New York Music Daily Presents the Sunday Salon at Zirzamin

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Every Sunday at 5 PM, New York Music Daily presents the Sunday Salon at Zirzamin, where some of New York’s edgiest songwriters and musicians trade songs and cross-pollinate in the old Zinc Bar space at Houston and LaGuardia. There’s never a cover charge; the club has cheap beer, good Tex-Mex food, and the public is welcome to attend. Participation is by invitation only – this is NOT an open mic and those without an invite are welcome to watch, but the stage is exclusively for members. After the salon, there’s a set at 7 PM by one of this city’s elite performers. Coming up:

5/26 Phil Shoenfelt and Pavel Cingl from popular Czech gothic rockers Phil Shoenfelt & Southern Cross, making their Manhattan debut.

6/2 Lorraine Leckie & Her Demons play a creepy mix of careening Canadian gothic rock and brooding chamber pop.

6/9 Pistolera’s Sandra Lilia Velasquez a.k.a. SLV brings her hypnotic, pensively smart, politically aware, sometimes sultry latin rock and soul sound in a special intimate show.

6/16 art-rock chanteuse Carol Lipnik and luminous pianiat Matt Kanelos’ haunting Ghosts in the Ocean project.

6/23 a very rare solo show by special mystery guest to be announced shortly!

6/30 veteran NYC Americana rock personality Rick Snyder

Other dates to follow. Zirzamin is located downstairs at the corner of Houston St. and LaGuardia Pl. in the West Village of Manhattan. The closest train is actually the B/D/F/6 to Broadway-Lafayette/Houston St.; it’s also an easy three-minute walk from the W 4th St. subway station.

A Rare Brooklyn What Side Project Still Available As a Free Download

It’s hard to imagine a  band in New York right now hotter than the Brooklyn What. Their long-awaited third album, Hot Wine is one of the year’s best, and they’ve been playing shows at a furious pace, recently opening for punk legends the Dead Milkmen at Bowery Ballroom (which is up for free download at NYC Taper - OMFG). Fans of the band also know that they share members not only with hard-hitting powerpop band New Atlantic Youth, but that guitarist John-Severin Napolillo also has a side project, John-Severin & the Quiet 1s. Back in 2009, they made a kick-ass ep, Get Quiet, which is still available as a free download at their Bandcamp page. You should grab it while it’s still available.

For what it’s worth, it’s interesting that three of the four tracks bring to mind early Joy Division, at least until the killer choruses kick in. The angst-fueled Prince St. blasts along with Napolillo’s jagged chords shedding sparks over the pummeling bass and drums of his Brooklyn What bandmates Doug Carey and Jesse Katz – the tune is straight-up classic Ramones but the production and the lyrics are completely in the here and now.

Jackie-O Rose opens with a couple of memorably brooding, low-key verses before kicking into a long interlude that sounds an awful lot like Transmission. Riot Queue juxtaposes frenetic, slashing chords on the verse against a classic powerpop chorus: “I might be a bit of a cynic but you don’t even know what you’re fighting for,” Napolillo intones. The last song, Autumn, Come On – a co-write with Yelena Kolova – is the genuine classic here, working its way up from a wickedly catchy, brooding 60s psychedelic folk-rock sway.  “I’ll be basking in the moonlight til the sun comes down,” Napolillo asserts, cynical but undeterred. In addition to being a tremendously good guitarist, Napolillo is a nonchalantly strong singer and lyricist – which comes as no surprise considering the other band he’s in.

A Conspiracy of Beards Reinvents Leonard Cohen at Drom

Is there a sexier band alive than A Conspiracy of Beards? Last night at Drom the thirty-piece all-male San Francisco choir squeezed themselves onto the stage dressed in tasteful earthtoned suits, several members sporting a more individualistic variety of hats. At present, only about a half-dozen of the group’s members actually have beards, although ultimately, the only thing that matters is their voices, which are strong and assured. Originally assembled for a one-off performance to realize a concept envisioned by the late artist Peter Kadyk, they grew into a local phenomenon and have since expanded their fanbase around the world. They dedicate themselves to reinventing the Leonard Cohen catalog as vocal works. Rewarding the crowd who’d come out for them on an unseasonably cold, rainy night, they delivered a richly resonant set heavy on the hits.

