Wild Flag bring their debut Wild Flag to The Lexington on 8 December. See details below. They also play All Tomorrow’s Parties on 9 December.
You should also put aside a few minutes to check out their brilliant (and funny) video for ‘Romance here
Wild Flag is a Portland, Oregon and Washington, DC-based quartet consisting of Carrie Brownstein (guitar/vocals), Mary Timony (guitar/vocals), Rebecca Cole (keys) and Janet Weiss (drums/vocals). The members of Wild Flag have played in numerous and notable bands including Sleater-Kinney, Helium, Quasi, The Minders, and Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks.
The quartet has known one another for well over a decade as tour mates and band mates of varying proportions. If you draw a venn diagram illustrating the intersection of the various groups, Brownstein, Cole, Timony, and Weiss would all be in the same tiny spheres. Playing together felt almost inevitable.
Brownstein and Weiss were in Sleater-Kinney and toured with Timony’s band Helium on numerous occasions. Brownstein and Timony collaborated in the late 1990’s, on their project The Spells. They released one EP, The Age of Backwards, on K Records in 1999, and played a single live show in Olympia. Rebecca Cole’s Portland-based band The Minders was a frequent opener for Sleater-Kinney. Weiss and Cole play together in the 1960’s garage-rock cover band The Shadow Mortons.
After the fledgling quartet collaborated on an instrumental score for Lynn Hershman Leeson’s feminist artists documentary !Women Art Revolution!, the ease with which they worked together proved infectious. Further practices resulted in songs, and Wild Flag was formed.
As Brownstein explains, “I think we all realised that we could be greater than the sum of our parts, not four disparate puzzle pieces trying to make sense of the other, but a cohesive and dynamic whole. It’s still about chemistry, it’s still about learning how to play together. You really should try to earn the things you get, and to feel like you have to prove something.”
