Holstein first formed in the late 90's in Lawrence, Kansas, and after 5 years and 2 albums of befuddling audiences across the Midwest, the band moved to Boston, seeking more exposure and better seafood.

Within a few years the band was drawn and quartered, its limbs pulled off and scattered across the country. Its members have continued creating music, as well as tiny humans, homes, drinks, videos, and public policies, often collaborating with each other in all these arenas. They reunited in September of 2008 for a sold-out show in Lawrence, and will continue to do so often as possible


Despite this uninterrupted output, the public has cried out for a re-focusing of the members' powers into the form they knew and loved so well. And Holstein is happy to comply. A resumption performance will occur Saturday, September 8, in the town that birthed this writhing thing that many, against their better judgement, let crawl into their hearts. But, for the uninitiated, what is Holstein?

"Holstein is best defined in terms of what it's not. The Lawrence-based quartet definitely isn't alt-rock, nor is it metal or hip-hop, grunge or gritty punk. But Holstein is just about everything else, a sonic soup overflowing with random ingredients and exotic spices." Thus wrote the Pitch Weekly, faring better than most in the difficult task of describing the band.

Holstein's four members approach music with a penchant for exploration and a home-schooled naivete, as if nobody ever told them that instrumental rock died with Frank Zappa, and that guitar solos have been relegated to the pre-grunge dustbin.

But that's not all there is to it. They aren't laboring under the illusion that they're the Stravinsky's of rock; a healthy dose of post-punk simplicity and self-deflating humor pepper their songs, sets, and albums. As listen.com states, while "the Progressive Rock elements of Holstein will be readily apparent, they have purified from their main sources of influence the onerous self-importance which sometimes poisons the listening experience. This band dares to write epic, structurally complex songs which aren't afraid to be silly and subversively self-parodic."

So while Holstein is anything but an image-conscious (or even image-aware) modern band contemptuous of sincerity, it also isn't going down with the ships of so many bloated genres of the past. They've ruthlessly picked sounds from every genre and era of music they haven't hated, clumsily sewed the parts together, and given life to some snaggled-toothed auditory Frankenstein that manages to take seriously the epic, the entertaining, and the absurd.

The only common thread running through all of Holstein's music might be its contempt for the generic. Observe the lyric, "I wouldn´t be so cynical/ If you weren´t so stereotypical."