The Billy Nayer Show | en

Explaining The Billy Nayer Show is like the Supreme Court trying to define pornography: You can’t describe it, but you know it when you see it. Their specialty is a dark and sometimes cryptic sarcasm that encases a surprising core belief in the power of love. BNS is a band infused by an entirely unique, internal mythology outside and beyond any trends.

The San Francisco born, New York based Billy Nayer Show is singer/songwriter/electric autoharpist Cory McAbee, drummer Bobby Lurie and bassist Frank Swart. Their first gig, opening for The Circle Jerks, found them covered in human phlegm (not their own) as the PA system caught on fire. With the Billy Nayer Show’s self-titled debut album in 1994, the group had already gained a cult following with San Franciscans enraptured by characters like the Bunny King. Genuine love songs like “Apartment #5” stood in contrast to angular post-punk allegories like “Window” and the strange but important phenomenon known as “Weasel Heart”. The band evolved with it’s own logic. The Ketchup and Mustard Man (1994) was a stream-of-consciousness type radio show. The Villain That Love Built (1998) -- easily the band’s most sinister and mean-spirited album—skinned the Bunny King and unleashed a malicious and heavy tone. Inspired by the band’s new life on the East Coast, BNS released Return to Brigadoon (1999), a lush, romantic ode to love, which stabbed at the dark crevices of religion and politics. Last year’s double CD, Goodbye Straplight Sarentino, I Will Miss You (2003) was the group’s most epic and obliquely political work to date. A dense, psychedelic, and cerebral album, it spawned the future classic “Three Monkeys” and added the “Angel Projector” to the BNS iconography.

In 2001, the band’s feature length film, a space western musical entitled The American Astronaut, debuted at The Sundance Film Festival. The film was written, directed, produced and stars the Billy Nayer Show. It features an original soundtrack by the band and some of the most bizarre Rock and Roll scenes ever committed to film. The American Astronaut has gone on to win numerous awards and participate in every major international film festival. The film continues to screen theatrically to blistering accolades and has generated an intense loyalty. The DVD release is set for early 2005.

The band’s newest CD, Rabbit (2004), offers this question: Is this a story about rabbits and bears or is this a story about saying your prayers? Of course, this is not an album about rabbits; it is an album about sex. At once slinky and angular, lush and bright, rough, raw and refined, Rabbit sparkles with a glam rock aesthetic delivered with straightforward garage attitude. Rabbit will appear as the most accessible of the group’s work, however, nothing is just what it seems in the world of BNS. .