Some of their arrangements, like the version of Marianne with its punchy echo effects and eerie close harmonies, are very sophisticated, and the choir pulled them off, one by one and made it all look effortless. Some of their other covers are closer to punk in spirit, like the broodingly Wagnerian march they made out of Everybody Knows, or their unexpectedly jaunty take on Tower of Song, which was part doo-wop, part sea chantey. So Long Marianne got a lush rendition peppered with suspenseful pauses, quite a change from the skeletal original. By contrast, the churchiest moment of the night – and biggest audience hit – was a slow, hushed take of Hallelujah.

With material like this, there are bound to be transcendent, transporting moments. The high point of many was a chillingly gothic version of Who By Fire. It’s one of Cohen’s best songs, but the original has a dated folk-rock arrangement that undermines the gravity of the lyrics. This group’s version began with the lyrics making the rounds of the voices over a resonant “who” underneath. When they’d finally reached the end, they ran the chorus a final time and ended with a single high harmony rising over the murky ambience: the effect was spine-tingling. The rest of the show could have been anticlimactic after that, but it wasn’t, with a serpentine, waltzing version of Tonight Will Be Fine, a celebratory take of Anthem that played up Cohen’s snarling political content, and Dance Me to the End of Love, done as an energetically seductive tango, conductor Daryl Henline moving to the side, putting his arm around his bandmate and adding another layer of richness to the wash of voices.

A Conspiracy of Beards will be at Cloud City (the former Dead Herring loft) in south Williamsburg tonight, May 25 at 7ish and then on a killer bill at Highline Ballroom on Sundaythe 26th at 1 PM with sultry resonator guitarist/bluesmama Mamie Minch and her band opening. Be aware that the last time they played there, they sold out the club: advance tix are recommended and still available as of tonight.

Linda Draper Reinvents Herself Again

Last night Linda Draper played the release show for her new album Edgewise to an adoring crowd in the West Village, backed by the acerbic Matt Keating (who also produced the album) on lead guitar and piano and Eric Puente on drums. While Draper has made a career out of reinventing herself, two things, tunefulness and smart lyrics, have been consistent in her work, all the way through her transition from early-zeros acoustic rock songwriter, to mid-zeros hypnotic lyrical surrealist, to early teens Americana chanteuse. Her melodies linger in your head long after they’re over; her words will tickle you just as often as they snarl and bite. And her calm, airy voice, always a strength, just gets more and more nuanced and compelling. Throughout it all, she’s never given in to any kind of cliche, never succumbed to the temptation to coast on her looks and sing top 40 schlock even though the opportunity must have raised its ugly head at some point.

As expected, most of the songs were taken from the album. Draper brought to mind Eilen Jewell’s southwestern gothic with the bristling Live Wire, a dark Appalachian folk tune livened with Keating’s glistening noir piano. They kept the rustic menace going with the tensely pulsing Hollow, an entreaty to “get it out of your system before you become cold and numb,” to smash through the darkness and seize the fun lurking just beyond.

A jaunty, upbeat new number hinted at hip-hop with its rapidfire lyrics and bouncy swing. Then they went back to the brooding desert rock ambience with the cynical escape anthem Sleepwalkers: “Even the pureset of angels would crash and burn in a place like this,” Draper sang with an understated somberness. They followed that with the loudest song in the set, the new album’s bittersweetly triumphant title track. Draper usually plays solo acoustic shows: hearing her songs fleshed out this energetically, even roaringly, was a rare treat, especially on the Johnny Cash-influenced Shadow of a Coal Mine.

