Great American Music Hall

Show Info

Mermen

Mermen
That One Guy
KoolieCat

Date: January 3, 2003
Doors: 8 30 PM
Show: 9:00 PM

Tickets: On Sale Now
$12 Adv / $14 Door
General Admission

Age Restrictions: All Ages Always
Kitchen: Regular Menu Available
Seating: Limited

Artist Links

The Mermen Site

" The best rock and roll is poetry in motion, with or without words—and some of the best records of the year came without. The Mermen play an extreme brand of surf music; the trebly turbulent and black minor chord moods of guitarist Jim Thomas are like a rough ride on the icy seas of the mid-Atlantic. Hints of Dick Dale filter through the cracked sidewalk wave forms of Sonic Youth. Thomas sounds more like Neil Young at the wheel of the good ship Crazy Horse."
--David Fricke, Rolling Stone

Jim Thomas's dazzling guitar work steals the show. Informed by both Dick Dale's staccato precision and Hendrix's molten psychedelia, Thomas posesses a flawless technique and a highly personal sound. Moving from deftly controlled feedback to breakneck accuracy to hushed crystalline passages, Thomas proves that he is one of rocks premier ax wielders.
Rick Reger, Chicago Tribue

In the late 50's the first wave of twangy surf and neo surf guitar bands created such artists as Dick Dale, Duane Eddy, The Ventures and Link Wray. The electric guitar- a vital ingredient in the development of rock and roll, was now thrust center stage. In the late 90's and beyond, swept up in the "new wave" of "surf guitar" bands, the critically acclaimed instrumental trio The Mermen have been considered the genre's most intrepid and inspired revisionists. Taking on surf music with what Option called "a revivalist purism, but a contemporary sensibility",the Mermen are one of the more offbeat bands to emerge from the surf renaissance, and survive well beyond the trendiness. Like the Los Angeles Reader says: "If you're looking for bikin-clad babes and coctails at five, you've come to the wrong beach. Tbe Mermen are the sonic euivalent of a mandelbrot set, waxing ever more cryptic and beautiful .Gorgeously complex, dreamy and oblivious to time, supremely unrushed divine textures seduce us like the melancholy bleatings of Artic whales."