A Month’s Worth of Nightcrawling, Part One

Don’t you just want to smack people upside the head when they say ignorant things like “There’s no good music in this city anymore?” Obviously, those people are either spending time in the wrong neighborhoods (Bushwick), or they aren’t paying attention. This past month has been amazing as far as live shows in New York are concerned. What’s the likelihood of seeing Katie Elevitch and Matt Keating back to back, for free? It happened, after Sunday Salon 23 at Zirzamin. She was the special guest to play after a characteristically lively exchange of tunes bristling with puns, double entendres and catchy hooks from the likes of Walter Ego, LJ Murphy, Lorraine Leckie, Tamara Hey and other usual suspects. Keating was a last-minute booking.

Elevitch’s music is more about setting a mood and building to a feral crescendo, or a quieter, more mystical ambience; Keating’s songs are narratives set to catchy changes that build to a similar angst-fueled intensity. While Elevitch’s music looks to soul and jazz and Keating draws on Americana for his tunes, ultimately they both reach back to punk rock for their energy. Keating is a cynic; Elevitch finds hope against hope despite crushing reality (during last year’s hurricane, a tree came crashing through the roof of her house and caught her on the head – she seems none the worse for it). Keating has a cult following across the country and in Europe; Elevitch plays the Hudson valley circuit and is well liked there.

What were they doing in Manhattan? Having fun. Elevitch played solo on acoustic guitar, stripping down a mix of new material and songs from her previous album Kindling for the Fire to their skeletons. From a sultry whisper to a full-on roar, she worked her way through pain and exasperation and emerged triumphant and sweaty from the workout. Likewise, Keating ran through a mix of slowly unwinding favorites like Lonely Blue and The Fruit You Can’t Eat as well as a handful of more soul-influenced songs from his latest album Wrong Way Home. But the highlight of the set was a LMFAO cover of Twist and Shout, done as Lou Reed would do it, Keating said. And he nailed it. It’s as good a song to parody Reed with as you could imagine: where the melody jumps around, Keating did just the opposite. It wouldn’t be fair to give away any more of the joke – when the video comes out, it’s going to go viral. Watch this space for future Elevitch shows in NYC; Keating is back at Zirzamin at 8 PM playing after the Dog Show’s equally lyrical, intense Jerome O’Brien on May 13.

The following Saturday night, Dawn Oberg played her second-ever New York show (the first one was the previous night at Desmond’s). A popular draw in her native San Francisco, she’d come to do the dives of New York. Somehow she’d found herself at the dreaded Bar East (the former Hogs and Heifers space on the upper east), playing solo on electric piano. What’s the likehood of getting what was essentially a private show from someone so entertaining? Well, it happened – only in New York, folks. Much as her new album Rye may be one of the year’s best, Oberg is even better in person: she airs out her vocal range, she’s a terrific gospel/soul pianist and she brings her intricate torrents of wordplay, endless puns and literary references to life with more energy than you would expect, considering how subtly and carefully rendered the studio versions are. And for someone whose music is fueled by a seething anger spun through layer upon layer of sardonic humor, she’s more lively and upbeat in person (it’s tempting to call her vivacious or even sweet, but she might take exception to that). She opened the set with the deviously funny Old Hussies Never Die, a track from her previous album Horticulture Wars (she cannot resist a pun, ever), then later did the wry (pun intended) title track from the new one along with the unselfconsciously wrenching, doomed, elegaic Cracks and the wickedly catchy, personal-as-apocalyptic alienation anthem End of the Continent, working its earthquake metaphors for all they were worth. From here she went on to far better-attended shows in Nashville and Austin before winding up her tour in her hometown. Here’s hoping she makes it back to town sometime.