Bitterness and anger are not the only emotions that inform her music. She can also be very funny, as she was on one of the later numbers, In Good Hands, making the connection between backbiting trendoid one-upsmanship and yuppie conspicuous consumption. The crowd begged for an encore: she gave them a casually snide, animated solo acoustic version of the kiss-off anthem Time Will Tell, from her previous album Bridge and Tunnel. From here Draper is off to the Outer Space in Hamden, Connecticut for a 6 PM doublebill toinght, May 24 with underground folk legend Kath Bloom, then Club Passim in Boston on the 26th at 7 and then a killer doublebill with Randi Russo May 28 at 8 at the Township in Chicago.

Emel Mathlouthi, Heroine of the Arab Spring, Brings Her Transcendent Voice and Revolutionary Songs to New York

Last night Tunisian-born, Paris-based singer and bandleader Emel Mathlouthi treated a sold-out crowd at Florence Gould Hall at the French Institute to a performance whose stripped-down, intimate format did nothing to diminish the volcanic intensity and raw power of her symphonic, revolutionary Middle Eastern art-rock anthems. Singing in Arabic with a couple of extremely successful ventures into English, Mathlouthi played both acoustic and electric guitars with an edgy efficiency, backed by guitarist Karim Attoumane, whose ethereal, majestically atmospheric lines gave the songs heft and bulk, and pianist Emmanuel Trouve, whose elegant chromatics enhanced both the songs’ neoromantic European and moodily levantine passages (in addition to a biting Doors quote, in a nod to the late Ray Manzarek).

Technically speaking, Mathlouthi is an astonishingly powerful, individualistic singer, maintaining an almost otherworldly clarity from the depths to the heights of what could be a four-octave range, whether with a ghostly whisper or a gale-force wail. Few other singers in the world have so much raw power at their disposal. With that kind of voice, Mathlouthi can afford to be straightforward, and she usually is, although the two most exhilarating moments of the concert were when she hit a rapidfire, serpentine Middle Eastern glissando, and when she went to the absolute top of her register during a riveting, angst-fueled rendition of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah that put to shame any other version including the original.

Emotionally, Mathlouthi vents a venomous contempt for and hostility to oppression, but more than anything else, she gives voice to longing. But the longing she evokes isn’t a solipsistic desire for attention or affection: it’s a longing for freedom – and a chance to transcend the hellish experience of the battle for it. She wasted no time in disdainfully explaining that the reason that the audience was seeing only a trio onstage was because that two of her Tunisian bandmates had been denied US visas. But at the end of the show, after a poignant, dynamically bristling version of her folk rock-flavored signature song, Kelmti Horra  (Freedom of Speech, one of the iconic anthems of the Tunisian Revolution and the Arab Spring) she backed away from the mic, retreated toward the piano and then twirled, jaunty and triumphant, knowing that she was about to dance away victorious.

Ornate and intricately intertwining as her songs are, they’re not art for art’s sake. Mathlouthi knows that she and others like her are a dictator’s worst enemy, and she revels in that, if with an understandable bitteness. “The pen and paper are the strongest, most powerful things in the world,” she reaffirmed as the band launched into a broodingly swaying minor-key ballad. Although what she was doing with pen and paper endangered her life in Tunisia to the point of forcing her into exile, ultimately they saved her and others like her. She dedicated the shapeshifting anthem Ethnia Twila (The Long Road), with its middle period Pink Floyd sweep and majesty, to “the brave and courageous people who fight for freedom and dignity.”

As the show went on, Mathlouthi mimicked oud voicings on her guitar via a series of nimble pull-offs, used a series of loop effects to sing Bjork possibly better than Bjork does herself, brought to mind Randi Russo or early PJ Harvey with a hypnotic, insistent, slow-burning anthem and eventually took the intensity to a searing peak with Ma Ikit (Not Found). “I cannot find a melody strong enough to break human hatred,” she intoned before building the song to an imploring, exhausted crescendo. Whether or not the audience understood the lyrics -and many did, and spontaneously clapped along in several places – it was impossible not be drawn into the drama of a battle whose conclusion is ultimately ours to either concede, or to join in with Mathlouthi and reach for victory.

