Dippers

 Whether it was fear of the trademark bogeyman emerging from small-hours infomercial hell or it was just time for a change, but the artist(s) formally known as Thigh Master is now Dippers. 

 Under their previous guise, the band have been invited to support internationally renowned artists such as Courtney Barnett, Real Estate, Ty Segall, Spiral Stairs, The Clean, Sheer Mag and more. Their musical output has received heavy rotation on community & college radio stations world-wide, not to mention critical acclaim by publications such as The Guardian, Rolling Stone & The Wire (and yes, they are Henry Rollins certified).

 The intervals of ragged, jangly guitar riffs interspersed with waves of sonic mischief pulls from the sounds of stylistic historical royalty such as Television Personalities, pre-bizarro Wedding Present and the scrappier of C86/Rough Trade/Postcard Records quantities, classic Flying Nun (namely The Verlaines, The Bats, The Chills, 3Ds, Look Blue Go Purple) and the 80s/90s groundwork laid by fellow Aussies The Go-Betweens, The Moles, The Cannanes, and the early years of Half-A-Cow Records (Smudge, Sneeze, The Plunderers, etc). 

 For the first album as Dippers, founder and leader Matthew Ford (Vocals, Guitar, Drums, Bass, Synth, Percussion) is again joined by Innez Tulloch (Vocals, Guitar, Keys, Synth, Bass, Melodica), who is now Ford's principle songwriting partner. Longtime Thigh Master collaborator Dusty Anastassiou (Dag, Permits) provides some guitar action on a handful of tracks. 

 Dippers' 2023 full-length, Clastic Rock for Goner Records, doubles down on Ford & crew's supernatural skill at something possessed by only a tiny handful of very special entities that exist under the voluminous banner of indie-jangle/pop: Immediacy. You won't even realize you're listening to indie-jangle/pop (or whatever term one prefers), cuz it takes just a few seconds of the gorgeous down-strummed acousti-riffs tumbling down the stairs across opener "S.I.M." for this thing to own your ass. The album is filled with stop-start dynamics that work to create hooks within hooks (a trick at which this band excels), especially on "Comment's Grip". "Staggering the Recipe" could easily pass the blindfolded taste test as a lost nugget from the late Chris Knox/Tall Dwarfs, while Nicole Thibault of Thibault and Minimum Chips brings excellent trombone chops (also a name from the Dippers' Thigh Master pre-history) to "Encouragement in Brackets," "Drop to Inoperant" & "Takings from the Bar;" and visual artist Nicky Minus makes an appearance on flute for “Recurrent Sight.”

 Nod

Nod also offered up fresh experiments from their basement laboratory this year titled “Fly Fly Fly” through Carbon Records (Liam Grant, Reynols, Thurston Moore). The new album maintains the trio’s NRBQ-esque unpredictability and exploratory distorted attack that’s been a thing since forming in 1990. Along with their new record, go find a copy of 1995’s “I’m Around,” one of the best things to ever come out of Rochester. 

https://www.facebook.com/dippersband/

https://www.dippersband.com/

https://nodrock.bandcamp.com/

Tickets: $15 and on sale now online at https://abilene.showare.com/and tonight at the bar