Ames, there is no way to say how grateful we are to be a part of this community. This town rages SO HARD! Last night was classic Ames. The M Shop did such a killer job with this show! Special thanks to Connor and Bryan, you guys are killin it at the M Shop this year, it’s incredible! Best bookers ever! And Darren on the sound, what a pro, you always maximize the potential of every band, so many people gave us good feedback about how good the sound was!
Peace, Love and Stuff kicked off the show with an extreme display of bravado, mastery and staight-up ROCK AND ROLL. What a band! Sharika from Ladysoal was a special guest vocalist with them too and that was so next level! There was one part where a big group of people made a giant circle and Lavonne got down on her knees and wailed in the middle of the circle. FUCKING CHILLING!
Then, seriously, Trouble Lights owned a million hearts! How do they do it? The dance moves are supremely tight! The beats are supremely heavy! The vocals are supremely worthy of the band The Supremes! Their set was just a monster. It was so cool how they kept the beat going through the whole show, connecting all the songs. That ruled!
The absolutely gorgeous and fierce DJ Trey LaTrash was laying it down SO CORRECT between all the bands. It added so much to the show to have him playing his killer beats through the show, that kept the energy high and made everything so much more epic. And he looked AMAZING! So inspiring. Ames hero.
And then, Nuclear Rodeo. Good lord, they brought the HEAT! It was seriously one of the best, or maybe THE BEST, Nuclear Rodeo show we have ever seen! They were incredibly tight in every way and their new song “Heart Attacks 2 Part 2″ destroyed! And I couldn’t believe they brought out their old school classic “Well I Kind Feel Like Dying Since you Left Me Jared!” Memories, magic, melody, mayhem. Nuclear Rodeo, please share your secrets with us, you understand music.
Oh and then the one and only Phoenix L’Amour just came out of the blue and OWNED THE STAGE LIKE A BOSS! Her burlesque performance added such a cool touch to this show and just made it all the more showy and wild and free and beautiful. Ultimate perfomer, consummate professional. Phoenix, Beef Cake needs your expertise. Help it grow.
And then when we played we were so honoured and moved and inspired by how much everyone was singing along and dancing along and jumping along and partying along. What a joy to play for so many friends and be able to share so much love. Thank you, Ames. We are Ames together. We are Ames forever.
If you know anything about Mumford’s, you probably know that WE LOVE FAIRFIELD! It’s the Twin Peaks of Iowa, where mystery reigns and demons are kind of funny. This year, we played our third consecutive Sweat Power Fest organized by our brothers Philip and Dominic Rabalais of Utopia Park! They do such a great job, we love this festival so much! A ton of our good friends played the fest and blew our minds! We played with an amazing band from Iowa City called Dream Thieves, we’d never seen them before and they ruled! Hopefully we’ll play with them again soon.
We also had the amazing opportunity to play a live session on the radio at KURE 88.5 on the same day as Sweat Power and it was SO FUN! What a rush to play live on the radio, we had such a blast doing it! Thanks so much to our friends Nikki and Darren and Michael and all the great staff at KURE for making it such a sick session, we are so lucky to have this station in our community.
Alright, so now we’re getting ready to play AMES WINTER CLASSIC at the M Shop on Jan 20! We can’t wait, this is gonna be so fun, we are playing with some of our favorite artists of all time and its just gonna be a blood bath of love and freedom. Check out these artists who are gonna shred brains into meatloaf:
NUCLEAR RODEO: We’ve been friends with these dudes for as long as we’ve been a band and we just love them so much. Our band paths have been running on parallel lines and we are just honoured to share the Ames scene with such a killer band made up of immaculate pop music professionals. They destroy.
TROUBLE LIGHTS: This is a pop band from Fairfield that inspires Mumford’s to no end. They bring an incredible show with gigantic club beats that will make you move. On top of that, the band is fronted by the stage-owning pop diva Adrien Daller, whose voice, dance moves and fierce presence will haunt your dreams. Ames will be implode with desire.
TREY LATRASH: Trey has been tearing up the Ames scene this past year, organizing dance parties, orchestrating drag shows, DJing tons of concerts and generally being a badass artist on the loose in the community. He’ll be DJing between the sets of all the bands, so the dance party will go nonstop all night long as he lays down heavy beats for heavy asses.
PEACE, LOVE & STUFF: This band has become a monstrous rock and roll force in Iowa, bringing their ferocious style of blues-inflected rockabilly to parties and clubs all over the state. The band is fronted by the punk-as-fuck Wanda Jackson-esque local singer Lavonne McRoberts and she’s backed by a crack band that lays it down correct.
