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.

House of Waters Bring Their Gorgeous Psychedelic Textures to the Rockwood

House of Waters are one of New York’s most interesting and unique bands. Part funky jamband, part Afrobeat and part pan-Asian, there is no other group in the world who sound remotely like them. In a casually expert way, frontman Max ZT is the Hendrix of the hammered dulcimer, an instrument on which he is a former American national champion. Yet while American folk music informs his songwriting, his rippling, hypnotic, warmly psychedelic instrumentals draw on styles from around the globe. As one would assume from a disciple of Shivkumar Sharma, India’s greatest master of the santoor – an ancestor of the hammered dulcimer – he’s taking his instrument to places it’s never gone before. The lush, dreamy quality of many of these songs disguises the fact that there are only three instruments in the band: the dulcimer, Moto Fukushima’s eight-string bass and Luke Notary’s cajon. They’re playing the small room at the Rockwood at 11 PM on May 17; if global sounds with a psychedelic edge are your thing, you’ll love this band.

Their album is titled Revolution: their kind of revolution is a good-natured, upbeat one. It’s a generous fifteen-track mix, the resonant ring of the dulcimer blending with the undulating bass and a thicket of percussion. Sometimes the dulcimer and bass double each others’ lines; other times they play off each other, or trade places, dulcimer anchoring a trancey groove as the bass sails overhead. There’s often a layer of dirt in the tone of the bass, and Fukushima uses all eight strings, especially if he takes a rapidfire guitar lead. Sometimes the beats are straight-up, other times they’re more tricky. That it’s often hard to tell who’s playing what speaks to the intricacy of the arrangements and the chemistry in the band.

A couple of the numbers work variations around a central tone as in indie rock, one of them rising to a big, insistent, anthemic stadium-rock crescendo, the other going into unexpectedly moody, ominous territory. Another track has a swaying triplet rhythm and a warm Mediterranean feel. Sound of Impermanence works around spiraling upper-register licks on the highest strings of the bass, while Sabula rises to a majestic, spacious atmosphere, Max ZT choosing his spots. The album’s most energetic cut, Agnolim, has the dulcimer machinegunning over a nonchalantly catchy, low-key groove – and then the bass goodnaturedly takes over. The closing track, Ball in Cage sets spacious Asian riffs over interwoven loops in both the lows and the highs from the bass. There’s also a terse rainy-day theme and a brief interlude that sounds like a resonator guitar solo but clearly isn’t.

Shannon McNally’s Small Town Talk: The Great Lost Dr. John Album?

Bobby Charles was a Cajun soul songwriter who scored during the early rock era with hits including See You Later Alligator and Walking to New Orleans. He also recorded sporadically: Shannon McNally discovered him via his self-titled 1972 album recorded with The Band. In 2007, three years before Charles’ death, McNally, Dr. John and the Lower 911 went into the studio with Charles and recorded Smal Town Talk, an album of Charles covers that is just now seeing the light of day. McNally plays the album release show at 7:30 PM on May 17 at Joe’s Pub; $12 advance tix are still available as of today.

McNally has a history of collaborating with underrated New Orleans figures, most recently her intense 2011 Americana album, Western Ballad, with Mark Bingham. Though credited to her, you might consider this a great lost Night Tripper record. As you would imagine, it’s pretty funky. As you also might imagine, Charles’ songwriting turns out to be considerably more interesting than the top 40 fluff he’s best known for: his aphoristic turns of phrase have a surrealistic humor akin to Dr. John’s. It must be a New Orleans thing.

The opening track, Street People, sets a funky tone with bubbly organ and punchy horns courtesy of legendary New Orleans arranger Wardell Quezergue, an octogenarian at the time who has sadly left us since. McNally’s wry vocals dignify the hobo narrator’s point of view, soberly observing that “Some poeple would rather work: need people like that!”

