The Dub Pistols Keep the Party Going Strong

If you’re into reggae, you probably already know that the Dub Pistols have a new album, Worshipping the Dollar, out this month, which they’re touring across Europe this summer. It’s a roadmap of where reggae is at, midway through 2012. A parade of dancehall artists give a shout out to the Dub Pistols massive over a mix of organic grooves mingling with techy blips and beats. It’s roots, and dancehall, and dub all blended together, plus one track that’s straight-up hip-hop, and the brisk opening cut, which has a techno beat. Slinky organ, twin trombones, swooshy white noise, ominously echoey electric piano, sly outer-space effects and crispy low Sly & the Family Stone clavinova shift in and out of the mix over an unexpected exchange of riddims.

The hardest-hitting track here is West End Story, featuring Akala & Dan Bowskill. Over an intricately layered psychedelic ska backdrop, the lyricists deliver a cynical look at how “the world’s one big slave ship…while most of humanity lives in abject poverty by design, is that not insanity? There is no flag that’s large enough to wrap around the horror…” The funniest song is Mucky Weekend, featuring Rodney P: seriously, how many drugs can this guy possibly do in a single night in the club? He never gets to explain how it ends. The last we see of him, he’s burning up the highway in the rain, high on coke, girl asleep in the backseat of his car with the cops in hot pursuit. Bang Bang, featuring Kitten & the Hip is a murder anthem with Ghost Town-style noir organ. After that, there’s Rub a Dub, a sex joint featuring Darrison, Sir Real and Bowskill; the weedhead dancehall anthem New Skank with TK Lawrence and Bowskill again and then the absolutely bizarre Rock Steady, with Rodney P explaining that “I’ve got more fiddles than the London Philharmonic.” They’ve also got a handful of 90s style shuffling gangsta dancehall numbers, and wrap up the album with an oscillating, spiraling dub tune. If you imagine a pungent skunky smell while hearing this, it seems to be intentional: it’s a soundtrack for your party this summer.

Devi vs. the Devil at Bowery Electric

Psychedelic rock power trio Devi played Bowery Electric a couple of nights ago. The band sets frontwoman Debra Devi’s casually alluring vocals and suspensefully crescendoing guitar solos over Dan Grennes’ sinewy, melodic bass and John Hummel’s artsy, eclectically ornate, hard-hitting drums (more about those in a bit); Brian Hudzik guested on Rhodes early in the show as well. The set included a handful of new songs – the catchy Butterfly, the explosive Riot Love Song and the downright sexy, Led Zep-fueled, riff-rocking Tired of Waiting – along with several powerpop crowd-pleasers. The second song, Another Day had a familiar, singalong feel, particularly as the chorus kicked in, a formula that reached critical mass on the wickedly anthemic Howl at the Moon. But this band’s songs go a lot further than just catchy verses building to a payoff on the chorus: the title track to their album Get Free had a slow, elegaic quality, as did the album’s best song, the absolutely haunting Welcome to the Boneyard, with its layers of jangly, watery guitar and its sad, resigned lyric told from the point of view of a ghost in the rubble at Ground Zero in the days after 9/11. C21H23NO3 gave the band a crescendoing springboard for wild, unhinged soloing and an unpredictable, practically hardcore doublespeed interlude, while the pensive, moody When It Comes Down was a showstopper, its centerpiece being a long guitar solo that moved from suspensefully sustained, to spiraling and bluesy, back and forth, alternately mystical and exhilarating.

