Conan Neutron & the Secret Friends at Cactus Club

Conan Neutron & the Secret Friends is a rock band formed in Oakland, California in 2015 by vocalist/guitarist/songwriter Conan Neutron and intended as a vehicle for his songwriting. Featuring Melvins drummer Dale Crover on drums and Tony Ash on bass and with production work by Toshi Kasai, their style is influenced by classic rock, noise rock and post-punk, and the live shows feature a revolving cast of players. They are a touring act predominately based in Wisconsin.

Resurrectionists are a band from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The line-up features former members of Check Engine and WORK and current live members of Conan Neutron & the Secret Friends. Now That We Are All Ghosts is the second album from Milwaukee’s Resurrectionists. The project was self-engineered, recorded and produced; it was mastered by Bob Weston at Chicago Mastering Service. The album features nine songs of Doom Chamber-Americana, all powerfully cinematic and ripe for video treatments, leading the group to take the unusual and ambitious step of commissioning videos for every one of them. Now That We Are All Ghosts, will be released on Seismic Wave Entertainment April 3rd on 12” vinyl LP, CD and Digital formats. The new album sees a marked change in the band’s direction and stylistic range. Resurrectionists were originally formed by lyricist, guitarist and banjo picker Joe Cannon and bassist Jeff Brueggeman from the locally revered trio WORK with drummer Josh Barto and pedal steel player Gavin Hardy. On the group’s 2019 debut album What Comes In -- a collection of everyman trouble tales delivered with dark wit and piquant Midwestern tang -- Gavin’s mournful, swelling steel work helped steer songs into Gothic-country territory. On Now That We Are All Ghosts, Hardy has been replaced by multi-instrumentalist Gian Pogliano. Gian’s penchant for more adventurous, wider-ranging sonic discourse inspires Resurrectionists to branch out into unexpected stylistic experimentation. The material here is informed equally by the meticulous melodic abstractions of pre-punk icons Television as Old Weird American sounds of Dock Boggs and Bascom Lamar Lunsford. The album’s opener “A Classic Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue,” for instance begins as a mournful, banjo-driven meditation but ends as an apocalyptic howl, filled with shrieking banjo feedback - ideal support for Cannon’s writing and singing. Joe’s lyrics on Now That We Are All Ghosts, are both primal and poetic and he sings the hell out of them with a tent preacher’s conviction and a working-class punk’s urgency. Lines that seem to squarely address experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic were actually influenced by reading Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice and The Magic Mountain pre-2020, married to strange ruminations concerning Walt Whitman’s death mask. It all adds up to a collection of life-or-death songs that are incredibly haunting, daunting and visceral. https://resurrectionistsmke.bandcamp.com/ Resurrectionists are a band from Münster, Germany. The line-up features former members of Arsen aka König der Monster, The Apoplexy Twist Orchestra and current members of ding dong dead. http://www.myspace.com/resurrectionists666 Discography: Demo (2009) Merkit/Resurrectionists - Split 7" (2009) Self-Titled LP (2010) Resurrectionists/Arse Moreira - Split 6" (2010) Resurrectionists/Battle of Wolf 359 - Split 10" (2010) Lich/Resurrectionists - Split LP (2011) Resurrectionists/The Gentle Art of Chokin' - Split LP (2014)