Music
Press
Prudes, don't shy away from these guys just because of their blatant band name - they're from Berklee! It's okay!
Add them to that trifecta of a genre we love to listen to known as rock, blues and soul. Vocalist Andrew Burri's raspy and raw vocals plea with sweet determination. Throw in full-band singing bridges and harmonies, mix in some lengthy guitar solos and you got yourself some damn good blues songs. And we all know, you can sing about just about anything irrelevant with passion in good blues songs (por ejemplo, their highlights include "Chevy Nova" and "Golden Shoes).
It's obvious that we love SEX! But what we'd really love is if they'd put out their CD already.
Catch them while you can:
August 15 - 3pm - KahBand Music & Arts Festival - Bangor, Maine. - tamborineshake
Sex! is a rock and roll band, plain and simple. The band is John Adams (drums), Josh Hari (bass and vocals), Kyle VandeKerkhoff (guitar and keyboard), Sky Handler (guitar) and Andrew Burri on vocals, a bit of percussion, and general tomfoolery. A typical Sex! tune is everything a good rock song should be; Burri belts out catchy choruses with ease (see “take a ride in my Chevy Nova”), while Adams and Hari hold a rock solid groove and Handler and, let’s just call him Kyle, play solos of inflammable intensity between seamlessly harmonized, vintage-sounding guitar lines. When I listen to their music, or better yet, see it live, I can half imagine I’m listening to some obscure Jeff Beck B-Side. There are echoes of Cream, Zeppelin, Hendrix, even a little Otis Redding, as well as contemporary bands like Wolfmother. Theirs is an unmistakably modern sound that is nevertheless firmly rooted in the hard-rockin’, free-lovin’ days a of a decade we weren’t around to experience firsthand. Upon seeing them live, the band’s music in combination with their appearance on stage (particularly handler’s, who droops an unlit cigarette from his lips the whole time) is borderline hokey, like those posers in the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. Somehow, they pull it off, though, and I think it’s because the singing, the songs, and the band itself are the genuine article. You can tell the band feels every note; like all the best rock n’ roll, the sound is infused with an unmistakable joy at being young and alive.
Sex! is a new band and known to few outside a small circle of devoted Boston and New York music lovers. Be sure to check them out if you live close by. Don’t despair, though, if you’re from parts out there; a band this good will be, well, out there and everywhere in no time flat. - wordpress.com
"Indie entrants Sex!...are the most poised to follow the Apollo Sunshine/Click Five path to success."
- Brent T. Ingram
- Weekly Dig 3.11.09 - 3.18.09 - Weekly Dig
SEX
House of Blues, Boston, MA
2/17/09
I’m at the opening night of the new House of Blues. Apparently the show was cancelled for about a half hour, but the place is still at capacity and it’s only 8:00 pm (although it doesn’t seem very full—plenty of room to move around, and it’s easy to get close to the stage). Sex is already onstage by the time I get through the extensive security checkpoints, and the crowd seems really into them. I’m impressed by how good the sound is here. Sex plays through a great set, and second to last they play their crowd favorite, “Chevy Nova.” Everyone dances, and the band plays especially energetically. The crowd goes crazy as they finish. This has got to be one of the best local bands in Boston right now, and I must add that House of Blues is a nice improvement over Avalon. (Emsterly) - The Noise
by Paul Robicheau
Boston music had a good year. Out of the shadows of underground open mikes and barroom stages, local groups grabbed major-label deals, racked up thousands of downloads and dueled to the top of band contests. Here are 10 artists navigating their way into the glare of the public eye. Catch them before they get overexposed.