Now if you’ve been paying close attention, you’ve noticed that this whole thing so far has been a description of individual songs rather than an account of how the band onstage actually played them. That’s because the prettyboy behind the sound board sabotaged them. He started by turning up the drums to the point where they drowned out pretty much everything else, which wasn’t an easy thing to do, considering that Devi was running her guitar through a big 4X12 Marshall cabinet. For a minute it was kind of cool to get a high-volume education in how Hummel develops a song, starting with a simple, muted rimshot-and-kick backbeat and building to a murderous frenzy of polyrhythms like a brontosaurus wrestling with a sea serpent. But nobody in the crowd came out for just the drums. What made it even worse is that Bowery Electric is a pretty small room where drums don’t need much if any amplification. And it wasn’t that soundboy wasn’t paying attention, either: whenever Devi hit one of her effects pedals, he turned her guitar DOWN. It would have been nice not to have to watch her fingers to get a sense of what she was playing. Does this twerp have something against bands fronted by attractive women? Does he prefer bands fronted by boys instead? Maybe – he has a Ryan Seacrest kind of look. Whatever the case, he ruined what could have been be a great show – if the sound is this bad every night at Bowery Electric, it’s a place to avoid.

Slavic Soul Party’s New York Underground Tapes: Intense As Always

As usual, the corporate media gets it all wrong. Brooklyn isn’t about Bushwick blog-rock. That’s a tiny clique of one-percenters who don’t really care much about music, anyway: their thing is all about fashion, and memes, and pseudo-celebrity. And much as music in Brooklyn may have become completely balkanized, there are innumerable small, self-sustaining scenes that continue to flourish just under the radar: country music, oldtime string bands, hip-hop, bachata and not ironically, Balkan music. Brooklyn’s best-loved Balkan export, Slavic Soul Party continue their Tuesday night 9 PM residency at Barbes when they’re not playing much larger clubs around the world. For those who might take this mighty, funky, genre-smashing nine-man brass band for granted, they’ve got a new album out appropriately titled The New York Underground Tapes. A little earlier this year their fellow Brooklynites Raya Brass Band put out a phenomenal album, Dancing on Roses, Dancing on Cinders and this is just as good.

How is it that this music, with its tricky tempos and frequently menacing microtonalities, has become so popular? Maybe because it’s so good! It’s about time the rest of the world caught up with what the Serbians and Macedonians and the rest of the people in the former Eastern Bloc have known for centuries. But what Slavic Soul Party does isn’t just traditional songs. Over the last couple of years, they’ve been mixing Balkan brass music with James Brown, adding hip-hop flavor and poking fun at techno; this new album is just as eclectic. The opening track, Jackson, is typical: punchy, bluesy soul trumpet over a Balkan hook, a mesh of biting close harmonies, a blazing bop jazz trumpet solo and finally Peter Stan switching from his accordion to organ to add subtle, staccato textures on the way out. And it gets better from there.

Ominous low swells anchor the rapidfire microtones of the horns on Sing Sing Cocek, with an unexpected thematic change mid-song. Brasslands – a pun on Glasslands, the unairconditioned Williamsburg sweatbox venue, maybe? – sounds like a Serbian brass band taking a stab at a Mexican folk song, while the aptly titled Romp begins with fast waves of accordion over a suspensefully stalking tune and then goes into brisk gypsy swing. Bass drummer Matt Moran’s arrangement of Draganin Cocek is one of the best songs of the year: it’s looser and more dangerous than anything else here, with dark, Arabic-tinged hooks, a tensely smoldering Matt Musselman trombone solo and a lushly delicious crescendo. It’s a song without words, basically – where is their sometime frontwoman Eva Salina Primack when they need her?

Who is Walter Hurley? There’s a band director at Oxon Hill High School in Maryland with that name, and if this song is about that guy, he’s kind of funny – the tune begins as a caricature and almost imperceptibly shifts back to the minor-key intensity of the rest of the album. Clarinetist Peter Hess kicks off his composition Ahmet Gankino, jamming out the highs over suspensefully pulsing lows, eventually building to a shivery, pulsing call-and-response with joyous syncopated low brass, followed eventually by a machine-gun accordion solo. It’s a bigtime party anthem – as are all these songs, for that matter, no surprise considering that what they’re playing is dance music.