The following night, salonniers John Hodel and LJ Murphy kicked off the feature set at Sunday Salon 24 with nonchalantly slashing songs about imperfect strangers who should avoid each other no matter what, and also the kind of crowds you find in bars on a typical Tuesday morning: not pretty. But the music afterward was. Americana songwriter Sharon Goldman had been booked for a solo show, but fortuitously, her pals Nina Schmir and cellist Martha Colby were in town. Back in 2009, Goldman and Schmir released a tremendously good, eclectic album as the Sweet Bitters, so this was a rare NYC reunion of sorts. Both Goldman and Schmir are brilliant singers – Goldman being more crystalline and Schmir more misty – and gave the sound guy a workout as they switched back and forth between mics, necessitating constant tweaks to make sure both voices were where they needed to be in the mix. The harmonies were exquisite, especially as Colby grounded the songs with a moody, haunting sustain. The show reached a peak with Goldman’s haunting, ominous Clocks Fall Back, a chilling early winter narrative set to a ringing, funereal guitar melody. “Women in gowns sparkle downtown as the tired crowd walks their route,” the duo sang, painting as evocative a portrait of current depression-era New York as anyone has written. Finally getting a chance to hear this song live was arguably the high point of the year, concert-wise. The trio also made their way nimbly through the machinegunning vocal gymnastics of Schmir’s Tom Thumb (On Brighton Beach) as well as Goldman’s nonchalantly ominous 9/11 memoir, Tuesday Morning Sun. Goldman will be at the First Acoustics Coffeehouse in downtown Brooklyn on June 1, joining her co-conspirators of the Chicks with Dip songwriters’ collective in their celebration of their remake of Joni Mitchell’s Blue.

Eclectic, Smart, High-Energy Keyboard Rock from Nat Osborn

There’s a subspecies of songwriter that wants to be Levon Helm. Possibly finding the inspiration after uncrating their dads’ Leon Russell and Joe Cocker records, they’ve set their sights on a modest and easily attainable goal: unthreatening, midtempo major-key Americana rock with a simple singalong vibe and not much else. What they hope to achieve from it isn’t clear: the era of big record labels keeping C-list sidemen like Helm and Russell in the fold, hoping to oneday see a second coming of Fleetwood Mac, ended decades ago. In the meantime, many of this new crop take up residency at open mics, hoping to gain some kind of foothold with their fellow dreamers.

While Nat Osborn plays catchy, warmly major-key, funky Americana rock, it would be a pity if he was to get pigeonholed as part of that crew, because while his music is just as retro, it’s vastly more exciting and edgy than theirs. Think Brother Joscephus on a smaller scale, or a younger East Coast version of Dr. John. The New Orleans influence is all over Osborn’s new album The King & the Clown, but it’s not cliches: his songwriting has bite. He’s playing the Mercury on May 7 at around 8; tix are $10 and still available as of today.

The album opens with Fire in the Wind, a blustery, catchy minor-key shuffle featuring Osborn’s horn section of Thomas Barber on trumpet, Adison Evans on baritone sax and Jake Handelman on trombone. “How does she hold so much anger in that little frame?” Osborn ponders.  Dreaming Her Love Away slinks along, drummer Zach Nicita giving it a bit of a disco pulse in tandem with the London Souls’ Stu Mahan’s fat, undulating bassline. Little to the Left is an irresistibly hilarious portrait of a trustafarian girl:

She’s got teardrops tattooed to her eyes
But I’ve known her for awhile now and I’ve never seen her cry
She loves to wear leather but she hates when I eat meat
She’s a hardcore hippie vegan with snakeskin on her feet

And it only gets more savagely sarcastic from there.

No Reason builds a catchy retro 70s disco tune out of a latin groove, with tinges of hip-hop. By contrast, Yours Alone is an explosive, minor-key antiwar reggae tune driven by Adam Agati’s furious, distorted guitar. Siren works a creepy 60s noir cabaret pulse with Osborn’s tiptoeing piano up against Agati’s twangy Henry Mancini surf licks and a lurid horn chart. Subterfuge develops variations on a hypnotic, classically-tinged, impressionistic piano vamp, while So Wrong It’s Right bounces along with a jaunty roaring 20s vibe: it wouldn’t be out of place in the Matt Munisteri catalog.

One Chance plays off a seductive retro soul groove lit up by Osborn’s twinkling, nocturnal Rhodes piano. Ritalin picks up the pace (doesn’t it always – after all, it’s chemically identical to crystal meth) with tumbling salsa piano and the sobering mantra “we leave every child behind.” The title track makes an unexpectedly macabre and extremely successful detour into circus rock. The only dud here, Leave All This to Me shamelessly pilfers a familiar Radiohead riff and works it to death. The album ends with the Sinatra-influenced solo ballad Where Morning Used to Be. Osborn gets his fingers into a whole bunch of different pies here and comes up with good stuff pretty much every time; he sounds like he’s a lot of fun live.