"We do really really simple stuff"
For people who dig rock 'n' soul with old-fashioned swagger and showmanship, there's nothing like Sex! "We do really simple stuff that's emotional, nothing technical," frontman Andrew Michael Burri says. "The whole point is to connect to the crowd." That's just what the Berklee-born quintet did this year en route to winning Rockus, a Boston-wide battle of college bands. Burri and lead guitarist Skye Handler demonstrated how physical chafaisma is key to the show, dropping to their knees and rolling onto their backs in the process. Burri says he looks to Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison as his performance models, "morphing between those people because they're so uninhibited." And Skye Handler is as obsessed with old blues icons as he is with letting it rip onstage. Handler and guitarist Kyle VandeKerkhoff put the first version of the group together in late 2005 after jamming. They hooked up with drummer John Adams, who lent them a gospel and hip-hop feel, and the current line-up gelled in 2007 with the arrival of Burri and bassist Josh Hari. As the group finishes its first CD for fall release, one sticking point is the moniker Sex! "You can't search the Internet for that band name," Burri says, "As long as we maintain the audience we've got, it shouldn't be a problem to change the name."
- Improper Bostonian Music Issue
SEX! SELLS AT BAND BATTLE
by Martin Caballero
April 16, 2009
The verdict is in and the judges like Sex.
The band, that is.
The Berklee College of Music quintet walked away victorious Tuesday night in the final round of the inaugural Rockus Battle of the Bands. Sex defeated six other groups in the final round, earning top nods from a panel of judges that included Rolling Stone publisher Will Schenck, A&M/Octone Records founder Ben Berkman and Incubus guitarist Mike Einziger.
Sex’s reward includes an unspecified cash prize, $1,000 in Rolling Stone swag, a CD release party at the Hard Rock Cafe and 12 hours of recording time at the famous Electric Lady Studios in New York City.
The battle, sponsored by Harvard’s student-run label Veritas Records and Rolling Stone, was the first of what organizers hope to turn into an annual event in Boston and other cities.
The path to the finals began in February when bands from Boston College, Boston University, Tufts, Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Berklee and Emerson began competing for the right to represent their college in the final round. (Full disclosure: This writer was a judge in the preliminary round.)
In Tuesday’s final showdown, each band had 20 minutes to convince the judges they were worthy of the crown. Like “American Idol,” music was only part of the criteria for winning. Bands with stage presence that knew how to rock the crowd had a natural advantage. It didn’t take long to see which bands had it and which didn’t.
MIT’s the Pears had chemistry, its members playing well off each other in a free-roaming funk style. But they overindulged in long breakdown sections; a mistake for this kind of show. Harvard’s Ben Kultgen Band showed that two electric guitars with an acoustic floating elegantly above them could work sonically, but the outfit lacked charisma.
Berklee’s Sex wowed the crowd with the best of both worlds - powerful music and an engaging performance. The band tore through torrid electric blues that brought the lead singer to his knees. Sex had a loud, captivating rock-star sound and the swagger of kids who, well, go to Berklee.
The outfit’s closest competition was FunkSoulLove of Tufts, a Roots-like hip-hop fusion band that never quite took off, despite solid audience support.
It took only a few minutes of deliberation for the judges to crown Sex the victor. - Boston Herald
Discography
Full length debut album is to be released in October.
Photos
Bio
As we passed through the decades following the birth of Rock n Roll, many things happened. Many bands attempted to capture and contain what they believed was the true essence of “Rock n Roll”. And, of course, many failed. There were, however, the few that passed the test of time and, subsequently, continue to live on through generation after generation. These bands had that special something: that secret ingredient that, no matter how hard you try, how far and wide you search, only the chosen few have. The exploitation of “artists” in the ‘90s and into the new millennia by the giant record labels bred the deterioration of quality in the music being made. There was so much money being generated by such bad music. Things needed to change. Enter: the Digital Age of “free” music. This transition has brought much distress to the higher ups in the industry, but it has allowed for the massive flood of new, easily reachable and mostly good music to be heard by everyone. Now more than ever, we can change the industry and bring better music to the masses. We can get back to that feeling of when people first heard the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix. This is what the band Sex is hoping to achieve. Boston based, Sex is an amalgam of West coasters, East coasters and Mid-Westers. They pride themselves on the pure, raw quality of their live shows where they play balls out, leaving nothing behind after the set. The mixture of blues, R n B and soul; everything we loved with the incarnation of Rock n Roll, is what Sex has already captured in their short tenure. And unlike their counterparts of the late ‘50s/early ‘60s, they’ve got another influence in Hip Hop to modernize themselves.
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