Close Every Valve To Your Bleeding Heart – Ha Ha Tonka

Ha Ha Tonka is a rock band from the Ozark region of Missouri. Their music has been described as a mixing of bluegrass and southern rock and a “marrying of influences as diverse as The Replacements, The Band, and Kings of Leon.” Check out their new album “Novel Sounds From the Nouveau South”

The band is more or less the brainchild of Andrew Whiteman, who has been in such groups as Bourbon Tabernacle Choir and Que Vida. He released a solo effort titled Fear of Zen in 1995. He is also the lead guitarist for the indie supergroup Broken Social Scene of Toronto. Whiteman returned to his native Toronto to resume writing and recording with Broken Social Scene after a two-month stay with his godmother’s family in Cuba. He learned to play the tres, a Cuban guitar, during that time. But in the midst of making the Juno Award-winning You Forgot It in People, Whiteman couldn’t escape the Spanish musical flavors of his time spent in El Barrio Santo Suarez. Whiteman returned to Toronto invigorated about a possible music that did not yet exist. Knowing he wanted to create it, Whiteman took up residency at a local dive as Apostle Of Hustle, a quartet that includes Julian Brown, who also tours with Feist, Whiteman’s former girlfriend, BSS bandmate and his travel companion to Cuba. The band played Brazilian and Cuban folk songs, as well as Tom Waits/PJ Harvey/Marc Ribot covers.

Folkloric Feel was released on Arts & Crafts in late summer 2004. The follow-up to Folkloric Feel is National Anthem of Nowhere, released in Canada on February 6, 2007, and the new album Eats Darkness was released on May 19, 2009. In an interview Whiteman said this new album is “about going through hard times and coming out the other end.”

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New EP out now from this UK quartet