Spaghetti Western Rock and Roll Dance Party from Vienna, Austria? Chick Quest’s debut record, Vs. Galore, is the sound of four people playing sweaty, explosive, danceable rock and roll built on creativity and fun— trumpet and all. It’s feeling the floorboards bounce while dancing to Violent Femmes in a crowded house at 3am, not trying to show people how “hard you rock” for the umpteenth time.
The original name for the band was Lee Van Cleef, named after the famous actor who starred in many classic western films like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Ryan White, an American expat living in Vienna, Austria, had the idea of taking “Spaghetti Western” influences and mixing it with his own Indie Rock songwriting for a couple of years. In mid January of 2014, while listening to The Go! Team’s debut album in a bar, a drunken conversation with his friend, Iris Rauh, convinced her to buy an electronic drum set and learn to play the drums from scratch so together they could create dance parties for their friends in Vienna.
Unlike most drunken “great ideas”, this one stuck, and Rauh bought her electronic drum set the very next day. White began to focus on writing “straightforward” songs based on chopped up snippets of “Spaghetti Western” chord progressions and simple, repetitive drum beats. In order to alleviate himself from more complicated guitar work so he could focus on vocals and performance, he wrote melodic bass lines underneath the drum patterns and rhythm guitar that had now taken a back seat to the song. The idea was to be “simple” in structure and technique but intricate in arrangement and layering, and energetic and explosive in delivery. The only instrument in the band with a license to do any kind of soloing would be the trumpet, which would emphasize the “Spaghetti Western” chords and bring a different color to the often exhausted Post-Punk genre.