The cynical country shuffle Can’t Pin a Color pairs the guitars of John Fohl with guest Luther Dickinson. “Tell a friend your deepest darkest secrets, watch how fast it spreads all over town,” McNally drawls. String of Hearts, an absolutely gorgeous, sophisticated duet with Vince Gill, has a lush string chart and some equally gorgeous piano from Mr. Rebennack. I Spent All My Money is a honkytonk song with a laid-back, funky edge courtesy of bassist David Barard and drummer Herman Ernest that contrasts with McNally’s vitriolic vocal.

Cowboys and Indians starts out as a rather somber take on American Indian-flavored rock a la Apache and then goes scampering with some surprisingly focused slide guitar from guest Derek Trucks. Will Sexton teams up with McNally on guitar on the sad, alienated country ballad Homemade Songs; then McNally picks up the pace on Long Face, a jaunty duet with Dr. John.

The slinky title track is a matter-of-fact commentary on petty jealousy. I Don’t Want to Know takes an outlaw country ballad and gives it a little slink as well: the tradeoffs between McNally’s tremoloing guitar and Dr. John’s piano are one of the album’s high points. Arguably Charles’ most-covered song, (I Don’t Know Why I Love You) But I Do gets a purist swing jazz treatment. Love in the Worst Degree, another one of his more popular tunes, gets a ranchy, Stonesy interepretation. Save Me Jesus has the feel of a Vietnam War era song, an unexpectedly cynical, apocalyptic spin on a swaying gospel organ groove. The record winds up with Smile (So Glad), a  soul shout reinvented as a classic Dr. John piano/organ romp, and  the lush, jazzy, 70s style soul ballad I Must Be in a Good Place Now.

Does this album have legs beyond the old hippie/Relix/WFMU crowd? Absolutely. It’s a lot of fun and a good look at a songwriter whose more substantial side was overshadowed by his early success. And it’s noteworthy for being the final release by Dr. John and this version of the Lower 911, considering that Fohl and Barard are no longer in the band.

Eerie Jagged Noir Blues from Austin’s Sideshow Tragedy

Sometimes it boils down to cred. The presence of Dimestore Dance Band’s noir gypsy guitar mastermind Jack Martin on Austin band the Sideshow Tragedy‘s album Persona instantly makes it worth a listen – it’s up at their Bandcamp page. For anybody who likes the idea of the Black Keys but finds them impossibly tame, the Sideshow Tragedy will not disappoint: they are the real deal. They’re upstairs at Bowery Electric, guessing at around 10 PM on May 15 and then at Zirzamin at 10 on May 17. If dark twisted surreal country blues is your thing, this will hook you up for the duration. Frontman/guitarist Nathan Singleton took the entire blues dictionary, distilled it, lined it up down the bar and then did shots of it until he had the whole thing in his system. And then recorded this album, for the most part just with drummer Jeremy Harrell. It’s like the Gun Club, but more raw, or like Dylan at his most haphazard and interesting – and funny. Singleton’s wry sense of humor is a welcome change from all dese wotbo blueschillun who done take da blues so serious, uh huh – there’s none of that blackface BS here.

Another cool thing about this record is that aside from Martin’s jagged guitar on the haunting, Otis Rush-influenced fifth track, The Bet, the rest of the album is all Singleton. He’s a one-man blues army, sometimes wailing with a slide, sometimes fingerpicking, sometimes slashing and roaring as he builds a doomed, menacing ambience. The album’s opening track, AM in Chicago sets the tone, an evil, reverb-drenched roadhouse vamp over tumbling drums: “A structure fire in the tower of song, a prisoner’s wish before he’s gone.” That the Leonard Cohen reference isn’t absurdly out of place speaks for itself.

“If you won’t believe me, I’ll keep telling you lies,” Singleton smirks over tasty layers of steady, shuffling slide guitar on Gasoline, then adds a sly, funky edge that reminds of Jon Spencer on the pulsing Something to Do. If there’s anything here you could call a hit single, it’s the wickedly catchy Satellite, bringing in a rare, upbeat major-key vibe.