There are three more tracks here. The brief Alcohol to Arms, by Moran, has fun with an action movie theme. Underneath all the stabbing, there’s a balmy ballad underneath Moran’s arrangement of the traditional tune Zvonce. The whole band – besides Stan, Moran, Musselman and Hess, there’s John Carlson and Kenny Warren on trumpet and truba, Tim Vaughn on trombone, Chris Stomquist on snare and percussion and Ron Caswell on tuba – tackles a brutally difficult, pinpoint-precise staccato arrangement and makes it seem effortless. The album closes with Jonas Muller’s clever Last Man Standing, the whole band having fun portraying a drunk guy as he staggers and slurs and tries to keep up with the tune. Beside the usual digital formats, the band also recorded a song on a wax cylinder in case you have ten grand to burn. Calling all Bushwick bloggers!

Slavic Soul Party are at the Jewish Museum this Wednesday, July 19 at 7:30 PM; $15 ($12 for students) gets you in plus open wine/beer bar plus free kosher ice cream.

Marcellus Hall At the Top of His Game at Pete’s

Marcellus Hall has a Sunday residency at 8:30 PM at Pete’s Candy Store this July; there are two shows remaining, on the 22nd and 29th. If clever, jangly, Americana-tinged rock with killer hooks and sharp, biting lyrics is your thing, you should see at least one of these. Hall is one of those rare artists who gets better with time: he was good back when he was in Railroad Jerk back in the 90s and then after that with White Hassle, who beat the White Stripes to the bassless garage rock thing by a few years but never got credit for it. Last night his deadpan sardonic wit was in full effect as he and his excellent band – Troy Fannin switching between organ and lead guitar, Damon Smith on bass and Mike Shapiro on drums – ran through a set of new material, a couple of covers and songs from Hall’s excellent 2011 album The First Line.

Since the White Hassle days – the band has been “on hiatus” since about 2005 – Hall’s songs have taken on a richer, more lingering sound, maybe just because he lets the chords ring out, he’s traded in his old Danelectro for an acoustic-electric and has bass in the band now. Speaking of bass, Smith was brilliant all night long, driving the first song with a neatly slurry lick way up the fretboard and staying way up there when the bittersweet chorus kicked in. The second song worked a straight-up garage-funk vein, Fannin and Hall joining forces on the catchy turnaround. A little later they did one that juxtaposed a distantly vintage Britpop verse against a biting chromatically-fueled chorus, with a casually smart, terse soul/blues guitar solo from Fannin. Another built up to a big crescendo with swirly organ and then a walk on the bass way down the scale, all the way to the bottom as the chorus kicked in. Soulmate, a cut that just screams out “college radio hit,” had a typically sarcastic lyric and a Motown-flavored break with just bass and drums.

But the best songs were the funniest ones. Hall has made a career of chronicling the misadventures of people who have their bullshit detectors set to stun: they have zero tolerance for fakeness and indecision, and their romantic adventures suffer badly as a result. The funniest one of these was a wry 6/8 anthem about a girl who’s a total killjoy: “I don’t want a boyfriend, she said with a sigh. I said no problem…I said what about dinner, you don’t have to pay,” Hall deadpanned. But when she put out her own suggestion for a pre-hookup activity, that had to be a dealbreaker – the joke is too good to spoil. The most offhandedly vicious song swayed hypnotically over a simple two-chord vamp as Hall set his sights on Faceboogers and textards:

I’m friends with people who I don’t know
Where does one turn after the afterglow
Please stick around, don’t go away
After this song there’ll be a Q&A
My head is messed up and my mind is undone
You are no one til you’re texting someone

The covers included one that Hall said he would sing in French which turned out to be a pretty basic version of You Never Can Tell which if you didn’t know it, you never would be able to tell that Chuck Berry wrote it. . They closed the set with an audience request, a completely serious, zero-sarcasm, harmony-driven cover of the old country gospel number Satisfied Mind, done as a defiant working person’s anthem. Hall also wasn’t joking that he’d brought a credit card reader for anybody who felt like using plastic to buy a cd, vinyl record or piece of art (Hall is also a highly sought-after illustrator): this was Williamsburg, after all, 2012.