Thanks to the French Institute, here’s some great Youtube footage of the early part of the concert: that Manzarek quote is at 6:35.

Guided By Voices’ Brilliant English Little League: The Other Blogs Got It All Wrong

You can never trust the indie music press: they screw everything up. For the past month, the blogosphere has been abuzz with the ostensibly bad news that Guided By Voices‘ fourth album (!!!!) in the past year, English Little League, is a dud. And that’s dead wrong.

It’s the best of the four, in fact, one of the best albums of the band’s celebrated career, even with the reinvigorated “classic” lineup of guitarists Tobin Sprout and Mitch Mitchell, bassist Greg Demos and drummer Kevin  Fennell. With their two-guitar attack, especially, there was always a hint that they were about to head in more of an art-rock direction, and this is the album where they finally do that. Which makes their ever-more anthemic sound even more intriguing, considering that none of the album’s sixteen songs go on for much more than two and a half minutes, if that. Frontman Robert Pollard is as inscrutable and sometimes frustrating as ever, but he’s still pretty unsurpassed as a surrealist visionary: among the unexpected lyrical gems here are a creepy recurrent theme of “friction in Japan,” a “fishtank with black sails” and a shout out to Zero Mostel, possibly the first ever in a rock song. Behind him, the band plays with fury and drollery and a rich, mentholated, reverb-toned resonance.

They get off on a good foot with the first single, Xeno Pariah, a post-Kinks romp with a tricky tempo and the gorgeous guitar sonics that will linger throughout all the other fully fleshed out songs here (impressively, most of them are). Know Me As Heavy works a solid backbeat drive, like Oasis with a sense of humor in lieu of insufferable attitude. Island (She Talks in Rainbows) rises from a hushed tiptoe to a killer four-chord hook, psychedelic 60s Britpop spun through Pollard’s wryly fractured lens. Trashcan Full of Nails pulses like mid-70s Who as it reaches for a tongue-in-cheek stadium rock swagger, while Send to Celeste (And the Cosmic Athletes) follows a trajectory up from elegant chamber rock, like the Church but with a smirk.

Quiet Game stomps along on a hypnotic riff in a gritty Steve Wynn garage rock way. Noble Insect is a dead ringer for apprehensive late 70s era Wire, except that it has a groove. The most nebulous, traditionally indie thing here is Crybaby 4 Star Hotel, which works because of the lyrics, followed by Flunky Minnows, which looks back to the Beatles and Kinks for a tune but gives the lead line to the bass.

Birds is dreampop as the Church (them again) would have done it if dreampop had existed in 1982. The Sudden Death of Epstein’s Ways is a Brian Epstein reference, given away by the gorgeously ornate Sgt. Pepper tune: what it means isn’t clear. The Fab Four are also referenced on Taciturn Caves, which is like Hey Jude with guitars, while the final track sounds like the Clash done as powerpop. Admittedly, there are a trio of what appear to be solo Pollard sketches featuring a disastrously out-of-tune piano that were unwisely included here. But that’s a small price to pay for tunesmithing this offhandedly brilliant. Count this among the best albums of 2013. To all the Bushwick and Wicker Park blogs who dissed this album: up yours.

In Memoriam – Ray Manzarek

Ray Manzarek, the iconic keyboardist and bassist for the Doors, died yesterday at a medical clinic in Germany after a long battle with stomach cancer. He was 74.

One of the originators of art-rock, Manzarek was one of the first to bring elements of classical music and jazz into rock, as influenced by Chopin as he was by Miles Davis, John Coltrane and the blues. A technically gifted performer, during his time in the Doors he juxtaposed ornate, intricate, rapidfire righthand melodies against simple lefthand riffs that he played on a keyboard bass.