An Excellent New Album and a Bowery Ballroom Show by Hem

What do you make of the fact that excerpts from some of the songs on Hem’s new album Departure and Farewell first appeared in tv ads? On one hand, for an artist with any cred at all to debut new material in commercials usually amounts to career suicide – John Mellencamp could tell you something about that. On the other, it’s tempting to give Hem a pass. If there’s any band that deserves a little trickle-down money so they can afford the big-studio production that their lushly orchestrated, sweepingly melancholic songs require, Hem fits the bill. Yet from an artistic standpoint, would you want your audience to associate your music with, say, a credit card company whose ad they (or their lazy flatmates, or siblings, or parents) forgot to mute? As a listener, would you want to hear a song that reminds you of a  commercial? Obviously not. Those are just a couple of the dilemmas faced by artists these days. Robert Johnson had to go down to the crossroads to make his deal; 75 years later, Hem simply handed over the files and took the cash.

Whatever you think of that transaction, there’s no denying how beautiful the new album is. Seriously: do you know anyone who doesn’t like Hem? Sally Ellyson’s sad, poignant vocals and the band’s slow, Indian summer ballads have won them a rabid following that acts who play such quiet, often delicate music seldom achieve. They’re playing Bowery Ballroom on May 4 at 9; general admission tix are $20 and still available as of this writing.

The theme of the album is endings, no great suprise considering the band’s previous output, a topic to which they’re especially well suited. Several of these tracks are available as free downloads (and for more delicious live stuff, check out the Hem channel at archive.org including their show earlier this month at the Bell House).

The opening, title cut sets Dan Messe’s terse piano against stately harp and bassoon, building to one of the band’s signature swells. The first of the free downloads, Walking Past The Graveyard, Not Breathing is an ominously blithe oldtimey waltz at its roots. “They are there inside, though we can’t see them,” Ellyson intones nonchalantly. Things Are Not Perfect in Our Yard is short and hypnotic, playing off a catchy, fingerpicked Steve Curtis riff.

The Seed has an oldtime country gospel feel lit up by Heather Zimmerman’s rustic violin. Bob Hoffnar’s blue-sky pedal steel washes through The Jack Pine. “My blood runs into the Gowanus Canal where it sinks to the bottom , it hurts like hell,” Ellyson laments in Tourniquet (another free download), a tale of Civil War era Brooklyn.

Seven Angels spices an oldtimey waltz with gospel piano and lively, twangy Gary Maurer guitar. Gently Down the Stream builds a pretty majestic rolling-on-a-river sweep, while Bird Song (an original, not a Dead cover) works a gentle 60s folk-pop vein.

Traveler’s Song – still available on a No Depression free sampler (via Limewire) – is over in less than two minutes, a rewrite of an old Irish ballad. The Tides at the Narrows builds to an unexpected majesty out of a spiky bluegrass-tinged tune on the wings of Maurer’s dobro. Last Call, with its sly Buffalo Springfield reference and a dreamy Ellyson vocal, is the album’s longest song; it winds up with the surprisingly upbeat, somewhat honkytonk-flavored So Long. Call this chamber pop, art-rock or even country music – it’s all three and it’s uniquely and instantly recognizable as Hem. May they thrive long past the point of needing corporate cash to pay for studio time.

Dawn Oberg’s New Album: Through the Bottom of a Glass, Darkly

Pianist/songwriter Dawn Oberg seems to have an enthusiastic cult following. She plays respectably small and midsize venues across the country and is well-liked by NPR. The obvious comparison is Aimee Mann, but where Mann looks back to 60s folk-rock and psychedelia, Oberg is more informed by jazz, gospel and soul music. She’s got a New York show at 9 PM on 4/20 – where, you ask? City Winery? The big room at the Rockwood? The Blue Note, or Barbes? Nope. Oberg is playing Bar East, the former Hogs & Heifers space on the Upper East better known as Bare Ast, which pretty much says it all about the kind of disarray facing musicians passing through town.