Harlem’s Shemekia Copeland Burns in Brooklyn

Today’s installment of the ongoing nonsequential current history of good music in New York continues with Shemekia Copeland, who played a sizzling show at BAM’s weekly outdoor series in downtown Brooklyn this past Thursday. A compactly built woman with a big voice, she got her start as a teenager back in the 90s, mentored by her father, the late blues artist Johnny “Clyde” Copeland. She credited her dad for “saving me from becoming a rapper” – and then told a hilarious anecdote about the kind of trouble she would get into as a second-grader, blithely serenading her classmates with blues lyrics whose suggestive subtext she didn’t yet understand.

What was most obvious from the first few notes of the show was how smart she is. As mighty as that alto voice is, she uses it judiciously. Copeland could sing jazz, or even opera, if she wanted to, but as a blues stylist, she’s more interested in bringing the lyrics to life than launching into endless volleys of generic Kelly Clarkson-style belting. Predictably, the moment that wowed the crowd the most was toward the end of the show, when she came out from behind the mic, went to the edge of the stage and vocalized without any amplification while the band kept playing. But even as she wailed, she didn’t go off into florid, cliched American Idol theatrics: instead, all the way through, what she was singing was a terse, biting, minor-key blues melody that would have been at home in any storefront gospel church in her native Harlem. Her band is yet another reminder that great singers never have a hard time finding great musicians to back them. The rhythm section of drummer Morris Roberts and bassist Kevin Jenkins was chill and in the pocket, taking their time building to some big crescendos, guitarists Arthur Neilson and Willie Scandlyn following Copeland’s lead by driving and coloring the songs rather than using them as launching pads for silly theatrics. The most powerful song of the show was a Johnny Copeland version of the old standard Blind Man Standing on the Corner, this one updated to a modern-day urban setting with a homeless kid sent away from school because he showed up without any shoes, “In this so-called free land,” as Copeland sarcastically put it. Neilson gently jangled and tremolo-picked as Scandlyn took a pensive solo, then turned it over to Neilson who picked it up with a fiery, distorted wail.

They went for an absolutely lurid, noir vibe on a long version of Copeland’s outlaw tale Never Going Back to Memphis, a spot-on, bitter account of a woman who’d become an accomplice only to be abandoned after she’d served her purpose. They brought it down to a long psychedelic interlude, Neilson’s surreal, sustained, sunbaked lines shimmering over Jenkins’ ominously rumbling drums. The opening number, I Ain’t Gonna Drink Your Dirty Water and the slow soul groove Salt in My Wounds moved from dark and suspenseful to an angry growl lit up by Neilson’s searing but tasteful solos. Not everything they played was blues, either. They did a couple of robust rock songs, one of them a defiant, Stonesy girl-power anthem, the other an unexpectedly Beatlesque command to snag whatever you can get your hands on in these new Depression days, with more than a little Hey Jude in the tune. And maybe by design, maybe not, the gospel-flavored Big Brand New Religion – inspired by Copeland’s childhood initiation in North Carolina gospel – worked around a hook straight out of Come Together. The band also went into laid-back wah guitar funk for a couple of tunes, including Mississippi Mud, offhandedly alluding to Hurricane Katrina.

As intensely as Copeland sang, in between songs she was relaxed and warmly conversational. She’s got a new anthology out, and explained that she owns has a bunch of other blues artists’ anthologies…but that all those players are dead. So she pondered why her record label would want to package her like that: “Are they trying to kill me? I’m only 33!” Copeland and band are on tour, as they usually are, with an upcoming NYC show at City Winery on Sept 27.

