The Cairo Gang

Over the course of recent years, The Cairo Gang has been a lingering passion for its Los Angeles based prime mover Emmett Kelly, a stimulated singer/songwriter with an impressive list of musicians in his rolodex. Relocated from late 90's era [location]Chicago[/location] to LA he kept the Cairo Gang moniker active for approx 20 years until the late 2010's including numerous recordings and stints touring and performing live under the moniker. Whether performing with a back up band or solo Read more on Last.fm …read full bio

Over the course of recent years, The Cairo Gang has been a lingering passion for its Los Angeles based prime mover Emmett Kelly, a stimulated singer/songwriter with an impressive list of musicians in his rolodex. Relocated from late 90's era [location]Chicago[/location] to LA he kept the Cairo Gang moniker active for approx 20 years until the late 2010's including numerous recordings and stints touring and performing live under the moniker. Whether performing with a back up band or solo, Kelly always brings a freshened thrill to the world of quiet rock music. After mastering countless instruments, Kelly decided to put his skills to work and record some tunes that have been afloat in his headspace. And thank the heavens he did, because this album perfectly tweaks the butterflies in all of our stomachs. Deep, soft rock for tobacco tinged hearts, that’s The Cairo Gang in a nutshell. The Cairo Gang has collaborated with artists such as Bonnie 'Prince' Billy and Ty Segall, and toured w/ Beth Orton & was a guest on the Will Oldhem album "The Letting Go" recorded in Reykjavík, Iceland. Most Cairo Gang recorded material emanates from Kelly in an LA studio, oft playing nearly all instruments, live he has been joined onstage by the aforementioned Ty Segall on drums, and touring compatriots like Ryan Weinstein on bass and Jeff Harms joining on the gtr & vox While there's nothing new about the Cairo Gang's debut full-length, none of it sounds canned or dated either. How do they make oft-cited influences sound fresh? Long answer: The Cairo Gang take the instrumentation of gentle British 70's folk with the free-form composition and detached, beard-stroking vibe of post-rock, all executed with the fidelity and humility of homespun indie rock. Short answer: The Cairo Gang cuts across musical movements of several years' span to create music sounding distinctly out of time. The Cairo Gang is a musical declaration uniting the romanticists with the doomsayers for a round of high fives and hand shakes. The ballad _Mother Earth_ is acoustically organic, delivering the listener an early Neil Young feel with bewitching flutes and bongos while other tunes may reflect influences from a wide array of indie pop including playing obscure covers of indie influences like The Mekons and Ronald S. Howard. Kelly told KQED in an interview that the name came through his father who was working on a piece of artwork about Irish history when Kelly was in high school.The actual Cairo Gang, was a 20th century group of British Intelligence agents sent to Ireland during the resistance to spy on the Irish Republican Army. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.

User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License and may also be available under the GNU FDL.

…shrink me down again