Although alcohol makes frequent appearances in Oberg’s urbane, wryly literate songs – her new album is titled Rye – disarray is not a factor. She’s a hell of a piano player with a fondness for gospel voicings and sings in a quirky, natter-of-fact contralto, sort of Amy Allison in slo-mo. Oberg keeps the humor deadpan and lets her images speak for themselves. Perfect illustration: the nonchalantly shuffling opening track, Girl Who Sleeps with Books. Oberg slowly pans an apartment that’s perfectly comfortable on one hand, and yet there’s something missing. The brilliance of this song is that this girl, with her notebook and clutter and caffeine addiction, who would rather spend an evening with something more interactive than a novel, is us. Seriously: who doesn’t have a book hiding somewhere in the covers?

The title track juxtaposes jaunty, blues-infused piano rock with a brooding, whiskey-fueled reminscence of a long-gone affair spent “hiking in the Sierras, getting high and watching South Park.” With its breathless torrents of lyrics, Gentleman and a Scholar is 21st century Cole Porter, a portrait of someone who “knows the works of Fats Waller and can play you recordings of them…he taught me how to drive a stick without acting like a prick and in general doesn’t tick me off.” The subtext is killing: Amy Rigby would do this one halfspeed with guitars and pedal steel.

Reconstruction evokes Shine On Brightly era Procol Harum, Roger Rocha adding shifting layers of guitar, a neat touch considering the song’s architectural theme. Parallel Plane revisits the swinging shuffle of the opening track: “The masterpiece I ruined is always on display…like a monster with a toy she’d break rather than hold,” Oberg laments. Cracks, an understatedly haunting, elegaic ballad worthy of Phil Ochs, sets Oberg’s clipped, wounded articulation over Rocha’s distantly symphonic guitar orchestration:

Black orange and red, colors of your bed
The canvas conveys how well you hide the dread
From Larkspur to the Tenderloin
A journey that spans a realm of the coin 
Distant as Marrakesh
Promixity of spirit and flesh
With angles so sharp and unkind
As to sever all you hold as true
You keep close to you heart the cracks killing you

Contortions works a sideshow metaphor for all it’s worth, an exasperated message to someone jumping through hoops for someone when she should really be kicking his ass instead. As a portrait of bitterness and alienation, Disguise makes a more angst-ridden companion to Blow This Nightclub’s Sensitive Skin. To That Extent once again evokes Procol Harum, Erik Ian Walker’s organ mingling with Oberg’s piano for a richly textural feast.

“The breakers shining big and beautiful, will laugh unthinkingly and crush your skull,” Oberg intones matter-of-factly on End of the Continent, its earthquake metaphors gathering intensity in anticipation of the Big One. It’s the album’s catchiest song and a rare moment where Oberg cuts loose at the piano: she always leaves you wanting more. It ends with Civic High, a high-spirited tribute to Oberg’s native San Francisco, her “favorite hedonistic playground.” The only other lyrical rock albums from this year that compare with this are Ward White’s surreal, sinister Bob, and LJ Murphy’s new one, which is in the can but not released yet.

Halle & the Jilt: Oldschool Soul with a Fresh, Dark Undercurrent

A cynic might say that the recent explosion of female-fronted oldschool soul bands are all trying to be the next Adele. But the reality is that most of them have been going for as long or longer than she has: the main reason why Sharon Jones isn’t on commercial radio is because her little label doesn’t have the payola money. Meanwhile, fantastic acts like Clairy Browne & the Bangin’ Rackettes, the Right Now and Meah Pace are packing small and midsize clubs. Halle & the Jilt work a lot of that same turf: for a taste of some of the lusciously noir cutting edge of retro soul music, they’re playing the album release for their second one, Three Roads Home, at the big room at the Rockwood tonight at 7.

Frontwoman Halle Petro goes for a steamy but biting oldschool soul vibe. Her voice is more crystalline and direct than most of the other retro soul mamas; when she’s not wailing full steam, her vocals often have jazz nuance. Petro’s not-so-secret weapon here is guitarslinger Michael Gomez, best known for his purist but often slashingly pyrotechnic work in careening minor-key gypsy/jamband Hazmat Modine. The album’s production is anything but slick, and all the better for it. At first listen, the funky opening track, Kiss My Ghost sounds like she’s saying “kiss my nose.” Petro sings vengefully over Tim Luntzel’s dancing, boomy bass, Jim Wert’s prominent drums and Gomez’ distorted funk guitar: “Are you happy when you kiss my ghost?” she demands. Did  she kill herself? Was she killed instead? Did anybody really get killed? The answer isn’t clear, and it’s intriguing.

