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Artist
Sweep the Leg Johnny
12+ albums
math rockpost-rockpost-hardcoreexperimentalpost-punk
about
Sweep the Leg Johnny were a Chicago-based post rock band from the late 1990s. The name comes from a line in the film Karate Kid. Sweep the Leg Johnny were fronted by saxophonist and vocalist Steve Sostak, who decided to form the band after meeting Chris Daly at university in Notre Dame. Steve tried out many different instruments to accompany Chris's guitar, eventually settling reluctantly on the saxophone. When they returned to America, they tried to recruit other members for the band and found drummer Scot Anna, whose open and free-sounding drum technique went well with Chris's convoluted guitar work, which was based mainly on melodies rather than chords. The band then also recruited John Brady to play bass. The bass playing is often simplistic in melody, but serves excellently as a pulsing rhythmic accompaniment where otherwise the beat might have been lost in the chaos. Allegedly, the group would rehearse up to 25 hours a week to graft their seamless synchronization in songs, which paid off. In 1997 the band released 4.9.21.30 on Divot Records, which was a clean and open sounding album that had a sound similar perhaps to Yes or Slint, but really captured a style of its own encompassing brash speeding rock with much more sensitive slow-paced rock, within songs. The band took individual riffs and developed them within songs, looking at them in different lights, sometimes with vocals and sometimes without. Steve Sostak has said he writes lyrics when things in his life chang