Vasseline is a swirling, Steve Wynn style desert rock stomp. The title track, a snide portrait of a status-grubbing groupie type, opens with bit of feedback, early 70s stoner metal throuth the prism of punk, and then goes scampering. The exasperated I’m Gonna Be Your Man has distant echoes of the early Yardbirds and cool reverb on the vocals and the drums. The album winds up with the menacingly swaying Long Way Down, a hypnotic Howlin’ Wolf style groove, resonator guitar carrying the brooding tune over a wash of eerie distortion.

Another Brilliant Noir Instrumental Album from Beninghove’s Hangmen

Bandleader Bryan Beninghove is a jazz saxophonist with a busy schedule around the New York area, and writes a lot for film and tv. He has a distinctive, individual voice on the soprano sax; he also plays tenor, and melodica as well. Back in 2011, he and his band Beninghove’s Hangmen put out a richly creepy, eclectically cinematic debut album of noir theme music which was one of that year’s best. They’ve got a new one, Rattlesnake Chopper just out, streaming at their Bandcamp page, and it’s every bit as murderously intense. They’re playing the album release show this Friday, May 17 at Nublu at 10 PM.

The Hangmen’s lineup this time out is pretty much the same: guitarists and John Zorn alums Eyal Maoz and Dane Johnson, trombonist Rick Parker (of similarly dark Bartok jazz project Little Worlds and a million other bands), Shawn Baltazor on drums, and Kellen Harrison on bass (dub maven and Super Hi-Fi leader Ezra Gale takes over on bass for the show).

Where the debut album was more of a jazz record, this one is horror surf rock along with a couple of lively departures into gypsy jazz (Beninghove also plays that style of music in the memorably named Jersey City group Manouche Bag) and noiserock. The darker material here brings to mind another great New York band, the Coffin Daggers; Maoz’ presence here adds a Middle Eastern edge similar to his own high-voltage instrumental rock band, Edom. The title track, which opens the album, could be the Hells’ Angels’ theme, a slowly marauding, minor-key biker rock groove with lurid neon horn harmonies, an absolutely sick Maoz solo followed by…a theremin solo. Hangmen’s Manouche has a jaunty swing, Beninghove’s carefree melodica and tenor sax contrasting with Parker’s brooding trombone and Johnson’s surreallistically warped Jeff Lynne guitar. One of Beninghove’s best songs, Surf n’ Turk works a menacing Anatolian guitar riff that everyone who plays an instrument will be trying to figure out: it’s absurdly catchy, but it’s tricky and it’s the darkest thing here.

Choro Clock D’Lite begins as aa bubbly soca theme, adds a weird undercurrent with Johnson’s outer-space EFX, then heads to New Orleans. The album’s other horror surf masterpiece, Surfin’ Satie builds variations on a macabre, reverb-drenched chromatic theme, a shivery tenor sax solo handing off to a jagged guitar duel. The final track, Powerstine, slows things down to a sludgy Macedonian-flavored grind and then picks up, gypsy-tinged soprano sax leading the way. Best album of 2013? One of them, no question.

Art Brut Join the Nostalgia Parade

Nostalgia always leaves out the good stuff. Ever notice how 60s nostalgia always conveniently neglects how central a role opposition to the Vietnam War played in that era’s music? Outside of CBGB coffee table books (how NOT punk is that?) and never-ending tours by bands like Agent Orange or the Subhumans (who are at Bowery Ballroom on 6/15 and  the Music Hall of Williamsburg on 6/16), who outside of a crowd of diehard individualists remembers first-wave punk bands like those two? And isn’t it funny that the first wave of 90s nostalgia, like the Breeders’ recent comeback, looks back to the earliest part of that decade, or even to the 80s?  Is this a generational thing, a twenty-year cycle…or a reflection of how forgettable so much of the 90s’ ostensibly most popular music was? And there’s more to come: zeros nostalgia is next in line.

