Mountain Of Venus Returns To Murphy’s Monday Jam-band extraordinaire Mountain of Venus will return to Murphy’s Monday. By Jeff Eason Fayetteville, Arkansas. Just the name sounds like a place where free-thinking rock and rollers would be leaving in droves. The band members of Mountain of Venus, however, have found that it is a perfect place to lay one’s head when not on the road. “We played a couple of festivals in Fayetteville and just fell in love with the place,” said lead singer Tanya Shylock of the hot new jam-band Mountain of Venus. “Plus we previously had a home base of Boston, which is a ridiculously expensive place to live, especially if you’re going to be on the road for ten months out of the year.” Mountain of Venus will return to Murphy’s during the tail-end of its summer long tour of the United States. The show is scheduled for Monday, September 15. The music starts around 10:30 p.m. Before setting up shop in Boston, the band had its roots in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. Now that the band has four years of touring under its belt and has a built up a loyal fanbase, it is setting its sites on the recording studio. “We’re planning on some studio time right after the summer tour,” said Shylock. “We’ve got some new songs that we have developed on the road and we already have five songs that we recorded in a studio in Florida back in July. This time around we’ll be recording in Boulder, Colorado.” In addition to Shylock, Mountain of Venus is Jody Cohen on rhythm guitar and vocals, Mike Pascale on lead guitar, Dave Gesualdo on bass and Stingray on drums. Mountain of Venus released a live album earlier this year from its New Year’s Eve show at the Gothic Theatre in Englewood, Colorado. The album showcases the band’s Dead-influenced electric guitar picking over danceable rhythms. The band has a nice blend of country and soul influences and Shylock is one of the more talented female vocalists on the jam-band scene, alternately gritty and tough a la Joplin and clear and soaring—sort of like Michelle Shocked without the twang. Sonically Mountain of Venus likes to stretch out their compositions into ten or twelve-minute opuses. The expanded versions of the songs are full of nice compositional twists and turns and give the extremely talented instrumentalists a chance to shine on solos. For more information on this show, call Murphy’s at (828) 264-5117.