#PhillyPresents - Ape School by DRGN KING

Your band name:  
Dominic Angelella/Drgn King


Style: Kitchen Sink music. I like loud guitars and synthesizers and cool lyrics.

Years on the Scene: I moved here nine years ago to come to college and have moved through countless bands and met lots of interesting and nice people. 

Current Project and/or Members: Drgn King is my child and I love it.  Joe Baldacci plays drums, Steve Montenegro plays bass, Brent Reynolds plays synths and tambourines and oversees all the music.  Brendan Mulvihill (current Philadelphia expatriate and member of Norwegian Arms) plays guitar.  Zach Goldstein is our engineer and he's been helping us record at Kawari Sound in Elkins Park.

 

Any new album projects? Sessions in the works?
We released our first record Paragraph Nights earlier this year and tour a good amount. We're recording our new record which will probably be out next summer at Kawari Sound, which is an amazing studio.

Recent and/or most unique/exciting show:
We're playing with one of the best bands in Philadelphia on the 30th. read below:

Introducing: APE SCHOOL

I think it's fitting that I'm 'introducing' Ape School as they are gearing up to play their last show for an unforeseeable period of time.  Michael Johnson has always been somewhat of an anomaly to me. He began working at University of The Arts when I was a confused/shitty junior trying to figure out what I was doing.  My mind was always somewhere else and I would occasionally cross paths with him.  If I caught him at the right time, I would get a chance to see his wall of modular synthesizers and, if I was lucky, get to hear a weird/fucked up story about famous indie-rock musicians that I idolized.  He always told these stories with a heavy amount of sardonic humor, as if he was trying to systematically take down every pedestal I'd built for these outsider music titans.

Years later, after I'd been familiarized with the band through various channels (many of my friends/acquaintances are occasional Apes) they released JUNIOR VIOLENCE, one of the most gleefully angry records I have ever had the pleasure of hearing.  Each song contains a vicious take-down equally as sarcastic and biting as those stories MJ told me back in my college days of yore.  The target of these songs doesn't know he's fucked himself over, he masturbates himself to sleep most every single night while he fantasizes himself a "krautrock paul simon," says the word shit at least a thousand times while apologizing.   The character is relentlessly imperfect and shameful.  He could be any of us.  It occurs to me while I'm listening to this record that Michael is most likely singing to every musician he's ever met or worked with, singing to himself, singing to Roger Waters, Robert Fripp, Todd Rundgren, Milli Vanilli, Ariel Pink or Pat Metheny.

This is music that is so good and fresh and interesting that it makes me angry and fills me with the same excitement that I felt when I first heard Magical Mystery Tour at eight years old. It is a rock band with reverence for the history of the genre but with the full knowledge that all of our heroes

are most likely horrible people.

We're playing Ape Schools last show November 30th at Boot and Saddle and I couldn't be more honored/excited.