The second track, Confessions is a feast of oldschool, jangly Memphis soul guitar under Petro’s nonchalant alto. Signs – which appears here in both live and studio versions – works a surprisingly interesting, artsy take on standard coffeehous singer-songwriter fare. Graveyard of the Ocean sets shipwreck metaphors over a cleverly creepy blend of noir funk and gothic folk. One suspects it might have a past life as a country song, reinforced by the presence of a broodingly torchy electric version of Wayfaring Stranger (which is actually fantastic – it wouldn’t be out of place on a Jennifer Nicely album).

Take What I Can Get pairs Petro’s elegant kiss-off narrative against echoey blues harp and nonchalantly unhinged, bluesy wailing from Gomez. Trees has a catchy, upbeat sway, Petro’s voice taking on a clipped, sardonic edge in the same vein as Hannah Fairchild of Hannah vs. the Many.

“You’re just a paper doll,” Petro adds casually on the burning, crescendoing, funk rock tune 10 East. Carry Me Home, a catchy 60s-style soul ballad, is a showcase for Gomez’ inspired, oldtime blues work with a slide on resonator guitar. The album winds up with a doo-wop soul number.

Yet Another Smart, Purist Album from Kim Richey

Kim Richey is one of those songwriters that Americana music fans take for granted. Every so often she puts out a new album, and it always ends up being pretty much what you’d expect: smart, impeccably crafted, with tasteful playing, lots of catchy hooks, plenty of detail and wise observations in the lyrics. Her latest one Thorn in My Heart is her seventh in a career that began in the mid-90s. Back then she was ahead of her time, someone who didn’t come out of country music but found herself a home there, more or less. Since then she’s circled closer around that center, every now and then selling a song to some New Nashville type. The viability of that business model having plunged so dramatically has put Richey out on the road more consistently, not such a bad thing since nobody does her songs as well as she does. She’s playing Joe’s Pub tonight with her band at around 10:15; tickets are $15 and are still available as of now.

As usual, Richey has surrounded herself with a cast of quality Nashville sidemen: the core of her touring band, guitarist Neilson Hubbard and mandolinist/multi-instrumentalist Dan Mitchell plus guitarists Will Kimbrough and Kris Donegan, bassist Michael Rinne and drummer Evan Hutchings, along with Wilco’s Pat Sansone (formerly of Jenifer Jackson’s band) on keys and Trisha Yearwood guesting on harmony vocals. Richey likes to write with people: as with her previous album, Hubbard gets a lot of co-writes here.

The title track is a terse midtempo backbeat country ballad that wouldn’t be out of place in the Tift Merritt songbook. “I’m fighting a battle with the undertow, it’s hard to hold your hand when you’re letting go,” the narrator grouses. Something More sets a brooding southern gothic narrative against spiky banjo and Sansone’s surreal funeral-parlor organ. And No Means Yes is an oldschool country cheating song in waltz time.

Angels’ Share, a co-write with the 1861 Project’s Thomm Jutz, builds a slow, summery, crying-in-your-beer ambience up to a bittersweet organ break: Lucinda Williams comes to mind. Richey has a couple more collaborations with Jutz here: I’m Going Down, an escape anthem with more bristling banjo, gospel piano and a trip-hop beat, and Everything’s Gonna Be Good, a slow, cautiously optimistic gospel-tinged ballad.

By contrast, the album’s best song, Come On – co-written with Mike Henderson – brings back the escape imagery over snarling guitar-fueled garage rock riffage. The other Henderson collaboration, Take Me to the Other Side, is also a gem, working its way up from a doomed Appalachian country-gospel theme. I Will Wait (written with Henrik Irgens) is sort of Richey’s Long Black Veil.

London Town, co-written by ex-bandmate Nate Campany, is a trip-hop song in disguise with tasty, moody trumpet fills interspersed amidst the jangle. And Richey moves to harmony vocals on the catchy Americana rock anthem Breakway Speed, a BoDeans-flavored collaboration with Mando Saenz with a wry Johnny Cash quote as its centerpiece. On one hand, Richey isn’t breaking any new ground here; on the other hand, it’s hard to imagine anyone else who mines a pensive acoustic-electric Americana vein as subtly and consistently well as she does.