Bad Guys Take Care of Business on Their Home Turf

The nonsequential current history of good music in New York continues today with Magges, who played a marathon show in lovely, tree-lined, well-shaded Athens Square Park in Astoria Tuesday night. “No Greek disco….only the music we grew up with, and love,” explained bandleader/electric bouzouki virtuoso Kyriakos Metaxas. The son of Evangelos Metaxas of the popular Trio Bel Canto, he’s keeping a legacy alive with this group, whose name is Greek slang for “bad guys” or “cool cats.” Magges’ website calls their repertoire “country music from another country.” This time out, the well-loved Greek-American band mixed up long medleys of folk tunes, hits from the 60s and ended with a long set of rembetiko, or as Metaxas put it, “Greek blues,” the haunting Middle Eastern-flavored, mostly minor-key songs from the underground resistance against the dictatorship of the 1930s and 40s, which was the stuff that resonated most intensely with the crowd. Since this was a public park, they didn’t bring along the ouzo that they share with the crowd at rock clubs. But the music was no less intense, and drew a similarly ecstatic reaction from the crowd. Along with the bouzoukis of Metaxas and Nick Mandoukos, the ubiquitously brilliant Susan Mitchell played violin alongside equally ubiquitous and brilliant acoustic guitarist Steve Antonakos (who didn’t take any of his famous solos), plus Ken Forrest on upright bass and Spiros Edgos on drums.

It was kind of funny how although a lot of the music had an American rock influence, the songs that rocked the hardest were the most indelibly Greek-flavored ones. They opened with a swaying, minor-key anthem with a gypsy-rock feel, Mitchell’s violin textures stark beneath the spiky, richly intertwined harmonies of the two bouzoukis. She took the first of several shivery microtonal solos on the second one after one by Metaxas, over a stately, almost martial groove; then they segued into a tangoish number with hauntingly gorgeous Arabic-tinged modes. A lively, sprightly Macedonian-style dance; a bubbly, upbeat tune with the bouzoukis leapfrogging the highest frets and what sounded like a warier, more angst-driven version of the same song followed.

Mitchell gave a psychedelic folk number from the 60s a chamber-pop feel with layers of lush atmospherics as the bouzoukis traded rapidfire licks. Like another song later in the set, it could have been a cumbia if they’d slowed it down a little: despite being from the other side of the globe, it sounded a lot like the Peruvian surf rock of Chicha Libre or Los Destellos. They slowed it down with a swaying Mediterranean ballad, then played a gypsy cimbalom tune on the bouzoukis and brought back the cumbia-ish bounce. Then they went into the rembetiko, which is when the dancing, and several spontaneous singalongs and clapalongs emerged throughout the crowd. Mataxas opened the first tune with a long, ominous solo taqsim, the rest of the band following him into the shadows, where they stayed for most of the rest of the evening. Suspenseful Arabic scales pulsed and then soared over rhythms that varied from slinky to martial to defiantly exuberant. One was a dead ringer for the French Revolutionary anthem Les Partisans; the single best song of the night was the next-to-last one, a furtive, chillingly apprehensive theme that paired off Mitchell’s violin against a plaintive thicket of Middle Eastern melody ringing and clanking from the strings of the bouzoukis. Magges have a brand-new album out simply titled 12 Tragouthia [12 Songs]; watch this space for upcoming NYC dates, whether indoors or out. And fans of Italian folk music can check out the weekly Wednesday 7 PM series of concerts here that continue through August 29.

Neko Case – Unstoppable in Lower Manhattan

Neko Case’s concert downtown on the water behind the World Financial Center Thursday night started late. Early in the set she explained gracefully. “Your sexy energy has created a Ghostbusters situation up here. Everything electric has stopped working, so we’ll be” – she searched for a split second for the word – “Apocalyptic.” Case’s stage monitors had blown out (or weren’t properly hooked up – what exactly happened, nobody seemed to know) before she ever took the stage. Were they even working as veteran soul man Charles Bradley, who preceded Case onstage, strained and strained to hit the notes throughout his set? Maybe not. Although visibly exasperated at being unable to hear much if any of themselves onstage, Case and her bandmates improvised as the show went on, switched out electric guitars for acoustic ones, changed the set list on the fly and in the process played a transcendent show. Case – “the girl with the amazing notes” as she sardonically but accurately described herself – warned the crowd that she was going to hit a few bad ones. “Oh no, I start this one,” she griped and then launched into a version of Wish I Was the Moon that she ended up hitting over the moon and whatever comes after that with some stratospheric highs to match those of harmony singer Kelly Hogan.

