Hellblinki - Press

(Excerpt)
Blink Your Ears
"Your life is a movie for us to sample. Your life is a movie and you are in a movie and, uh, the frames go by at one speed."So begins "The End," the first song on "Oratory," a freakshow pastiche masquerading as an album by Asheville, N.C.-based band the Hellblinki Sextet. In just that first song you'll hear operatic warbling, Midlle Eastern fiddling, jingling tamborines, and some guy ranting and growling about something. If this is a soundtrack to the movie of life, the musicians of Hellblinki must be seriously tripping.
The Record is littered with found sound, strange answering machine recordings, trumpets, and acoustic guitars alongside clinking wine-bottles and toy instruments. (Check out this post at Nickellbag.com for some choice musical samples.) It is as theatrical as it is musical - perhaps more so, as in "Wicked World," a stomping Psychedelic dirge marching behind the sinister-carnie vocals of Andrew Benjamin: "Take a look into my eyes and tell me what you see. Does something in here frighten you or does it set you free? I tell you of my petty dreams and petty miseries, oh take a look into my eyes and tell me what you see."
I see a dude who shouldn't be allowed to perform for children, lest he inspire a lifetime of nightmares.
Word is, the band's shows are even more bizzare and revelatory than their album. "The Hellblinki Sextet's pirate cabaret is something that needs to be seen as well as heard to garner its full scope," wrote one critic at Athens, Ga.'s The Flagpole. "Enamored of audience participation, Benjamin showered dime-store noisemakers on the crowd, imploring the audience to join into the aural disarray... It was a one-of-a-kind show."
Catch the show yourself when the Hellblinki Sextet plays the Badlander on Wednesday, Aug. 6. Smokestack and The Foothill Fury will also perform.