Snarly wackjob Shilpa Ray ended 2010 on a high note: the Indian-American musician known for lugging her harmonium to gigs and elevating unhinged, screamy vocals to a new art form (Spin called her a "human tornado") opened for not one but two legends, Nick Cave (solo, for his Grinderman project) and Patti Smith (with her band Her Happy Hookers).
Up next, Ray reveals the spanking-new video for Heaven in Stereo, a track off her band’s new album Teenage and Torture (the buzzy follow-up to 2009 debut A Fish Hook an Open Eye), out next Tuesday, January 18th, on Knitting Factory Records. The camptastic Will Joines-directed video below is bursting with 1980s nostalgia: it’s an homage to the era’s teen-horror fare like Michael Jackson’s Thriller video and any number of low-budget slasher movies (which themselves were nods to ’50s horror films) – meta-vintage, if you will.
Ray and the Hookers have a show coming up January 21 at Brooklyn Bowl that’ll double as their record-release party and kick off a North American tour that’ll carry them all over the place clear into April. To call the band’s live presence “unbridled” is an understatement, “banshees on stage” is a little closer to the truth. Get a ticket.
Shilpa Ray & Her Happy Hookers record release party (with Soft Black, She Keeps Bees), Friday, January 21, 8PM at Brooklyn Bowl, 61 Wythe Avenue, Williamsburg; 718-963-3369. Tickets $5, available here.