Luxotone Releases Robin O’Brien’s Darkest Shining Moment

The morbid imagery of the cd package  – a surreal vintage 60s psychedelic illustration by Velveeta Heartbreak - for Robin O’Brien‘s new album Dive Into the End of the World pretty much gives it away. A chillingly understated song cycle fixated on death and dissolution, it’s O’Brien’s first collection of all-new material in years and one of the most shattering albums in recent memory. Beautiful as O’Brien’s voice is, and as many of the songs are, it’s not for the faint of heart. With a nod to Dylan, O’Brien asks her “blue-eyed son” what he sees:

I saw bright coin in the business of cancer
She opened my palm, put a portal in my chest
But earth from her back shakes off the rider
Mother, she knows best

The personal as universal; ontogeny recapitulating philogeny – or vice versa. That’s a line from the album’s third track, a tense, brooding folk-rock song titled Ashes, and it’s typical of what this album has in store.

“Joy is a narrow place, but your face is always changing,” O’Brien reminds over a Ticket to Ride bounce on the hypnotic opening track: summer is something that you “take with you when you go.”  George Reisch’s uneasy, echoing layers of guitars echo the anxious swirl of 80s paisley underground bands like the Rain Parade. Guitarist Kevin Salem opens the next track, Sylph with a snarling, bluesy slide guitar riff, O’Brien’s vocals raging through a bullhorn effect:

This house that I call my home
Slide into the muddy water
By the river’s edge it crumbled
Over stones and broken bottles

Salem takes it out with a long, savage solo, like Richard Thompson at his most assaultive. “Drink the sugar from the leaf, you can taste the passage over,” O’Brien adds knowingly.

She’s been a cult artist for years, sought out for her full-throated, soul-infused, soaring multi-octave vocals. This is her third album on the insurgent Chicago label Luxotone. Her previous two explored everything from folk noir to blue-eyed soul and jazz-inflected, Joni Mitchell-esque stylings. The latter comes front and center on Frozen Still, O’Brien taking flight over Nikos Eliot Flaherty-Laub’s icily surreal avant garde piano, Reisch holding the song to the cold ground with a terse bass pulse. It contrasts with the shamanic dirge I Will Not Fight and its doomed “we cannot drink the water” mantra, Salem’s distantly menacing slide guitar over Marcus Giamatti’s coldly minimalistic bass.

With its jangly, watery chorus-box guitar, soaring chorus harmonies and 80s folk-pop feel, Catalina is arguably the most gorgeous song here. Dive into the Purple Water is essentially the title track, its layers of guitars and O’Brien’s catalog of doomed images building menace over a minimalistic delta blues beat.

O’Brien takes the catchy, swinging 60s folk-pop song Empty into desolate terrain, Reisch’s spaciously funereal guitar accents enhancing its wounded, exhausted feel. St. John blends lush early 90s dreampop with gothic folk, Reisch’s off-center guitar tones transforming it into a surreal lunar lullaby as O’Brien contemplates herself “all ondone amidst the lilies.” On Mountain, Reisch builds wailing, galloping Floydian desert rock behind O’Brien’s tense, accusatory vocals. We Catch Fire works a gloomy Velvets-folk vibe; the album winds up majestically and hauntingly with Under the Skin, a southwestern gothic bolero evocative of  Penelope Houston, fueled by Risch’s simmering, spacious reverb tones:

Night is made of sand
Ours are the children
Born to watch them die
All of our riches
In the cauldron fire

Jocelyne Lanois of Martha & the Muffins and Crash Vegas, Chris Harford and Anthony Presti also make cameos. It’s the high point of O’Brien’s career and a genuine classic that ranks with the darkest material that Nick Cave, PJ Harvey or Nina Nastasia ever recorded.

