Mugi-Boogie

So yeah, Queens of the Stone Age played down at the Cunard Centre last night, and yeah, they were awesome, but you can read about that all somewhere else on the Internet. What we’re going to talk about today is last night’s opening band Mugison. Mugison (pronounced Moo-gy-son) is the brainchild of  Örn Elías Guðmundsson and isone of Iceland’s top selling artists (that’s where he’s from if you hadn’t caught on yet). Normally he operates as a one-man plus laptop band, but for this tour he’s got a four peice backing band to beef his sound, giving the whole thing a beer-soaked blues on steroids vibe. The band hit the stage with an air of confidence around them and promptly launched into their set. Mugison’s songs run the gamut from Tom Waits’ caterwauling and Hawksley Workman’s falsetto with a little bit of Eels jagged edged blues mixed in for good measure. And ho-boy can these guys swing (Sasha Frere Jones should take note), thanks in no small part to their drummer who was standing up pointing his drum sticks at the crowd about as much as he was actually playing and the crowd ate it all up. If all this weren’t enough, the band played a second set later that night at the Seahorse Tavern. By the time this blogger got their the lineup ran up the stairs and across the front of the Economy Shoe Shop. So while I didn’t get in to see the band, I have no doubt that they had no trouble making new friends.