“Anyone who has seen Venus de Mars perform with her band All the Pretty Horses knows that the veteran punk rock and goth artist isn’t afraid of putting it all out there—at times literally, with only a few strips of electrical tape and a well-placed corset serving as her only stage wear.
Her new album, Flesh and Wire, might be de Mars’ most revealing work yet. With only an acoustic guitar and a few scuffling, subtle background rhythms standing between her and her listeners, de Mars is shining a spotlight on her big, booming, three-octave range voice and introspective lyrics in a way she’s never done before.”
So begins an article on my good friend Venus deMars, whose latest album, “Flesh and Wire” officially dropped yesterday at a release party in her home town of Minneapolis. We’ve waited a long time for this album, those of us who have followed this exceptional artist’s career over the years, and I have to tell you, the excitement is palpable.
Now, I’ve never used this platform as a venue for reposting blogs or articles written by somebody else, but that’s not for any proprietary reason. I just think there are other platforms for that, including Facebook and Tumblr. This article, however, continues a dialog I started a few months back, here on this blog, about Venus and her return to music after a harrowing experience with tax auditors. When she announced last year that she would be releasing a long-awaited acoustic album, I was more than a little stoked.
I’ve followed Venus since the bad ol’ Soul Invictus days of Phoenix, when the Bowie-esque song “If God Were Caught” filtered from my speakers one busy deadline-riddled afternoon. I had never heard of All The Pretty Horses, much less the band’s front goddess Venus deMars. That one song not only caught my attention, it began a love affair that hasn’t abated to this day and a friendship that has grown ever since my business partner Scotty and I invited Venus to play our artspace in Phoenix. She still makes it a point to include our humble casa in New Mexico in her tour plans to this day.
The article in questions also features a link to a video I made of Venus in our Ready Room a couple years back, doing an acoustic version of David Bowie’s “Heroes.” Neither Venus nor I asked for the link, nor did we supply one to the writer. It just happens to be the one video out of dozens floating around out there in the world wide web that caught her attention. Or that of her editor. In either case, I’m happy to be so represented.
It’s a good article. Read the rest of it here.
Ground Zero 