Wet Confetti

As a trio that features two guys playing drums and guitar behind a waifish Asian bass-playing frontwoman, Wet Confetti share a lot visually and musically with Blonde Redhead. Similarly, they are a hard band to categorize, fitting into the post-punk genre mainly because they're too clean and new wave for punk and too dirty and no wave for pop. Sometimes brandishing an extreme Sonic Youth noise assault, other times flirting with breathy Ladytron dance-rock, they blur genres together to create an angular amalgam of styles. Starting their musical career while in high school in the late '90s, bassist Alberta Poon and guitarist (and vocalist at the time) Dan Grazzini paired up and began making angular post-punk recordings. Realizing that their Mormon hometown of Orem, UT, was not going to embrace off-kilter rhythms, noisy feedback, and an overt lack of melodies, the duo packed up and moved to Seattle, home of Sub Pop, and then Olympia, WA, home of K Records. Finally finding their niche in Portland, OR, they teamed with drummer Mike McKinnon. As a deafening threesome, they played a variety of house shows and small clubs before starting work on This Is So Illegal (Do It Fast) in 2004. Fellow Portlander Dave Allen, former bassist of Gang of Four, was so impressed with their sound — particularly their stuttering time signatures — that he offered to produce their follow-up album, Laughing Gasping. Released in late 2006, the album was a slight departure from their noisier early records into polished dance-rock, with the punk veteran engineers involved (Allen and former Shriekback member Mike Cozzi) capturing a surprisingly glossy snapshot of the band's music.