Press
Reviews
Reviews
“ The energy and humour that drives the performance is highly infectious and constantly amusing, but beyond that Mikeangelo and his black-clad gents are seriously superb musicians” ~ The List ✭✭✭✭
“Their best show yet, it’s superbly staged and well worth the risk of being clambered over by a man wearing anything-for-a-dare swimming trunks” ~ The Herald ✭✭✭✭
“Mikelangelo and his band of extremely talented musicians are all well defined and disturbing characters in their own right “ ~ hairline.org.uk ✭✭✭✭✭
Press photos
Press photos
the List
The List (UK)
✭✭✭✭
The gypsy cabaret troupe returns to the Fringe once more to assault audiences with their riotous mix of songs, storytelling and sinful behaviour. This year, the Balkan-styled, Australia-based five-piece have pitched up to promote their new album, Dead Men Tell a Thousand Tales, a collection of typically blackly comic songs that swing between gallows humour and wanton lust and passion.
It’s on stage, however, that the band really comes alive. They’re a motley crew of finely realised characters fronted by louse lothario Mikelangelo (baritone vocals and guitar) and featuring ratty Rufino the Catalan Casanova (violin), the Sphinx-like Great Muldavio (clarinet), handsome homicidal maniac Ivan (double bass) and solemn, Golem-like Guido Libido (piano accordion). An incorrigible braggart, Mikelangelo dominates the show with his booming voice, hulking presence and penchant for leaping into the audience to satiate his much-advertised sexual desires. But the rest of the band members all get their individual moments in the spotlight, too, telling their variously tragic tales and singing their songs of woe.
The energy and humour that drives the performance is highly infectious and constantly amusing, but beyond that Mikeangelo and his black-clad gents are seriously superb musicians. Regularly switching vocal duties and instrumentation (one balmy tune is performed on recorder, pennywhistle and marching drum), they play ballads and barnstormers with fine finesse and great gusto as required — and as exemplified during the opening number, ‘Dancing at the Devil’s Wedding’, and the closing one, ‘Sodomy is Not Just for Animals’. During the hour or so in between we’re treated to all kinds of odd diversions both musical (the spaghetti western soundtrack ‘Ten Long Years in the Saddle (Waiting for Death to Come)’) and comic (Mikelangelo’s discourse on the use of hair pomade in different continents around the world). Long may these deliciously dark gentlemen continue to stage their devilish cabaret.
Miles Fielder
16 August 2009
16 August 2009
The Herald
The Herald (UK)
✭✭✭✭
The incorrigible Mikelangelo is back from his own personal Transylvania to show that being a Black Sea gentleman is a state of mind. He and his troupe may come over as the spookiest funeral band in the Balkans but they can just as easily be Tombstone's answer to the Keystone Cops, stars of their own polenta western.
Not so much High Noon as High 4pm, no, make that 3pm - Guido Libido, the accordionist, can't count - this latest extravaganza continues Mikelangelo's fascination with death, body parts and the devil, with much dark hilarity and knowingly preposterous posturing.
To the strains of a Death Valley harmonica, an eerie voice warns of dangerous strangers. A fife and drum band marches through corpses and the wounded. Skeletons dance a mambo and our hero is refused a beer because he has forgotten to dismount on entering Rufino's cantina after 10 long years in the saddle.
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Their best show yet, it's superbly staged and well worth the risk of being clambered over by a man wearing anything-for-a-dare swimming trunks.
Rob Adams
19 August 2009
Scotsman
The Scotsman
✭✭✭✭✭
I set off for Mikelangelo the Black Sea Gentlemen and emerged, a sweaty hour later, with a newfound appreciation of moobs. If that’s not a five star achievement, what is? I worried that the five Australian musicians pretending to be Balkan minstrels would prove to be a sub-par Gogol Bordello act. Was I ever wrong! Barrel-shaped ringleader, Mikel Simic, has a voice of operatic grandeur, capable of moving in many directions to suit the material. And that material’s hilariously over the top – all sex and death and death and sex. Achingly beautiful tunes are paired to the most bonkers lyrics. One song appears to be about skeletons languishing on a beach beside a sea of blood that’s washing up internal organs.Each of the accomplished musicians – who play everything from wind instruments to the standing bass – gets a solo turn, and each in his own way charms and excels. But the star is surely Mikel, who regularly leaps into the audience to caress and kiss them. And Mikel returned for their rousing finale wearing an old-fashioned, belted swimming costume, jiggling his moobs with pride and not a little glee. It was dead sexy. They’re divine!
