The Roxies

Thursday, June 12, 2008
By Dan Barry
The Roxies
(self-released)
It's like honey on a razor blade. The hooks and vocals on the Roxies' debut disc are so sweet and so sharp you don't even realize your tongue is bleeding. It's been a long time coming—two years, in fact—since vocalist Magdalena was voted Best Female Singer in the Advocate's Grand Band Slam poll. Since then, the band has had to change its name (from Kitty Kitty Bang Bang, to avoid legal trouble with a burlesque show using the same name), and has undergone some lineup changes. But their delicious brand of glammy alternative has stayed delightfully intact. The songs stay short and punchy: they're tiny pop bombs averaging three minutes long, and nothing on the disc even hits the four-minute mark. "Gold Top" features falsetto vocals over a heavy disco beat, while "Down the Drain" burns with punk rock jet fuel. Hot shit.

http://www.hartfordadvocate.com/article.cfm?aid=8205
- Hartford Advocate

Tuesday, June 24, 2008
By Brian LaRue & Mike Sembos

New Haven Advocate Showcase at Ideat Village With The Roxies

Active showgoers may be quite familiar with the acts we’ve chosen, but The Roxies could be slightly foreign to y’all. The group’s Connecticut shows are, after all, something less than frequent. But it helps to know the history.
Last spring and summer, The Roxies were the subject of substantial area buzz under their former moniker, Kitty Kitty Bang Bang. Word was they were rock star stuff in the making. Kitty Kitty Bang Bang was tight, professional, fun, catchy, entirely rockin’. Striking Polish-born singer Magdalena was named “Best Female Vocalist” in the Hartford Advocate’s Grand Band Slam readers’ poll and local promoter Rob DeRosa gave them a prominent spot in the ’07 Meriden Daffodil Festival lineup.
Since then, the group has changed its name, following threatened legal action from a Texan burlesque troupe. But it has retained its sound and attitude. The Roxies have also issued a 10-song CD full of energetic, tuneful, unironic songs that get in and out well before they’ve exhausted their welcome. (The longest track is three minutes and 37 seconds.) Perhaps what The Roxies are doing ain’t new, but nothing is, and furthermore, it’s believeable (a rare quality indeed). Come out on Thursday for a free show and feel good about rock music again, the same way you did when you were 15. Yes, this paper is performing a service for you.
 —Brian LaRue

http://www.newhavenadvocate.com/article.cfm?aid=8493 - New Haven Advocate

June 1, 2008
By: Jeffrey Petrin, Editor
(Play Magazine Cover Store/Feature)
Partying with The Roxies


A lot of bands host cd release parties, but few remember the party aspect of it. Such is not the case with The Roxies. "My personal favorite time in history is Fin de sielce, which is 19th century, which is Bohemian-Parisian. I think I would have loved to live back then, and I just appreciate that kind of decadence." Explains Magdalena, the sexy front woman of The Roxies. "We wanted do our show and include those sort of elements including absinthe, which is legal now in the U.S., and women with a wild side being a part of it and burlesque dancers and magicians... it's an all encompassing vibe- we wanted to do something a little bit on the edge with it."

The Roxies are certainly throwing a party with an edge. The event will take place at The Backstage Rock Bar in Groton on Saturday night. For those unfamiliar with the venue, The Backstage is connected to Rose's Cantina, which guitarist Joe Sanborn explains is a great place for a show, "It's the perfect rock environment. It's half a strip club and a door in-between with a rock club on the other side; it just has a really unique feel."

Being that the Backstage is connected to a strip club allowed for the band to create the night of indulgence they were looking for. Not only will the night will include nude girls serving absinthe shots (first one is free with the $10 admission that also includes the cd!), but, according to Magdalena, the night will also feature "a lot of special guests, including a dear friend of mine, and a sister from a different father and a different mother, Jen Hill, who is a gifted and talented songwriter and musician. She is going to do a couple songs with me- and we're going to do something very extreme and very unexpected..." Magdalena giggles. "So everybody needs to be prepared and hold their seats tight... I can't really give any more details, other than she's going to be whipping people."

In addition to the apparent whipping, Magdalena details the other guests that will be there throughout the night, "There's also going to be Maiiah, and she's a burlesque dancer, and she's going to be performing with a real snake- I think it's a boa, but I'm not sure- I don't know much about snakes- as well as David Martin, the illusionist, he's going to be working the room."
And while there will be plenty of distractions throughout the night, of course there is the actual cd itself.

"It's one of those things where you always want to say it was a great experience and we did it two hours in the studio and we were done, but it definitely wasn't like that..." Sanborn explains, "it was quite a drawn-out process. We really wanted the record to be right, and we took our time with it."
Sanborn and company were able to take their time with the record thanks to the fact that they have the advantage of working out of their own studio. Called The Rock Shop (147 Fairfield Ave., Hartford; 860-983-3837), the band was able to record and edit the album in house.

The band, however, didn't mix the album themselves. Sanborn explains, "Magdalena and I co-produced the record and we co-wrote the songs, and since we were also performing the songs, we were afraid we were getting too close to the record and so we kind of wanted to get somebody with a fresh ear to listen to the tracks and mix the record."

The band enlisted the mixing talents of Michael Bona, who has worked with artists such as Peter Gabriel, Seal and Public Enemy. However, for The Roxies it wasn't just his resume that made working with Bona appealing. "We sent I Hope You're Real, the first single on the record, to Michael and two other engineers. We had three mixes come back and his just sounded amazing," Sanborn says, "but the other thing was that we really liked his attitude. Most of the people we talked to initially just wanted to talk about money and how much they wanted to charge us, and he called back a day after he got the track and his first words out of his mouth was that he loved the track, and he couldn't wait for us to hear the mix he did."

In addition to Bona, The Roxies worked with other big name production people, including vocal producer Edwin Ramos, who earned Grammys for his work with Mary J. Blige, and mastering engineer Chaz Harper, who has worked with some of the biggest names in rock and pop music, including Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, Sum 41 and Aerosmith.

Harper was a fan of the band since the early days, when the group was called Kitty Kitty Bang Bang (a name they had to change because a Texas burlesque show had trademarked it already.) As Sanborn explains, "he would just hang out and chill and he gave us a card at one of our early shows, and it turned out he was a mastering engineer at Battery Studios and he offered to master our cd for free."

While working with incredibly talented people is great, it wouldn't matter if the music sucked. This is certainly not a concern for The Roxies, as their album is quite impressive. Musically, the band's sound is difficult to pin down, because there appears to be so many different elements of influence on the record. Punk sounds intertwine with bits of pop and new-wave, all of which nestle flawlessly in their crunching and driving hard rock sound. It's hard to name a band they sound like, which is a good thing, but if you had to categorize them, it wouldn't be too far-fetched to place The Roxies' sound somewhere between Blondie and the Cult... if you could imagine such a combination.

The band's sound most likely comes from the fact that Both Magdalena and Sanborn have such a vast array of bands they like. "We had a lot in common musically, and it was sort of all over the map." Sanborn explains, "The glam or sort of 80s stuff, I love sort of riff-based pop stuff, like Iggy and the Stooges and some of the early glam stuff like David Bowie, but Magdelena have this common denominator too in that we're both huge Depeche Mode fans. But we are so all over the map, but there were certain references of bands that we both really loved."

The ideal way to know what the band sounds loke would be to see them at their cd release party... And a party it will be, as Magdalena promises with a laugh, "I'm from Poland, and we party our ass off, and I'd like to show the American folks how we party..."

It certainly sounds like a night to remember- assuming you'll be able to after all the absinthe.


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