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Strike Iron and Varona
MUSIC | Strike Iron is an Oakland based, 12-piece juggernaut who brings high-energy grooves and a blistering band.

Strike Iron and Varona

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Date/Time
Date(s) - 01/31/2019
8:00 PM - 10:00 PM

Location
Rickshaw Stop SF

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Strike Iron is an Oakland based, 12-piece juggernaut who brings high-energy grooves and a blistering band. Completed by an explosive stage show, thick with hypnotic percussion, heavy horns, dance, roaring vocals, funky rhythms, and pulsating group movement. Born out of the ashes of the international Afrobeat act Albino, Strike Iron brings sexy, socially charged dance music into the 21st century.

Fronted by multi-instrumentalist, composer and lead vocalist Michael Bello (Phil Lesh and Friends, Ernest Ranglin), and featuring a slew of The Bay’s consummate professionals, Strike Iron is an original dance band unlike any other.

For all their tendency towards experimentation, Varona take a very meticulous approach to songwriting, arrangement and production. The result is a work of precise weirdness. W. H. Auden’s once suggested that poetry be defined as clear expression of mixed feelings. By that standard, Varona’s music is nothing if not potently poetic, filled to the brim with emotional ambiguity and contradiction. The band’s stylistic influences are no less mixed than the feelings their songs evoke. Barely-contained anxious spasms of screamy post-punk; frenetic, cheerfully-destructive experimentation of Downtown jazz; literary melancholy of late-20th century Russian-rock songwriting, are not so much ingredients here as deep-set roots, and what results less a cocktail than an exquisitely strange hybrid mutant not quite like anything else springing from San Francisco’s fertile musical soil.

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