In the band’s late 60s heyday, a writer once called Manzarek’s keyboard work “Balkan funeral music.” Manzarek liked the description so much that he adopted it. Although his playing often had a puckish wit – best exemplified by the droll classical and jazz quotes in the long solo in Light My Fire – his most memorable moments were his darkest. His coiling organ lines in The End and raw, feral blasts in When the Music’s Over, his saturnine piano in The Crystal Ship and misty, nocturnal Fender Rhodes introduction to Riders on the Storm long ago became standard repertoire. It’s hard to think of a rock keyboardist who hasn’t been influenced by Manzarek in some way.

Although his 1981 art-rock version of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana was arguably the high point of his solo career, Manzarek didn’t limit himself to that genre. Before joining the Doors, he played blues, jazz and surf music. After the Doors broke up, he explored soul music and jazz, produced four albums by Los Angeles punk rock band X and played piano and organ on their recordings, most notably the macabre organ on Nausea, from their 1981 debut Los Angeles. In his later years, he turned his focus to electronica.

Manzarek was complicated. Fiercely proud of his legacy, he didn’t suffer fools gladly. He had a short fuse, yet was generous to a fault. A dedicated stoner, he had a youthful enthusiasm and a boundless, almost childlike sense of wonder. Part Eastern mystic, part hard-bitten blue-collar Chicago kid, part ageless hippie, he had a voracious appetite for what interested him, from philosophy, to painting, to literature (he wrote two memoirs as well as a novel, The Poet in Exile). An articulate raconteur, he would inevitably find himself having to correct misconceptions about his Doors bandmate Jim Morrison, whom he remembered fondly not as an incorrigible drunk but as a gentle, sensitive soul. “We were hippies: we laughed a lot,” he often said.

A Dark Psychedelic Stone Show by Tzar Featuring Moist Paula Henderson

[repost from NY Music Daily's older sister blog Lucid Culture, who took the jazz with them when the two blogs spun off of each other. Occasionally they'll throw back a dark gem like this one]

Moist Paula Henderson (whose nickname stems from her longtime leadership of legendary instrumental trio Moisturizer) has been the standout baritone saxophonist in the New York downtown scene for several years. Her own work has an irrepressible joie de vivre and wry humor; her new album with her latest project, Tzar, recorded live at the Stone this past February takes a turn in a considerably different, much darker direction. Here she’s joined by Ithaca, New York musicians Brian “Willie B” Wilson on drums, electronics and bass pedals (who really gets a workout, playing everything  simultaneously, it seems) and Michael Stark on keyboards. Their intriguing multi-segmented pieces blend elements of trip-hop, downtempo, noise and the edgy jazz that Henderson has pursued more deeply in recent years. It’s a deliciously mysterious, eclectic ride. The whole thing is streaming at their Bandcamp page.

The first track, There’s a Prayer for That opens with a raw, bitter piano theme and variations against rumbling drums, Henderson’s stark, biting swirls enhancing the smoky ambience. Funereal organ then replaces the piano and the piece morphs into creepy trip-hop. Begin At Sunset maintains the vibe, sax mingling suspensefully with layers of uneasy synth and squiggly eleectronic EFX, then takes an unexpected turn into dub reggae. The most improvisational-sounding number is Ambient Subtraction, Henderson’s otherworldly, harmonically tingling polytonalities blending into a morass of textures as the storm builds to an ominously insectile rumble. By contrast, the cheery go-go theme Hibachi Sushi Dance sounds like a Moisturizer outtake, but even more minimalist. The album winds up with Knuckles & Milk, juxtaposing surreallistic, mechanical menace a la Pink Floyd’s Welcome to the Machine with noisy, paint-peeling synth squalls over a martial beat, Henderson raising the tension with a marvelously terse, chromatically-charged interlude before turning it over to Wilson’s misty cymbals. Play this one with the lights out. Recommended equally for fans of jazz, psychedelia and dark rock.

