Washington DC-based singer-songwriter Thao Nguyen ticks all the “quirky singer-songwriter” boxes. Raised in Virginia by Vietnamese immigrant parents, the 23-year-old plays guitar with a toothbrush instead of a plectrum and has a song, Swimming Pool, that deals with the "horrors" of witnessing a wet T-shirt competition.
It’s not all pigeon-toed cutesiness, though. Thao’s second album We Brave Bee Stings And All was informed by traumatic memories of her dad walking out of the family home when she was 12. Factor in her wonky, edge-of-dissonance vocal style and you’ve got an artist who recalls Cat Power in her original “tortured oddball” guise rather than her more recent, “Karl Lagerfeld-endorsed songstress” one.
Current single Bag Of Hammers is a deeply weird concoction, in which Nguyen brags about a voice that “soothes you like a lick of ice cream”, over the same combination of ticklish guitars and Duracell-Bunny drums that propelled Modest Mouse’s Float On. The resulting sense of motion-sickness is compounded by a claymation video that suggests a psychedelic version of The Trap Door.
We Brave Bee Stings And All is out next month on Kill Rock Stars.
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Washington DC-based singer-songwriter Thao Nguyen ticks all the “quirky singer-songwriter” boxes. Raised in Virginia by Vietnamese immigrant parents, the 23-year-old plays guitar with a toothbrush instead of a plectrum and has a song, Swimming Pool, that deals with the "horrors" of witnessing a wet T-shirt competition.