Although those who spent that decade across the pond might disagree, the European corporate music conglomerate took longer to drown itself in dreck than it did here in the US: good bands like Pulp and Blur spent a lot of time on Top of the Pops. Which the Brits take very seriously, or at least used to: let’s not forget that American Idol was a spinoff of the long-running Eurovision competition. That fascination with pop-charts-as-spectacle springboarded the career of Art Brut. A cynic would ask how many songs they ever made after the surprise 2004 hit Formed a Band: the answer is on the new Art Brut retrospective – imagine that! – appropriately titled Top of the Pops. Forty tracks, including one by Art Brut “franchise” band We Are Scientists (one of a friendly network who dedicate themselves to keeping the Art Brut catalog alive in concert). Defiantly blue-collar, sometimes to the point of self-parody, frontman Eddie Argos’ tongue-in-cheek, wide-eyed persona fuels the songs’ irrepressibly cynical sense of meta.

It’s funny how quaint so many of these songs are, even though the band is still active. Pump Up the Volume has a guy taking a break from making out with a girl so he can turn up the radio. My Little Brother “only listens to b-sides.” Nag Nag Nag Nag has a kid escaping the drudgery of home, his “album collection reduced to a mixtape” for travel purposes. Sideways references to decades of radio hits pervade these songs: the riff from Cool Jerk, allusions to ZZ Top, the Beach Boys (or the Clash parodying the Beach Boys), oi punk and especially Wire (a cynic would say Elastica instead). Ian Catskillkin and Jasper Future’s guitars (not to neglect founding member Chris Chinchilla on the early stuff) buzz and roar and are surprisingly tuneful despite themselves. As the band grew up, you can watch the humor extend to the music: wry harmonics and phasers and other effects make their appearances, more or less to mask the band’s musical limitations. What other group would have set a song about Guns & Roses’ brain-damaged vocalist to a Joy Division bassline?

Is 40 tracks of Art Brut overkill? For a band that was basically a lark from the git-go, maybe – although what’s most impressive is how strong, and funny, the satire is throughout most of this. DC Comics and Chocolate Milkshakes’ kitsch-obsessed trendoid, the snooty Strokes wannabes in Demons Out! and the Jarvis Cocker wannabe in Sexy Sometimes all get a karmic kick in the ass. And Alcoholics Unanimous is just a great song, one that needed to be written and a good thing that it was Art Brut who did it. How ironic it is that a band formed as a spoof of the pop music machine would become one of the very last to ride that machine to any kind of genuine success.

A Month’s Worth of Nightcrawling, Part Three

Those of us who run music blogs are discouraged from every side from publishing concert coverage.  The publicists all want us to “preview” live shows, which is understandable: let’s get the crowd out to the gig!!! The reality is that we are in a deep, deep economic depression. The corporate media pretend it doesn’t exist because to acknowledge it would anger advertisers. The Bushwick blogs are oblivious to it because indie rock is by and large made by and for trust-funded children whose only connection with the daily reality experienced by most New Yorkers is their late-night slobbberfest at whatever trendy taco truck stays open the latest. But in spite of it all, incredible live music that has no connection whatsoever to the indie trust fund machine persists. So this final segment in three parts is dedicated to the working poor who make up an unpublicized majority of the audience at most New York concerts.

Walter Ego headlined Sunday Salon 25 at Zirzamin. The Sunday Salon began right after the hurricane last fall: it continues, unabated, a gathering of some of New York’s edgiest songwriters and musicians trading licks and songs. In an hour onstage, Walter Ego played every instrument within reach. Backed by brilliant drummer Josh Fleischmann, he began on guitar, switched to piano, eventually took over on bass for a slinky version of the Beatles’ Baby You’re a Rich Man and ended up behind the drum kit. In between, he acknowledged the horror of being behind the wheel of a subway train that runs over a passenger, went deep into Lennonesque piano mysticism, fired off jaunty, wryly amusing songs making fun of new agers and killjoys, evoking the Zombies, Beatles, Elvis Costello and ELO along the way.