As riveting a chanteuse as Case is – like Paula Carino but with more range – she couldn’t do what she does without a brilliant band and that’s what this one was: John Rauhouse moving between pedal steel, guitar and banjo, Paul Rigby on guitar, Tom V. Ray on upright and electric bass and Kurt Dahl on drums. Case pulled out her gorgeous white Gibson SG tenor guitar for a couple of songs, taking a brief solo during a matter-of-factly chilling version of The Tigers Have Spoken that she obviously couldn’t hear, anxiously looking to Hogan for reassurance that she’d pulled it off. Hogan nodded approvingly and then playfully flipped her the bird after she’d finished – although Hogan delivered plenty of her own casually spine-tingling moments with that maple sugar voice of hers. It’s the perfect complement to Case’s quietly seething, nonchalantly sultry menace: the two are the ultimate noir vocal ensemble.

Case likes short songs, and that’s what most of the set was. She and Hogan held onto Teenage Feeling, defiantly trailing out the end of the chorus and thrilled the crowd with a torchily bittersweet Maybe Sparrow. By the time they hit the maneater chorus of People Got a Lotta Nerve, it was clear from the visuals if not the audio that there were sonic problems onstage. That didn’t stop Case from her guitar solo and all kinds of chilling nuance on The Tigers Have Spoken: “If he wanted to remember,” Case half-spoke, coldly sotto voce, for the caged beast in anyone who’d “lived that way forever” before being gunned down. Favorite, another audience favorite, was as sarcastically noir as expected, with an outro lit up by some practically Middle Eastern chromatics from the electric guitars. Ray bounced his bow off his strings for some scary overtones on a brisk, biting take of the bluegrass-flavored escape anthem Things That Scare Me and did the same later on a haunting, dirgey take of Knock Loud, a song that wouldn’t be out of place in the Randi Russo catalog.

Margaret vs. Pauline was all understated rage over gorgeously noir sonics; Hold On, Hold On, “co-written with the Sadies of Canada,” took on a towering, anthemic, Steve Wynn-style angst maxed out by the jangly reverb of Rigby and Rauhouse. Hogan cranked a music box and timed it perfectly to the vocals during a surprisingly creepy take of Middle Cyclone, which they followed with a pulsing new song with distant Velvet Underground echoes, Hogan explaining that it was “about dating your dad who turns about to be your mom.” The most tender place in Case’s heart is for strangers, so she suggested that audience members imagine her holding them to ease the darkness of the lyrics. Shortly after a lusciously lurid, bitter, harmony-driven Star Witness, they encored with Don’t Forget Me, Rigby taking centerstage with a tersely acidic, sostenuto noiserock solo. It was transcendent in every sense of the word for both band and audience: despite the sonic snafus, nobody was about to forget this one.

A word about Bradley – his vocals aren’t usually ragged like they were this time, probably the result of touring and trying to overdo it since he may not have been able to hear himself over the band. Who were stupendously good: from a distance, this Daptone crew looked a lot like the guys who usually back Sharon Jones. They were a time trip back to 1967 in the best possible way: nobody overplayed, the organ purred, the bass was smooth but sinewy, the horns punched in and then disappeared in a split second and the guitarist showed off expert command of every good, useful, emotionally vivid lick from that era. Bradley has been playing on and off at Bowery Ballroom and the Music Hall of Williamsburg lately: if oldschool soul music is your thing, he’s worth seeing – unlike the lame, cliched, kitschy Delaney & Bonnie wannabes who opened the show.

