Bang Bang Eche

It’s always fun having brunch at Alleluia, but when you’re having brunch with Bang! Bang! Eche! it’s even better. After playing three shows in Auckland in late May, we meet three members of the band to discuss, well, whatever we liked.

We were all pretty tired. The guys had just played three nights in a row, supporting !!! on Wednesday night, playing Sohomo Thursday and finishing with a rapturous performance at Brand New Math’s ‘Moustache Party’ on Friday.
After congratulating the guys on their amazing performances, they quickly hit back by saying they were shit, referring to Friday night’s show, when they had to play without T’Nelle who had flown back to Christchurch to work. According to Zach “She is really in love with her job at the bakery and thinks it’s a life long career option.” While they all take their day time jobs seriously, T’Nelle seems more dedicated than the boys.

Perry works at an organic grocery store, Zach works in a cafe and like Charlie goes to uni. James goes to community college, which he seems quite proud of.

Despite being a young band, they didn’t meet each other at school. Charlie explains, “Me and Zach used to be in a folk band, he (James) used to be in a punk band with one of the people in the folk band and T’Nelle was in a sister punk band.”

It was James’s determination that paved the way for Bang! Bang! Eche’s European tour in November. Thanks to the bigger and open minded music community in Germany, who dig creative musicians and aren’t afraid to take risks, James managed to convince people to let them play. It was all done via the internet, using myspace as the major catalyst. That’s basically it, they now have agents booking shows in the UK and Germany, and someone is even paying for their flights.

The guys seem to be experts at working the system, they have also managed to record and distribute their debut EP for next to nothing. Government grants paid for the recording, Shayna Quinn did the artwork and RDU in Christchurch basically did the rest. Charlie says “not many bands know about all the grants you can get, they’re not advertised or anything”.

Getting stuff done for free is a credit to the bands hard work and hours of networking. Unlike some bands, they have not searched out fame, but have instead grabbed peoples attention with their killer live performance.

As the band prepare for their European tour, who knows where they’ll end up. Zac’s doing his best to learn about Germany by reading children’s picture books, which he claims “are an accurate reflection of a culture”.

Bang! Bang! Eche’s story is inspirational, and if they could afford to take an entourage with them to Europe they would. Unfortunately the rest of the band laughed off James’s suggestion, but Zac did make one promise to him “we can have a full on tour bus with your face on the side of it instead”. And it wouldn’t be an entourage without us, every minute with Bang! Bang! Eche! is so much fun. I can only imagine the fun I’d have touring with them. - Nick Fulton

BANG! BANG! ECHE! EP
You'd be forgiven for thinking that this was the latest big thing from New York city rather than from Christchurch.
B!B!E! stunned and impressed the Auckland audience when they supported !!! (chk chk chk) recently, with people still wowed by the backflips days later. What really impresses me with this EP is that they have actually written good, solid songs rather than extended out just a couple of good ideas like too many of their contemporaries. Destined for big things if this debut is anything to go by, mark my words! AT - Andrew Tidball

“Bang! Bang! Eche! are a five-piece dance-punk band from Christchurch, New Zealand. Their beats are along the measured, precise lines of Foals, but there's whirring, fitting keyboards around them and yelping vocals which mean it's less pretentiousness and more fun. It's medically impossible to listen to '4 To The Floor' or '(You & Me) As Thick As Thieves' and not dance involuntarily. The lyrics are deceptively clever; you're too busy having fun to actually take notice of them, but if you did, you'd realise there's a strange insight in to the world of parties down under.”
- Fake DIY UK
http://www.thisisfakediy.co.uk/articles/8751/Bang-Bang-Eche.html - Emma Swan

"This is the best EP we've heard out of Christchurch for a long, long time" - Ben Fuller

"Believe the hype people, BBE are definately the best new band in NZ at the moment, and whithin months these dance punks are going to be massive. We can't stop playing the new EP in the studio, its impressive from start to finish. I just hope James Murphy and DFA are watching!" - Sam Demphries

If there’s any life left in the UK dance-punk scene, it’s probably in New Zealand. Skinny-limbed Kiwi
quintet Bang! Bang! Eche! approaches the Brit clichés from a new angle, as the band combines aggressive, distorted vocals with a dissonant musical edge to create something impressively vulgar. “Nikee” offers up deliciously campy synth lines, and the call-andresponse section is a messy endeavor: “Rip it up, mess it up, fuck it up/Cut it up, line it up, snort it up/Gag her up, smack her up, choke her up.” Over the thumping bass lines, shimmering riffage and winding synths, vocalist Zach Doney satirically spouts off. As in “4 To The Floor”: “From Tokyo to France/We know you want to dance!” Now that’s confidence. - CMJ

The band began as a naïve attempt at music-whoring. Two friends, James Sullivan and Pez Mahoney drafted some high school drop-outs and tried to score a publishing deal by writing bland pop tunes suitable for audiences in elevators. Their Hollywood dreams were crushed and they remained in Christschurch, New Zealand. They didn’t have it in them to be whores, bland or otherwise.

It was all worthwhile. Bassist T'Nealle Worsley needed to be less of a whore. There was a long growing need to get right, to write the music that was buzzing around inside her head and to give up Muzak. Disillusionment is a mandatory hurtle to cross in order to reach adulthood. She snapped one humid summer night in 2007. She’s the one with Viking blood; they should have seen it coming. We’re all just lucky there was no looting or pillaging. She wrote two albums of new material in one week. For them the world changes by the following weekend.

Vocalist Zach Doney now drove a raucous synth-rock riot more manic than the Faint or the Rapture. They land somewhere short of the frenetic proportions of Mindless Self Indulgence, making themselves a soul mate of sorts for Daiquiri or VCR. It’s a place where jagged synthesizer noises accentuate dance beats and the lyrics swing from meaningless to oddly coherent. They don’t caricaturize the genre; they just press all its boundaries, and all it’s buttons.

But as New Zealanders, they are on an island of influences. Your typical gathering of Brooklyn indie rockers were not influenced by Moron Says WHAT?!, Radio Birdman, Blam Blam Blam, and the 3Ds. The oeuvre of the entire ill-named kiwi-pop scene and the Flying Nun label were massively important to the building of New Zealand’s rock culture. The biggest mistake a critic could make here is describing this record only in the terms of our own western musicological framework.

Last October, Bang! Bang! Eche! awoke one morning, in a pile of half dressed limbs and bodies with severe bedhead and smeared eyeliner. They are now a lean, mean new-wave, post punk machine. That Fall they won a local music contest called the SmokeFreeRockquest. They toured Australia, Europe and the United States in 2008. Not bad for a band from a city of 150,000 on an island whose main business is acting as a transit depot for Antarctic flights.

So where will our heroes go in the next episode? Tune in next time to find out. The step from nothing to something is the biggest most difficult step in a bands career. That wobbly step is sometimes even taken by accident. It’s the second one that is so intimidating. - Stranded In Stereo