Lee Randall
21 August 2009
Dead Men Tell A Thousand Tales
Mikelangelo and the Black Sea Gentlemen
Inertia
To live we must die. Many a culture far older and wiser than our own tell tales that rejoice in the part that death plays in celebrating and enjoying life. Mikelangelo and his Black Sea Gentlemen know this, they revel in it. Dead Men Tell a Thousand Tales – most of them well worth listening to – throws back to an era of dark cabaret, twisted tales, and smoke-filled cavernous venues. Hark the Moricone inspired Ten Long Years in the Saddle (Waiting for Death to Come) – and we have all been there - take up an invite to The Devil’s Wedding – what do you bring as a gift for the devils who has all of eternity? Or perhaps you are understanding that It’s a Struggle to be Human some days. There are not enough Balkan folk bands in Sydney, and by gosh we have missed the piano accordion since the demise of Weddings, Parties, Anything. Whether they hail from Communist Yugoslavia or the outer limits of Tempe; Mikey and his Gentlemen friends understand how to compose a tale of death, joy and dark humour and I’ll drink from my tankard to that.
*** 1/2
- Chris Peken
Alternative Media Group of Australia 21 July 2009
Dead Men Tell A Thousand Tales
Mikelangelo and the Black Sea Gentlemen
Inertia
✭✭✭✭
This is the first CD I can recommend on the strength of its liner notes alone. It is a wonderful piece of short fiction that neatly bypasses the band's Australian origins and instead has them sent packing from their debauched spiritual home in a Yugoslav hotel under a curse personally delivered by Tito. Happily, the album measures up to the ambition of this creation myth with a slab of dark cabaret that mixes everything from klezmer to Tex-Mex and wild-west gothic and simmers the lot in a cauldron of Balkan fatalism. With the very able assistance of his gentlemen (who sport names as superb as Guido Libido and Rufino the Catalan Casanova), Mikelangelo's lugubrious bass-baritone is the perfect guide to the band's visceral violin, clarinet and accordion flavoured adventures amid death and the whispering of angels. But the chief character is the Devil, who is not so much embraced here as taken on a bender. And when it all gets overwhelming, there's sage advice aplenty, not least this line in The Devil's Wedding "The only way to find the way back home again is to grab the sow by its milky teats". Death may rule the day, but this is some of the most alive music I've heard in a long while.
James Jeffery
The Australian
Dead Men Tell A Thousand Tales
Mikelangelo and the Black Sea Gentlemen
Inertia
They describe their act as ‘kabaret noir’, and it fits.
Behind the façade of Mikelangelo & The Black Sea Gentlemen, there lurks … well, I don’t really know. They’ve hidden their real identities, so I have to take them at face value – even though the members have such improbable names as Guido Libido and Rufino the Catalan Casanova. But they’ve been touring this country since 2000 (so take with a large dose of salt their claims to have emerged from Communist Yugoslavia and to have wowed the crowds in Kirov). But, as their name implies, their musical hearts are in eastern Europe, with Balkan folk, gypsy, klezmer and other traditional feels portrayed with accordion, clarinet fiddle and double bass. It’s all then cranked up on this third album with a vaudevillian exaggeration that pushes these apparently sonorous, serious songs about death and dissipation into mock-epic melodrama. And frontman Mikelangelo has a theatrical baritone to boost the sense of shadowy cabaret here. So tracks like The Struggle To Be Human and The Devil’s Wedding work on two levels – dank and mysterious, but also darkly comic. If you’re still not in on the joke, try Ten Long Years In The Saddle (Waiting For Death To Come) – it’s like Johnny Cash lost in Romania. Overtly comedic visual cues make their concept work better live, but there’s enough here to have you joining in on the noir-ish fun.
***½
BILL HOLDSWORTH - Rave Magazine, Brisbane, 8 July 2009