So, bottom line: THIS SHOW WILL RULE! IT’S FREE AND ALL AGES! SEE YOU THERE!
We are so consistently honored to play with such excellent bands everywhere we go, there are so many cool bands in Iowa! We are very proud to be a part of it.
We just updated our calendar with a few of our upcoming shows, and there are more to come! Here are some details to make you feel as amped as we are!!
This Saturday we’re gonna be playing our third consecutive SWEATPOWER FEST! We love this festival! It celebrates the birthday weekend of our friend, tourmate and overall inspiration Dominic Rabalais! He is so fucking illegal! Don’t even try to be him! You’ll go to jail! Some more sick bands are playing too, like Christopher the Conquered, Utopia Park, Lesbian Poetry, Lane Weaver, Trouble Lights, Dream Thieves, Purple Asteroid Cadillac, Little Ruckus, Josie Overmeyer and MANY MORE!
Then next Friday (Jan 20) we’re gonna be playing the AMES WINTER CLASSIC! It’s a FREE and ALL AGES show at the M Shop! We love the M Shop!!!! We’ve had some of our greatest experiences as a band at this amazing venue, we love it so much, it’s a total legend! For this show we get to play with some of the dankest artists out there, like Nuclear Rodeo, Trouble Lights, Peace Love and Stuff, and Trey LaTrash!!!! We are so amped. So much partying for FREE.
Then on Feb 4 we’re gonna play with 49 other Iowa bands for the Space’s Fourth Anniversary: 15 Nonstop Music Marathon! 50 bands in 15 hours! What? Yes!
Then we’re gonna toss like a boss at the PANDEMONIUM AT THE AMES PANTORIUM series on March 2. This show supports KHOI Community Radio and that rules because we totally support our community and we love this town! We are playing this show with two heavy slay-masters: Utopia Park and Doctor Murdock! That’s rock and roll! Stop, drop and die!
There are more sick shows coming up too, keep your eyes peeled, we’ll post more soon! Plus we’ll start having some details about our Spring tour soon too! We love life! But we worship death!
We had such a blast partying and getting buck on New Year’s Eve, thank you so much to all our friends for coming out and to DG’s Taphouse for throwing such a wild night of rock and especially to Cleo’s Apt, Utopia Park, Longshadowmen and PoeToaster for repping Iowa with us and being such magical bands!
We meant what we said too: 2012 is Iowa’s year. We look forward to creating the future of Ames together!
So a few quick previews of future occurances:
1) We’re gonna announce some DANK new local shows very soooooooon!
2) We’re headed back out on tour in March to go down to SXSW and rep Iowa hard!
3) We’re making a new album and it’s gonna be super heavy and extreme! It’ll be out in the fall!
4) We’re gonna make a criminally insane 7″ record that will come out at the same time as the new record!
5) Most of all: We will celebrate our home state of Iowa and our hometown of Ames every single day, nonstop, no compromises. Don Mumford, lead us.
We are so excited for our upcoming NYE show at DG’s Taphouse! We get to represent Iowa with some of our favorite bands, sultans of sweat, masters of mayhem, idols of Iowa: CLEO’S APT! UTOPIA PARK! LONGSHADOWMEN! POETOASTER! This is gonna be more than a party: it’s gonna be funeral for fear!
All I can say about Mumford’s set is this: there will be incredibly talented special guests, we are gonna debut a gigantically epic new song that you will instantly know how to sing-along with and we’re gonna throwdown a mind-shaggingly monstrous cover featuring Fairfield’s incomparable diva of destruction Slaydrien.
Also, DG’s will generously provide champagne at midnight as well as party favors! That’s a hell of a deal at just $10 at the door. Affordable entertainment makes for addorable enter-AMES-ment! (Okay, that one was a stretch).
Also, real quick, just wanna say what a great year 2011 was for Mumford’s. Thank you so much to all our friends and family who made this such a wonderful year for us. We went on three national tours, played wild music festivals, put out a full-length vinyl record and a seven-inch, played tons of crazy shows all over Iowa and Americowa, represented Ames at all times on all fronts and generally made a lot of friends and had a ball. Thank you Ames, thank you Iowa, thank you DON MUMFORD for being the spirit of music and guiding our path as a band.
On NYE, we’ll take it into the new year and tell 2012 to go ahead and be the end of the world, we’re ready to fucking die.