Aaron Blount Haunts Zirzamin

Monday night at around half past eleven, the back room at Zirzamin was basically empty, and all of a sudden it was packed, as Aaron Blount, formerly of dark Austin rockers Knife in the Water took the stage for a rivetingly mysterious show, most of it solo. Blount is a tremendously interesting guitarist and a nonchalantly haunting, quietly powerful singer. Playing his Danelectro Jazzmaster copy through a Fender Twin with the reverb going full steam, his casual but precise fingerpicking built a blizzard of overtones ringing from the amp: it was as if he’d summoned every ghost who’d ever hit a reverb pedal to join him in the vortex. His songs unfolded slowly and sepulchrally, phrases from old blues, bluegrass, gospel and folk rising ominously in the mist. His mostly chordal approach to the guitar intersperses eerie passing tones to max out the menace. To twist a title from Leonard Cohen – one that Blount probably knows well – he puts a new spin on the old ceremony.

A single, jagged slash broke the enveloping ambience as Blount worked his way into the first number, employing a strange tuning for what was essentially a bluegrass melody, but one stripped to the bone and bleached by the desert sun. An icy burst from his reverb tank kicked off the next one, a mix of cold chromatic chords and muted low notes like waves hitting the November shore. “There is no room, no hostel, nowhere to hide,” Blount intoned nonchalantly. Pregnant pauses in many of these slowly crescendoing anthems left the overtones extra time to linger and leave their mark. Blount casually made his way into a bittersweet soul song that picked up with a gorgeously menacing chorus straight out of the David J songbook. A gothic folk number reminded of the Church’s Steve Kilbey at his most hypnotic; another, sung in French, sounded like Elliott Smith in ultra-minimalist mode with the reverb turned all the way up, turning a two-note phrase into an orchestra.

Then Blount brought up the Dimestore Dance Duo a.k.a. guitarslinger Jack Martin and bassist Jude Webre along with a drummer. Martin’s blends of country blues and gypsy tonalities is the raw essence of noir, and it made a perfect match with Blount’s allusive menace. This wasn’t about fitting into a song seamlessly. Martin and Webre wrestled with them, Blount calmly and coolly guiding them with a phrase, or a jab of his guitar’s headstock, the duo tossing and turning and then suddenly diving into their depths once they had the structure down. It didn’t take long. In the Dimestore project, Webre serves as the perfectly melodic, matter-of-fact foil for Martin’s jaggedly biting phrases, and he played the same role here, anchoring the songs with a series of artfully transposed voicings shifting between the lows and the upper frets. Together they rampaged haphazardly and memorably through a backbeat-driven anthem (again, evoking the Church), a twisted country blues that gave Martin a launching pad for a succession of deliciously lurid chromatic riffs, and then a creepily swaying nocturne. “The night is slowing to a crawl,” Blount intoned, “Bottles dance on the shelves…we float, drift and collide and spill out into the street.” Before they did that, they gently ravaged another ballad in the 6/8 time that Blount loves so much, Martin and then Webre shifting uneasily from major to minor, playing modes against each other as the crowd sat silent and rapt. This crew is bound to reunite at least once, whether for a show or (fingers crossed) a recording somewhere in the relatively near future: watch this space.

Sister Anne Kicks Out the Jams at Arlene’s

Any band named after a MC5 song is usually worth checking out: in Sister Anne’s case, you have three more chances to check them out this month since they’re playing every Monday night at Arlene’s at 9. Their blend of punk and various shades of metal is as original as it is in-your-face and sexy. “I’m not here to be a good-time black girl,” frontwoman Kitana Andrews belted on the opening chorus of their first song this past Monday, sarcastically toying with white stereotypes about black women as the song shifted from slow to fast and back again, shades of the Stooges circa 1971. Tall and charismatic like a version of Grace Jones from just before the Road Warrior era but more feminine, she made a powerful presence out in front of the band.