Balkan chanteuse Eva Salina played a gorgeously eclectic solo show the following Friday night at the American Folk Art Museum. She’s a musician’s musician, taking the time to explain her background and how she survives in a world of magical musical niches, an American girl determined by the time she was in grade school to master styles she had little background in. Playing and singing solo with just her accordion, she held a standing-room-only crowd rapt with haunting songs from Bulgaria, Macedonia, Greece and the Jewish diaspora. Rising from a hushed, sultry alto to an anguished, microtonal wail, she held the crowd breathless as she brought to life ancient stories of mismatched marriages gone drastically awry, love lost to wartime casualties fighting the Ottoman empire, and an unexpected detour into American Appalachian folk music, another one of her specialities. A rugged individualist from day one, she now teaches music all over the world and collaborates with a similarly diverse cast of the world’s most sought-after players, from trumpeter Fank London (with whom she has a new album coming out) and modern accordionist Merima Kljuco. Her new solo album is a subtly beautiful hint of the careening chromatic intensity she pursues with London and an all-star cast of Eastern European players.

What is the likelihood that on a Monday night, an 11:30 PM Brooklyn show would be sold out? If it’s Rev. Vince Anderson, that’s always a possibility. He’s reached the point where he’s just about outgrown his weekly Monday residency at Union Pool, which is not a small venue. With a raw roar, he crashed into his signature song, Get Out of My Way and kept a packed house dancing throughout a somewhat abbreviated first set this past Monday night. Is there any jam band in New York who can match Anderson and his Love Choir? Doubtful. Firing off funk riffage on his trusty Nord Electro keyboard and backed by brilliant downtown baritone saxophonist Paula Henderson and Dave Smith on trombone plus guitar, bass and drums, he kept a resonant, murky minor-key mix going, then quoted both Hendrix and Jesus Christ Superstar in a slinky version of his own song Down to the River. A new number, Fallen from the Pray explored an existential crisis for the “dirty gospel” bandleader and minister (click here for his most recent sermon). “People are curious. They see me on the train and they come up to me and ask me, am I the Rev. Vince Anderson, and I say yes. Then they ask me why I’m depressed. and I say, do I look depressed? Am I acting for you? You mean I’m not animated like I am onstage? Then they ask me if I’m a believer. Today? Stone cold atheist, tomorrow who knows?”

The Rev., as he is lovingly known, is not an atheist. He followed that angst-ridden romp with a solo piano version of Precious Lord, Take My Hand. then a deep-fried soul vamp titled I Like My Lettuce Fried (you can actually do it if you use the heart of the vegetable) and then his hot sauce theme, Tangalicious. And that was just the first set. By the time that was over, there was no possible way to get into the room at Union Pool: you have been warned.

Alison Tartalia has an impossible 11 PM Tuesday residency this month at Spike Hill. It’s a great venue to not have to worry about drawing a crowd: it’s right by the train, the bartenders are super friendly and it’s the antithesis of the fussy trendoid bars immediately to the south. And the sound is great. Her first night here saw her working creepy noir cabaret, stagy theatrical piano songs, a ferocious blast of guitar rock and more delicate, pensive sounds. If you’re in the neighborhood, check her out – you’ve got a month to do it.

From an audience perspective, there were also a couple of shows last month that should not have happened  That ferocious Balkan brass band that plays that beer garden in Williamsburg shouldn’t advertise their shows there: dudes; just take the money and run. When the bartenders blast cheesy eastern European jazz while you’re playing, it’s time to quit while you’re ahead – and you are not easy to drown out wth the PA system. And that blues guitarist who’s gotten so much ink here on the live calendar needs to play some solo shows instead of with that hack who’s been kicking around the hippie scene here since the 70s.