Noir Cinematics, Briefly Interrupted, by Ludovico Einaudi at the Town Hall

Last night at the Town Hall looked like date night. Lots of couples, on the older side, which was logical since Ludovico Einaudi was playing. The Italian composer/keyboardist’s cinematic new album In a Time Lapse is a dark but lullingly hypnotic, minimalistic orchestral suite inspired by the nature writing of Henry David Thoreau. Playing piano, Einaudi and his excellent twelve-piece ensemble – a string section with a couple of members who doubled on acoustic guitar, bass or percussion, plus two percussionists, a second keyboardist who frequently added boomy, almost subsonic bass via a syndrum patch, and an onstage mixing engineer whom Einaudi credits as being part of the band – brought the album to life with unexpected vigor and an often haunting intensity.

The concert began with the slow, reverberating beat of a gong, the house lights all the way down, the stage in darkness except for the lights on the music stands, the string section opening with a slow, pulsing, nocturnal theme. About two hours later, the show ended with a delirious audience clapalong on what could be termed a minimalist art-rock dancefloor vamp. This was definitely not foreshadowed, either by the latest album, or by anything that preceded it on the bill – but the crowd responded with a lusty standing ovation.

The show followed a slow upward trajectory interrupted by two unexpectedly fiery, clenched-teeth interludes, the orchestra going full steam and absolutely explosive on the second one. Einaudi’s brilliance is in how he shifts moods, sometimes drastically, with very subtle melodic changes. The influence of Philip Glass was evident from the first notes; Angelo Badalamenti’s David Lynch soundtracks also came to mind. Einaudi’s orchestration is packed with neat textural touches like having one of the percussionists harmonize with the piano using a mbira, or by rubbing the inside of a steel pan for a lingering, keening sustain. From moody, dusky late summer apprehension – the date night part of the show, which went on for quite a while – the strings finally rose with an agitatedly shivery isnistence. From there they backed away while Einaudi took his time working back into the shadows, the orchestra again rising with a vintage ELO swirl as one of the cellists added wispy overtones run through a reverb patch for extra ghostliness. This would recur to even more potently eerie effect late rin the show. For his part, Einaudi rigs his piano with several reverb effects, from an fast echo similar to what U2′s The Edge uses on his guitar, to a subtle tremolo, to a practically never-ending sustain.

From there Einaudi went into a solo interlude and latched onto a theme that reminded of [what is that awful, cloying 1986 album by the Cure that all the indie bands rip off?], and wouldn’t let it go. Was he setting up a contrast? Actually, yes, but there wasn’t enough substance in the tune – a simple, seemingly random series of rigthhand variations around a central note – to make anything interesting out of it. He finally let it go, and the music rose mightily, to an anthemic romp that evoked breezy mid-70s ELO and then a theme that reminded a lot of the Verve’s Bittersweet Symphony. By this point, it was a rock show. Pretty cool, considering how raptly and carefully the group had been playing for most of the night. Einaudi brought back the menace with a rippling, chromatically spiky vamp that he finally took over the top with a gleeful glissando: gotcha! Einaudi’s current US tour continues, winding up in San Francisco in early June, then he’s on the road in Europe this summer.

A Dark, Richly Resonant Live Album from Phil Shoenfelt & Pavel Cingl

Czech rockers Phil Shoenfelt & Southern Cross have earned a cult following across Europe for their brooding, artsy gothic rock. The core of the band, frontman/guitarist Shoenfelt and multi-instrumentalist Pavel Cingl are coming to New York for a tour of some of the dives here, They’ll be at Pete’s Candy Store on May 24 at 9 – with their similarly dark tourmates Lorraine Leckie & Her Demons opening at 8 – then at Zirzamin at 7 on May 26, plus an 11 PM gig that same night at Otto’s. Fortuitously, Shoenfelt and Cingl also have an unexpectedly lush duo album out, Live at the House of Sin, which has an anthemic sound far more rich than you would expect from just two performers. It may be a cliche to say that if a song sounds good stripped down in an acoustic format, it’ll sound even better with a band, but it’s true. So if this album is any indication, New York dark rock fans are in for a treat next weekend.

