GUIGNOL & MISCHIEF BREW first collaborated on "A Liquor Never Brewed," a track from Mischief Brew's 2005 release Smash The Windows. Erik's Fistolo label released GUIGNOL’S sophomore EP Drink The Best Wine First the same year. Now, three years later, a long-planned full-length collaboration is coming to fruition: GUIGNOL & MISCHIEF BREW Fight Dirty is seven MISCHIEF BREW songs with GUIGNOL as backing band; six GUIGNOL songs with Erik on guitar, a Django Reinhardt cover, and a barn-burning take on Iron Maiden's "Hallowed Be Thy Name" (with Slavic Soul Party's Ben Holmes on trumpet).
GUIGNOL [geen-yol ] = literally, in the parlance of the treacherous French, a puppet, or figuratively, a tale of the macabre and fantastic either petite or grand...but you knew that, you crafty little buggers. What you've got here is not really one of those bands puffed up with self-importance with some political or countercultural snake-oil to sell. It's the raucous, theatrical, spastic and melodramatic soundtrack for singing drifters, murderous marionettes, and grease-painted gutterballs. It's an oom-pah wedding, squealing and lyrical, that hits like punk rockers and sings like a gypsy camp. GUIGNOL, led by Franz Nicolay (The Hold Steady, World/Inferno Friendship Society) and Peter Hess (Balkan Beat Box, Slavic Soul Party, World/Inferno) and filled out by tubist George Rush (Hem) and drummer John Bollinger (Antony & The Johnsons) played its first shows in February 2002, backing up the fire-breathing, maggot-eating Lucky Devil Circus Sideshow from Coney Island every weekend for a month at CBGBs. They were charter members of New York's nascent gypsy-punk scene (as documented on the Mehanata Bulgarian Bar compilation) and have since been on the cover of the New York Times, on MTV, and played on bills with bands from punks, Against Me! and Choking Victim to art-rockers, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum and Barbez.
MISCHIEF BREW is a wicked concoction; a musical feast falling somewhere between the categories of pirate punk, Celtic folk, gypsy swing, devilish jazz, American olde-tyme and country. It's good music to stomp, kick, pogo, jitterbug, waltz, drink, twist and shout to - whether the performance is solo acoustic or with a backing band of accordion, drums, and mandolin. Erik Petersen is the new face of East Coast folk-punk, and Fistolo Records is the home.
Banged out at Vibromonk Studios with Danny Shatzky (Firewater, Balkan Beat Box, Gogol Bordello), GUIGNOL & MISCHIEF BREW’S Fight Dirty collaboration will appear on CD and clear vinyl this fall. It's apotheosis anthems for the carnies, the travelers, the gypsies, jazzmen, and lowlifes; singing Turkish-flavored reveries, odes to tax evasion, dirty tricks, and mob revolution; cumbia carols, sludge-metal reels, and a funeral march at a flooded bar.
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