The Cactus Channel Album Launch at Blue Beat

Melbourne’s favourite purveyors of dark, cinematic instrumental funk, The Cactus Channel, kick off their national tour to launch their second album, Wooden Boy (see tour dates below) with back to back launch shows at Northcote Social Club. The lineups for both nights are sizzling hot; on Thursday September 5th, The Cactus Channel will be joined by The Putbacks, The Seven UPS and DJ Chris Gill, then on Friday September 6th they’ll be joined by special guests Sex on Toast, The Do Yo Thangs and DJ Manchild. Get your tickets from thecactuschannel.com. Wooden Boy by The Cactus Channel is out September 2nd on HopeStreet Recordings.

The album will be in stores on vinyl, CD and digital on Sept 2nd on HopeStreet Recordings via Fuse Music Group. The band has recently unveiled a trippy new video for Wooden Boy (Part 3), the lead single from Wooden Boy. The creepy clip features hand drawn animation by comic artist Ben Montero and depicts an imaginary city populated by bugs and beetles, maggots and machines. Check it out at The Cactus Channel’s Youtube channel: www.youtube.com/user/thecactuschannel‎ and download the track for free from hopest.re/WoodenBoy.

IT’S SOUL MUSIC, BABY, but not as we know it. The backbeat and the handclaps are still there and the horns still sound. The bass bumps, the organ screams and the guitars still twang, but the singer has left the room. Everything is shades of blue. This is soul music for the after hours. For the solitary dancers and the lonely hearts. The soundtrack to solitary headlights on a midnight highway. What to call it? Who cares! Can you dance to it? Just try not to. No one’s telling you to throw your hands up in the air, but no one would be surprised if you did. It’s dark here, so you can do your own thing.

Wooden Boy was recorded by The Cactus Channel — a ten piece band from Melbourne, Australia — all born in the 90s and raised on the internet. Yet somehow, this astonishing follow up to last year’s rave-reviewed debut, Haptics, sounds like it could have been recorded in the 1970s, or possibly in the distant future. A timeless, placeless cinematic odyssey, Wooden Boy could have been an alternate soundtrack to Ghost Dog — if Lalo Schifrin and the Meters were collaborating on the RZA’s score. Or maybe Wooden Boy was what happened when Lars Von Trier got invited to direct an episode of Soul Train. What any of it may actually mean is left to the listener’s imagination.

Funk aficionados will hear shades of New York on this record, echoes of El Michel’s taking on Wu Tang, the influence of Budos and Menehan et al. But this is the Generation Z version; both more tempestuous and more introverted. Recorded analog in the digital era, presented faceless in the celebrity era, inexplicably ambiguous in the soundbite era, is this the album the world needs right now? Undoubtedly yes. In a world where the NSA can read the text message that dumped you, what does a person need more than sad soul music from the future? Wooden Boy, baby, Wooden Boy.

PRAISE FOR HAPTICS by THE CACTUS CHANNEL (debut 2012 album):

“Hot-to-trot… an embryonic version of the Meters or the Dap Kings” – THE AUSTRALIAN (four stars)

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“Album Of The Week” – RTR PERTH, PBS-FM, SYN-FM, 2SER + EASTSIDE RADIO, RTR PERTH

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THE CACTUS CHANNEL – “WOODEN BOY” NATIONAL TOUR DATES:

Fri 4th Oct – Blue Beat Sydney

Website
thecactuschannel.com