to say nothing of some killer melodies--and they utterly charmed the small but enthusiastic audience in this legendary biker bar. Here's the obligatory crappy cell phone shot:



They are also playing the musical brunch at Nietzsche's on Sunday (July 30) at 2 p.m., and rumor has it they might appear elsewhere in town while they're around, too. If you like well-crafted, off-the-beaten-path music, you'd be wise to seek them out before they return to their native land.

Or maybe visit their MySpace page for some audio clips, and hope they return, soon.