A Month’s Worth of Nightcrawling, Part Two

Funny how this blog started out covering live music almost exclusively, then within weeks the torrents of albums began and never stopped. Remember when everyone was saying that the album was a thing of the past? Now you can record an album with your phone, and everybody’s doing it. There’s a pile – or a virtual pile – of more than fifty of them patiently waiting their turn here. And they’ll have to wait another day because today is part two of catching up on all the shows from the past couple of weeks or so.

Lorraine Leckie is as comfortable with elegant, brooding chamber pop as she is at unhinged noir Americana rock. Her most recent show at the big room at the Rockwood last month featured the former. Then headlining Sunday Salon 26 at Zirzamin this past week, Leckie and her band the Demons were at the absolute peak of their game, slashing and burning through a mix of retro glamrock, surreal downtown NYC narratives and an unhinged version of Ontario, her sideways Canadian gothic salute to her birthplace. At the Rockwood, pianist Matt Kanelos added a nonchalant menace to several of Leckie’s collaborations with Anthony Haden-Guest (from the duo’s recent, excellent collaboration, Rudely Interrupted), especially on Bliss, a cruelly sarcastic portrait of a marriage gone irreparably wrong. At Zirzamin, guitarist Hugh Pool fired off machinegunning riffage that evoked Hendrix without being slavishly derivative or drowning out the vocals. Harmony vocalist Banjo Lisa amped up the songs’ allusive menace, blending bewitchingly with Leckie’s ever-increasingly full-throated wail.

The following Saturday night, Kanelos was at Littlefield playing in his duo project, Ghosts in the Ocean with Coney Island noir siren Carol Lipnik, who continues to move further toward the avant garde. One perceptive musician in the crowd likened their hypnotically minimalist performance to a cross between early Jane Siberry and Philip Glass, and she was right on the money, other than that Lipnik has a four-octave range and uses every inch of it. The two reinvented Leonard Cohen’s Gypsy Wife as Radiohead-inflected art-rock, then Lipnik employed a magical theremin-like vibrato on a mesmerizing version of Harry Nilsson’s Lifeline. They brought out every ounce of menace in Dylan’s Man in the Long Black Coat, turned Nick Drake’s Black Dog Blues into an even more haunting, skeletal sketch – that dog is a lethal predator – and moved through Richard Thompson’s The Great Valerio with a bell-like, funereal pulse, Lipnik going down into the sinister depths of her low register. But it was the originals – the catchy, anthemic Sonadora Dreaming, the defiantly insistent Crows and the disarmingly sarcastic Oh the Tyranny – that were the most memorable. They’re at Zirzamin after the Sunday Salon this coming June 16 at 7 PM

Pete Galub followed them, playing the album release show for his fantastic new one, Candy Tears. Galub brings world-class, dangerous guitar chops to classic powerpop, with an often frenetic, menacingly noisy edge – the Steve Wynn influence has made itself more and more clear in his music in recent years. Appropriately, he had Wynn’s guitar sparring partner Jason Victor as a guest on the album’s next-to-last track (they played the whole thing through, in order). And counterintuitively, after he and Galub had reduced the song to a toxic, molten mess of overtones and raging reverb, Victor led the band back in with gentle washes of major chords. Before that, the songs ranged from what sounded like Yo La Tengo doing XTC, Roscoe Ambel doing the Beatles, Guided by Voices doing Syd Barrett, and on a suspensefully skeletal version of the album’s gorgeous title track, Wire doing Big Star. In over an hour onstage, Galub made his notes count, choosing his spots – space is just as important in his music as the actual notes. Guest Karen Mantler played plaintive art-rock piano on the bittersweetly psychedelic 300 Days in July; Greta Gertler lent her soaring multi-octave voice to one of the later numbers. Drummer Chris Moore swung the backbeats while bassist Tom Gavin varied his attack from growly and slinky to a deep, anchoring pocket that held the center while Galub plotted where he was going to go next. Galub is at Zirzamin after the Sunday Salon on May 19 at 7.

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.