Afterparty for Hallwalls 40th Birthday Celebration A/V Imbroglio: Redux

Admission FREE with A/V Imbroglio: Redux ticket, $5 otherwise

Cathy Carfagna (keyboards, vocals)
Biff Henrich (guitars, vocals)
Mr. Heyden (drums)
Gary Nickard (bass, vocals)
Scott Ryan (guitars, vocals)

from Artvoice:

May The Vores be With You

What keeps a band together for more than 30 years? Apparently, songs about Love Canal, murder, deteriorating relationships, stalking, mental disconnect, and maybe not seeing each other every day. Oh, and humor—lots of humor.

The Vores, who started playing and recording music in Buffalo in the late 1970s, are about to release their newest CD. Common Scar, upon completion of the art work by Brian Grunert, who designed the art work for The Vores' 2007 CD, Moment of Uncertainty, and won a Grammy Award for Best Record Packaging for his design of Ani DiFranco's Evolve CD in 2004. The band is made up of original members Biff Henrich on guitar and vocals and Gary Nickard on bass and vocals, visual artists who also provide much of the songwriting, as well as keyboardist, vocalist, and songwriter Cathy Carfagna (ex-Jazzabels, current Outlyers, solo, and Jim Whitford Band), Scott Ryan on guitar and vocals, and Patrick Heyden on drums.

Henrich, Nickard, and Carfagna recently sat down at an Allentown restaurant to discuss the new CD and The Vores past and present. Carfagna conveyed Whitford's compliments for The Vores' Elmwood Festival of the Arts performance to Henrich and Nickard; Whitford told her the band "was as loud as Motorhead."

"That is because we've had loud drummers," Nickard says with a smile. "It's caused by the speed of the music and the velocity of the drums we play at. I always complain that I can't hear Biff's guitar on stage." He nodded to Henrich and Carfagna. "My job is to connect these guys to the drums."

While this writer and others have compared The Vores' sound to art rock, art punk, and bands such as Wire, the Gang of Four, and Pere Ubu, Henrich hesitates on comparisons. "We've used the term avant garage; that's a pretty good description. I've never called us 'art rock' because that would present a different connotation. There are things I have listened to and that we were interested in, but the sound really came from us. At the start"—The Vores' first release was a four-song seven-inch, "Love Canal" and "Get Outta My Way," flip-side "Amateur Surgeon" and "So Petite"—"we tried out some singers who were real bad or too good, and [original member] David Kulik and I decided to try singing."

-Kevin J. Hosey