Tift Merritt and Simone Dinnerstein Play Their New Album Live

[Repost from NY Music Daily's sister blog Lucid Culture]

Earlier generations might not be able to handle the concept of of juxtaposing Appalachian and classical music on the same stage. But songwriter/bandleader Tift Merritt and pianist Simone Dinnerstein have their fingers on the pulse of the future. Thursday night at their sold-out duo performance at Merkin Concert Hall, they held the crowd riveted with an intense, intimate performance that put each musician’s strengths under the microscope as they made unexpected connections between traditions from throughout the ages on both sides of the pond, Dinnerstein’s fiery baroque and Romantic interludes alternating with Merritt’s elegantly plaintive chamber pop. Most of the material was drawn from the two’s nocturnal song suite, Night, just released (and reviewed here).

The stage set foreshadowed what the concert would be: a pair of comfortable padded chairs at either side of the stage in low light from a couple of floor lamps. Merritt teased the crowd – “We’re not going to talk to you …we’re still not going to talk to you” – as the two made their way from Schumann, through a solo acoustic version of Merritt’s  plaintive Only in Songs, then glimmering themes by Schubert and Purcell. Dinnerstein’s gravitas and flinty irony balances Merritt’s biting wit and mercurial persona: they are very different peas in the same pod and obviously good friends. Merritt has established herself as a southern intellectual in the tradition of Faulkner and Welty; Dinnerstein represents for the old guard. Of the many eye-opening moments at this concert, the most impressive were when the two ventured into jazz, with a take of Billie Holiday’s Don’t Explain that was so sensual it was lurid, and a bit later an expansive, commissioned work from Brad Mehldau, I Shall Weep. Swing is a rare quality in a classical musician, but Dinnerstein has it: both she and Merritt have futures in jazz if they feel like it.

But it’s more likely that they’ll continue to cross-pollinate. Dinnerstein revealed a fondness for George Crumb and played resonant dulcimer lines inside the piano behind Merritt’s finely nuanced, wary mezzo-soprano. Merritt told how Dinnerstein had introduced her to an operatic rendition of the English folk ballad I Will Give My Love an Apple that Merritt instantly recognized from its slightly less antique American folk version – and then they played it as moody, lingering  art-rock. The biggest hit of the night was Dinnerstein’s rapidfire romp through the Allemande and Courante (make that tres courante) from Bach’s French Suite No. 5 in G Major. Although Merritt admitted to being shy about playing the piano in front of her bandmate, she impressed with her own tersely brooding, gospel-fueled take of Small Talk Relations.

Dinnerstein’s subtle dynamic shifts followed a trajectory from bittersweetly neoromantic to bracingly modern throughout Daniel Felsenfeld’s Cohen Variations, a suite based on Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne. After Merritt sang a rapt, quiet version of Patty Griffin’s Night, the concert reached its peak with the plaintive, crescendoing, saturnine anthem Feel of the World, which Merritt had written for her well-traveled grandmother. The duo encored with a very clever mashup of Gabriel Faure’s Apres un Reve with La Vie en Rose, which Merritt sang in flawless French. The two are soon off on US tour; the schedule is here. Dinnerstein is also at the Greene Space for an on-air performance of Bach’s Goldberg Variations on March 28 at noon; the performance is free but tickets are required.

Ronald Reagan Lives On As a Parody

“Ronald Reagan, Boston’s premier 80′s pop saxophone duo aim to revitalize America’s economy by promoting large tax cuts and a revival of 80s pop music. Their sidemen went on strike, violating a band regulation prohibiting critical players from striking. Ronald Reagan stated that if the musicians ‘did not return to work within 48 hours, they have forfeited their jobs, and will be terminated.’ They are seeking non-union musicians in anticipation of a 2011 tour to Grenada.” That was a couple of years ago. It’s not known if this particular Ronald Reagan is still alive, but their album lives on, most of it still streamable at myspace. And it’s a hoot. The trick is how to write about it without giving away the jokes, because they’re that good.

Ronald Reagan is/was Alec Spiegelman - who plays with a whole bunch of great bands including gypsy/klezmer powerhouse Klezwoods and Miss Tess’   jaunty oldtime Americana group – and Kelly Roberge, from Quartet of Happiness, who are sort of an equally funny, satirical Boston counterpart to New York’s Mostly Other People Do the Killing.

