After three painful months, you’ve finally returned to beloved Columbia.
You’ve organized your room, picked up your books and most likely celebrated the jolliest of unofficial holidays: syllabus week. But what to do this weekend, while you still have a considerable amount of downtime before classwork starts to devour you? We at MOVE suggest stepping off campus for a few hours on Saturday and heading downtown to Hair Hole.
Notable among the local bands this weekend at the First Annual CoMo Jams BBQ is New Tongues, a three-member group dedicated to the simple joys of making music.
New Tongues came together in Columbia in October 2011, after guitarist Shane Johnson met drummer Mike Quinn at a fair last summer. Quinn went to high school with bassist Justin Nardy, and so emerged New Tongues.
“We started off as a couple of us recovering from past musical projects that were looking to do something new,” Johnson says in an email. “With roots tracing back to Bald Eagle, Caterpillar Tracks, MTMQ, Amputee Set and more, the band members have established themselves in the Columbia music scene.
“There were no lofty goals of ‘making it’ or touring for weeks on end,” Johnson says.
The group is simply in it for the enjoyment of creating original electric music.
Johnson describes the band’s unique sound as “a collection of punishing, meandering, methodic and propulsive rhythms that sooth, caress, and displace and confuse … a comfortable place between ’90s Chicago underground rock bands and others from the discordant rock tradition of over-generalized genres.”
To hear their music, New Tongues have a few demos on their [website](http://newtongues.bandcamp.com/) without vocals.
“The lyrics and vocals are a minor part of what we do both musically and sonically,” Johnson says.
Both, however, will be included in their live performances and on an upcoming record.
Their album, _We are the ones we have been waiting for_, was recorded in St. Louis with Daniel Ruder of the band Jack Buck and is scheduled for release in the fall or early winter of this year.