Every Christmas for the past four years, Kissing Party has released a song in honor of the holiday, but this year, the band has put together an entire EP. Cheekily titled Winter in the Pub, the digital platter, which contains past songs along with two new ones, can be downloaded directly from the band's website. The music, which isn't too far removed from the Party's usual winsome, sometimes melancholy pop confection, has church bells, strings and sleigh bells to give it the right holiday-season sonic trappings.
See also: Profile: Kissing Party's Gregg Dolan talks about Wasters Wall
To celebrate the release of the EP, the band is playing a show this Saturday, December 21, at the Skylark Lounge, with Best Creeps and Wild High. The first ten or twelve people through the door will get a free copy of the limited physical release.
To accompany the new EP, Kissing Party has made two videos for the two new tracks, "Pretty Lights" and "You're Going Everywhere Without Me," a clip that Gregg Dolan thinks "captures some sort of depression, right? That was actually shot a couple of years ago. I had it lying around, and it seemed to fit that song pretty well. It sounds like a negative Dr. Seuss or something, right?"
The video "Pretty Lights," meanwhile, came about when Dolan and Deirdre Sage took a trip to Bishop's Castle. "We actually didn't plan on shooting a video at all," Dolan recalls. "We were just going there. On the way there, we thought maybe we would get our cell phones out and shoot some footage. On the day, it was cold as balls, so we thought no one would be in this fucking cold castle on a Saturday afternoon. Turns out there were like twenty Comic Con people there doing God knows what. They were taking photos, I know that much. So we thought, 'Holy shit, we've got to ask them.'
"Harry Potter told us to fuck ourselves," Dolan goes on, "and there was a Thor there who wasn't into it. But the rest of them were more than willing to lip-synch the words. I didn't even have the song on me, so I had to sing it to me, so maybe it looks off a little bit, but that's how it happened. No, I'm not joking.
So that ice guy was there, too?
"Yeah, he was the guy that I saw and thought, 'Fuck me. We have to at least ask him,'" Dolan remembers. "Because he looks like the guy from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade who was guarding the cup of Christ.
"I don't know how I got these people to do it, but they just agreed to do it," he concludes. "I don't think any of them have seen it yet, because I told a couple of them, 'Hey, we'll send you a link.' I hope they're not offended, because I think a couple of them thought maybe we were going to use the footage to make fun of them or something. I hope it's not interpreted that way."
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