Has anyone ever really listened to Wham’s hit Take On Me all the way through and actually paid attention? These guys have. What they do to it is cruel, because in trying to make art out of it they reveal how absolutely artless it is. Garbage in, double the garbage out. Cindy Lauper’s Girls Just Want to Have Fun also has vocals for extra ouch! factor, but what’s coolest about it is that these guys are great players, and they try, and try, and try to make this stuff interesting, snaking around and punching on the beat and doing everything a jazz musician possibly can do to redeem it. And that’s where the fun is.

Likewise, We Built This City, by Jefferson Starship (or were they simply Starship by 1985?) has some vocals too. One funny thing about this version is that in between cloying choruses, these guys actually succeed in conjuring up a catchy soca groove that doesn’t sound anything like the original.

Michael Jackson’s Beat It has been parodied forever (Weird Al Yankovic’s Eat It, with Rick Derringer totally whipping Eddie Van Halen’s ass when it comes to the guitar solo, is a favorite). This particular spoof is tight and yet completely over-the-top (hint – backing vocals). They end the album with a popular choice of worst song ever written, Total Eclipse of the Heart, which among other things turns out to have a less-than-secret connection to Cindy Lauper.

If you have a friend who’s addicted to cornball songs from the 80s, introduce them to this album, if only for spite. Likewise, if you work in retail or in a medical office and are forced to have the easy-listening station playing over the PA instead of Spotify, or your phone, or a boombox (food for thought), this will validate your suffering. And make you smile. And if you’re old enough to remember this stuff when it first came out, you will really bust a gut. Break this out at a party sometime and watch everybody crack up.

Oh yeah – if you’ve made it this far, a little research reveals that Take On Me wasn’t by Wham. That was George Michael’s 80s band. Take On Me was by a Scandinavian group called A-Ha who must have thought that if Abba could have gotten away with all the fractured English in their hits from the 70s, these guys could do the same thing in the 80s. And they were right!

Red Jacket Mine Takes You Back to 1979

Seattle band Red Jacket Mine love their old new wave, and they are very, very good at it, almost to the point of parody. Their sound is period-perfect London 1979, right down to the overdone fake American drawl on the vocals- hearing this, you instantly envision a bunch of guys in skinny ties pilfering American soul music, occasionally giving it a hit of speed, a little Stonesy burn or Bowie-esque staginess. Their songs are insidiously catchy and don’t waste notes – ten tracks in 33 minutes or so. The band -  Lincoln Barr on guitars and vocals, Matthew Cunningham on bass and Andrew Salzman on drums – is tight, their licks and instrumental settings (tasteful Memphis and Muscle Shoals guitar played cleanly through old tube amps, vintage borderline-cheesy electric piano) perfectly retro.

The best song on the album is the title track, a wry 99-percenter anthem that sounds like Red Shoes as Elvis Costello might have done it had he saved it for Get Happy instead of putting it on his first album. Another good one is Better to Be Broken Than Blind, which ironically outdoes all those old British guys in evoking the brooding early 70s soul ballad sound of the Stylistics: these guys spice it with brass and swirly organ from guest Ken Stringfellow. Many of the other tracks here sound a lot like Costello, musically if not lyrically. Let’s not forget that at the peak of  Costello’s popularity, not everybody liked him for his vicious lyrics. A lot of people liked him because he was such a great pop tunesmith (and still is). That’s the crowd that will be psyched to discover this band.

With its fuzztone intro and staggered funk beat, Amy sounds like a song by the early Larch, or maybe a Mike Rimbaud b-side. The final track is a dead ringer for Rockpile. In between, when Red Jacket Mine does the blue-eyed soul thing, which is a lot of the time, they often remind of Graham Parker, especially on the wry, Memphis-tinged Nickel & Dime, or the brisk backbeat-driven Listen Up. And Skint City sounds like Costello’s Living in Paradise as a young Parker might have envisioned it.  Ron Nasty, which is closer to new wave than soul, does not appear to be about the Speedball Baby frontman. The rest of the songs include the allusively country-flavored Novelty’s Gone, with a tasty organ crescendo from Daniel Walker; a faux honkytonk number like the ones on Costello’s Taking Liberties; and a Jean Genie ripoff. So many bands get criticized – and rightfully so – for being oblivious to music made before 1980. These guys seem oblivious to anything made afterward. But that’s ok. They aren’t missing much.