Who have better chops and more eclectic taste than your average punk band. Shane Kerton is the rare rock drummer who actually swings; bassist Garrett Wright (whose mom was in the crowd, and is obviously cool because she was into the show) sprinted through a wicked solo and an endless series of tough hammer-on hooks on one song while guitarist Joe Torcicollo spun out storms of metal shrapnel when wasn’t roaring or growling or playing a gentle 60s folk-rock tune. Which he did, with Andrews singing quietly how she was happy to be somebody’s girl – and of course they punked it out from there. They kept the sense of the unexpected going: one of the songs had Torcicollo channeling James Williamson and Kerton doing a totally spot-on Dennis “Machine Gun” Thompson groove. Another was faster, with a bit of a southern rock feel, like Molly Hatchet without the screeching (hard to imagine, but try it); another sounded like the UK Subs with Torcicollo firing off acidic sheets of noise. They ended the set with a surprisingly slow, quiet, brooding tune, the lyrics mourning someone “who I used to be.” The band’s one mistake was a cover and it was awful. Wikipedia says – right or wrong, you never know with them – that it was written by Mike Oldfield (the Exorcist Theme guy) and was a hit for Hall & Oates sometime back in the 80s. Whatever. Nobody’s going to come see this band for their covers, anyway – it’s their originals that kick ass. They got the show back  on track and ended with a funny singalong by a former bass player (they used to have two of them), Leon Chase of Uncle Leon & the Alibis that put the crowd in the mood for the club’s weekly punk/metal karaoke.

Catch Rob Teter Now Before He’s Popular Again

First-class melodic rock tunesmith Rob Teter has a 8 PM-ish Sunday residency through the end of this month at Zirzamin. Songwise, the obvious comparison is Tom Petty, but that doesn’t do Teter justice: he’s a better and far more eclectic songwriter than Petty, as you’d expect from the co-founder of the popular, now defunct Austin gypsy-rock band the Belleville Outfit. Don’t think Petty in phone-it-in, boring, American Girl mode – imagine early, inspired Damn the Torpedoes-era Petty, with even better lead guitar. This past Sunday he had a brilliant band – who call themselves the Slaw Dogs – featuring Teter’s old Austin pal Grant Gardner on lead guitar. That guy is the real deal, a phenomenal, Jim Campilongo/Bill Frisell class player who takes Teter’s jangly, catchy songs to the next level.

One of the best tunes in the set was Plywood and Plaster, a brooding kiss-off anthem: Gardner was in chill mode on this one, adding judicious slide licks to Teter’s bitter, brooding brokendown house metaphors. They picked up the pace with the next one, building from Teter’s skeletallly funky guitar hook that Gardner fleshed out with burning, sustained chords that crescendoed to a wickedly catchy, minor-key chorus: “Don’t go looking for me, sometimes I don’t wanna be found,” Teter warned, deadpan and casual as the band jangled and clanged, nonchalant but energetic. They did one cover, a western swing tune that Gardner lit up with jaunty pieces of jazz chords and Chet Atkins licks and then an original that grew from a laid-back, folky hook to a western swing-tinged slink. After a catchy detour into oldschool 60s soul, Teter switched to piano and mixed the soul with Britpop on a number whose catchiness played down the wrath of the lyric: “I’d rather die than fall in love with you again,” Teter mused, Gardner casually firing off a richly jangling, clanging,, jazz-fueled solo. The set went out on a high note with I Get High, a bouncy, biting minor-key gypsy-rock number where Teter finally cut loose and sparred periodically with Gardner, whose ferocious flurries of Django chords alternated with spiraling, prowling nocturnal runs. The rhythm section of bassist Mike Noordzy and drummer Mark Crowley felt the room. When Noordzy finally got a solo at the end of the set, it was slinky and fluid and cool. Crowley kept the groove going artfully with his brushes: Zirzamin is a deliciously intimate venue, and he made things intimate to the point of suspense. A lot of rock drummers won’t or can’t do that. If you like the idea of Zach Brown – or Petty – but need more substance, Rob Teter and his band will sustain you. Teter is playing solo this coming Sunday the 15th; he’ll have the band, or at least some of them, back on the 22nd and 29th.