Member Since: 7/26/2005
Band Members: n carson
f knutson
b holloway
c holloway
Sounds Like: Imagine Arnold Schoenberg's "Pierrot Lunaire" (basically an atonal nightmare composition from 1912) as played by a grindcore version of Melt Banana, and you kind of (only kind of) get the idea of what lost island Portland's The Better to See You With is coming from. Completely beautiful and scary pretty much at the same time, TBTSYW's math-muscular music jerks and jolts its way through airless compartments while protean female vocals alternate between siren song and Circean beast, except you get the feeling that this time Odysseus ain't coming home. ERIK BADER. - WILLAMETTE WEEK 04/09
Long-defunct Portland record store Django's used to keep Norwegian black metal in a cardboard box behind the counter. The intent was likely to protect kiddies from Varg's Fourth Reich or whatever, but the strategy sort of backfired: Make it special enough and even lunatic howls and inaudible corpse-paint sound amazing. Local punk experimentalists the Better to See You With have been teasing us for over a year with berserk samples of full-length material with new lead banshee Tina Fae Knutson. And every few months, they play this caustic set live: a paint-peeling exercise in car-crash noise, time-signature corruption, and eventual voice loss. Tonight, they finally present their secret cardboard box—on Portland's Celestial Gang Records—with contents so pure, so cold, that you might just want to keep it to yourself. MIKE MEYER - PORTLAND MERCURY 02/09
Record Label: celestial gang
Type of Label: Indie