The opening track, Vivi the Flea unfolds in a down-and-out New York milieu evocative of Mark Steiner at his gloomiest, Cingl’s soaring violin contrasting with the lingering resonance of Shoenfelt’s guitar. The second track, Twisted, has Cingl playing through a wah effect to raise the psychedelic factor. The Irish-flavored Saviour’s Day reminds a lot of Nick Cave – the irony of the title is not lost in a doomed gothic context.

Cingl switches to eerily reverberating electric mandolin, Shoenfelt fingerpicking his twelve-string on Black Rain for a majestic, sweeping ambience. Shivers Inside brings to mind Mark Sinnis at his most darkly seductive, while The Gambler works a menacing two-chord vamp, Cingl’s violin taking the intensity to redline. Alchemy sounds like a Lee Hazelwood theme taken forty years forward in time to Transylvania; Martha’s Well mines a bitter, abandoned theme.

The aphoristic Darkest Hour brings Sinnis to mind again, but in full-blown angst mode. Angel Street has some neat guitar/violin tradeoffs; Shoenfelt’s sepulchral croon rises to a casual menace on Black Venus, a traditional tune with new lyrics and a deliciously ringing mandolin solo. With its echoey violin, Hospital has Cingl looking over his shoulder at the Smiths’ How Soon Is Now. The album winds up with Letter From Berlin, which manages to be both elegaic and sympathetic: at the end of the song, the narrator offers to walk the suicidal girl home. Fans of Shane MacGowan, Leonard Cohen and the other troubadours of doom will eat this up.

Menacing Noir Surf and Garage Rock from Wooden Indian Burial Ground

Portland, Oregon band Wooden Indian Burial Ground play some of the most kick-ass rock around. Part horror surf, part dark garage rock, they thrash around references from Syd Barrett to Link Wray to the Coffin Daggers. Their latest album, as well as their previous stuff, is all streaming at Bandcamp. An echoey, menacing surf rock riff rampages along to the turnaround when the creepy funeral organ joins the mix, half-shouted vocals obscured in a cloud of reverb. The funeral organ takes a slinky solo. Then a guitar feedback solo? A Theremin solo?  It’s hard to tell, but it’s as invigoratingly noisy as all getout. And that’s just the practically eight-minute first track, Helicopter. They’re playing Grand Victory in Williamsburg on Friday the 24th sometime after 9.

The new album’s second track, Sparklerella takes a sludgy Cramps riff and speeds it up, with a dead-cheerleader chorus in the background.  Lazy Ascension is a Lynchian 60s Nashville gothic pop anthem done rough and ragged for extra menace, right down to a long, haphazardly reverberating electric piano outro. From there the band segues into the funereal, marching Waltz for Eldritch, shiveringly twangy guitar set to a zombified acoustic guitar-and-piano tune.

A slightly out-of-tune Link Wray riff suddenly modulates as White Bats gets underway. The shortest track here, Bryant St. Death Cult sets paint-peeling layers of Stoogoid wah guitar over a slow, hypnotic minor-key riff. They follow that by juxtaposing a faux-tender doo-wop theme with an out-of-breath Texas roadhouse stomp. The final cut, A Long Way From Cerrillos works an uneasy, skittish, Doors/Radio Birdman theme up to a surreal, dirgey grandeur.

It’s refreshing to see that the album is also available on vinyl and cassette. It’s worth owning in either format and it’s one of the best to come over the transom in the past several months, a welcome, creepy companion to similar efforts by New York outfits Ulrich Ziegler, Twin Guns and Beninghove’s Hangmen.