The Vores to Hold CD Release Party at Babeville Aug. 17

 

            The Vores, one of Buffalo’s punk, new wave and alternative music progenitors still playing vital music today, will hold a CD release party for its new recording, “Common Scar,” Friday, August 17, at Babeville, 341 Delaware Avenue at the corner of Tupper in Buffalo. Admission will be $15, which includes a copy of the new CD (hmm, any other specials for those of us who already have the CD?).

            The Vores, led by original members guitarist/vocalist Biff Henrich and bassist/vocalist Gary Nickard, are joined in the newest version of the band by keyboardist/multi-instrumentalist/vocalist Cathy Carfagna, guitarist Patrick Ryan and drummer Patrick Heyden. “Common Scar” features 13 new Vores’ recordings and a cover of Bernie Kugel and the Good’s “Walk Around the World,” with Kugel singing. I was fortunate to hear the CD via mp3s before I received a hard copy of it, and it is a really good recording (which will be reviewed here soon) and shows where the Vores have been, where they are now and possibly where the band is heading. It is certainly has some angular guitars, a few more melodious songs and continues in what Henrich calls an “avant garage” vein with some moody strangeness.

            Not so incidentally, the opening bands for the show are a reconfigured The Good, still led by Kugel, and The Irving Klaws, making this sound like a rather stellar offering of Buffalo punk, new wave, alternative, rock and so on with a little bit of the disturbing and off-kilter thrown into the mix.

            For anyone interested in more on the Vores, here is an interview I conducted with Henrich, Nickard and Carfagna for Artvoice last year, as well as a review of a show of the Vores at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery that was the first entry into the newly revived The Hosey Report.