Hometown Sounds

Sardonic provocateur Ian Svenonious’s band Chain & The Gang is back with their first new music video in two years, in advance of their summer tour with Black Lips. “Experimental Music” sees the wizened sage of rock and roll proclaiming his love of the titular and inaccessible genre, even though its musical style is straight out of 60s pop staples. The video depicts a cloaked and hooded figure drowning in power and audio cords as he fiddles with knobs and affixes duct tape to an old keyboard. I think the message is pretty clear, don’t you? The tour skips DC, but you know they’ll play here soon.

Thank god Ian Svenonious, dean of DC punk-in-cheek band Chain & The Gang, is still around to put in perspective all the changes and over-development DC’s been through over the last few years. His own gang is an ever-changing lineup of sassy DC musicians, now including Ex Hex’s Betsy Wright, Francy Graham of Dudes and Anna Nxsty of Olivia Neutron-John. The new album Minimum Rock & Roll drops May 6th on Spiv’s label Radical Elite, and the fine folks at Dischord have your pre-order needs covered. Here’s the new video for “Devitalize”, directed by James Schneider who’s also helming the somewhat related documentary Punk the Capital.

Ian Svenonius has been the driving force behind quite a few DC bands over the years, and it’s his wit and depth of musical experience that make the songs in his current project Chain & The Gang so memorable. Chain & The Gang manage to combine an engaging, confident and blistering live performance with insightful songwriting chops to really present the full package of a top-notch musical act. Their fourth album Minimum Rock ‘n’ Roll comes out on April 15, and the title track gets the music video treatment from Spiv himself, starring Francy Graham of DC’s care-less punks Dudes. Find out what “crime rock” is all about in Chain & The Gang’s spoken-word lyrics explaining their ethos.