Quasi

Schedule

Wed Mar 22 2023 at 08:00 pm

Location

200 41st Street South Birmingham AL 35222 | Birmingham, AL

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* Age Restriction: 18+
* Door Time: 7:00pm
* Event Time: 8:00pm

Come join us for a FREE show with Quasi & Bat Fangs!

Breaking the Balls of History is Quasi’s tenth record, landing ten years after their last record, on
February tenth. Three tens, which aligns with the thirty years they’ve played together. Sam
Coomes and Janet Weiss have become Pacific Northwest icons, and Quasi has always felt so
steadfast— their enduring friendship so generative, their energy infinite, each album more
raucous and catchy and ferocious and funny than the last. But we were wrong to ever take
Quasi for granted. For a while, they thought 2013’s intricate Mole City might be their last
record. They’d go out on a great one and move on.

Then in August 2019 a car smashed into Janet’s and broke both legs and her collarbone. Then a
deadly virus collided with all of us, and no one knew when or if live music as we knew it—the
touring, the communal crowds, the sonic church of the dark club—would ever happen again.
'There’s no investing in the future anymore,' Janet realized. 'The future is now. Do it now if
you want to do it. Don’t put it off. All those things you only realize when it’s almost too late. It
could be gone in a second.'

Under lockdown, Portland’s streets fell still, airplanes vanished, wildlife emerged. And with the
obliterated normal came an unexpected gift: uninterrupted time, hours every day, to make art.
Quasi couldn’t go on the road, so they got an idea: they would act as if they were on tour and
play together every single day. Each afternoon, Sam and Janet bunkered down in their tiny
practice space and channeled the bewilderment and absurdity of this alien new world into
songs. Janet’s strength returned and rose to athlete-level stamina. “When you’re younger and
in a band, you make records because that’s what you do,” Sam said. “But this time, the whole
thing felt purposeful in a way that was unique to the circumstances.” They knew they would
keep it to just the two of them playing together in a room. They knew they’d record the songs
live and together, to capture a moment.

The incredible result of those sessions is Breaking the Balls of History, recorded in five days and
produced by John Goodmanson at the legendary Robert Lang Studios in Shoreline, WA. Here
are two artists at their prime, each a human library of musical knowledge and experience,
entirely distinctive in their songcraft and sound. In Quasi-form, the band becomes alchemically
even greater than the sum of its parts: Janet’s galloping drums and Sam’s punk-symphonic
Rocksichord and their intertwining vocals make something gigantic, anthemic. In the thick of a cataclysmic social and political moment, they’ve crafted exquisitely melodic songs that glitter
with rage and wild humor and intelligence, driven by a big bruised pounding heart.

“A last long laugh at the edge of death” sings Sam at the album’s outset, and that gleeful
defiance—which might as well be the logline of our present moment—sets the table for the
songs to come. In “Gravity,” Quasi’s predilection for the absurd now tips into unnerving realism;
in the post-facts era, the very thing that tethers us all to the earth is rendered meaningless
(“you can walk on water if you so choose in your made-in-USA concrete shoes.”) Punchy
warning verses about death and disarray swoon into the blissed-out, checked-out chorus of
“Queen of Ears” (“But I, I float above it all, wizard of idleness, mistress of killing time.”) Janet’s
voice floats sweet and eerie through the atmospheric suspended reality of “Inbetweenness.”
Etch “Doomscrollers” onto the golden record and launch it into space as a precise time capsule
of the incomprehensible present. “The Losers Win” is a tart arsenic nightcap to close out the
record, and hell, the nation.

It sounds dark, and because it’s rising to the moment, it is. But this is also a record surging with
energy and pleasure and joy. “It felt so life-affirming. I can hear in the music how happy I am to
be there and to be playing at that level again,” Janet said. 'I get to exist.'

I’ve been listening to this record for a few months now, and I can’t stop thinking about how as
the world started to end, and then kept on ending in all kinds of surprising new ways, Sam and
Janet returned to their practice space every day and made songs. Face to face, instrument to
instrument, they decided to build something new. They did the work. They made their art.
They’ve lived through enough to understand that nothing is permanent, and that when your
faith in humanity sinks, you turn to the life force of what you can rely on: the people you trust,
the community that claims you, and what you can create. You can’t control the time. But you
can make a record of a time. And luckily for us, Quasi has again."

—Chelsey Johnson

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Where is it happening?

200 41st Street South Birmingham AL 35222, Birmingham, United States

Event Location & Nearby Stays:

Saturn Birmingham

Host or Publisher Saturn Birmingham

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