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

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

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

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

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

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

In Memoriam – Ray Manzarek

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hem Plays a Show to Get Lost In at Bowery Ballroom

Chauvinistic as this is to say, Hem always seem to play their best shows in New York. As frontwoman Sally Ellyson was quick to acknowledge Saturday night at Bowery Ballroom, it didn’t hurt that they had a full eight-piece contingent onstage including drummer Mark Brotter, pedal steel wizard Bob Hoffnar and violinist Heather Zimmerman along with keyboardist Dan Messe, guitarist/mandolinists Steve Curtis and Gary Maurer, bassist George Rush and guest Dawn Landes on backing vocals, glockenspiel and percussion. Midway through their current tour, they seemed happy (well, as happy as this band gets) to be back on their home turf and rewarded a hushed, adoring crowd with an almost thirty-song set that went on well past the two-hour mark.

Enchanting as Ellyson’s voice is on the band’s new album Departure & Farewell, she reminded that she’s even better live, transcending some hiccups in the Bowery’s usually reliable PA system during the first three songs. She sent a shout out to her Brooklyn homwtown with a poignant version of Tourniquet, Hoffnar lighting up Hotel Fire with a simmering steel solo as he would do on most of the other more country-flavored material. Reservoir built vividly to a soaring, harmony-drenched chorus out of Curtis’ nimble fingerpicking. Ellyson led the band into a plaintive, longing turnaround, reinventing Johnny Cash’s Jackson as early 60s noir.

Zimmerman’s edgy lines were a welcome presence, especially on bittersweet takes of The Seed and Strays, while Curtis fired off one of the night’s best solos on acoustic guitar on the “self-deprecatory love song” Stupid Mouth Shut. Ellyson and Messe teamed up for rapt, gorgeous duo versions of Traveler’s Song and Almost Home, while the whole band ramped up an epic art-rock intensity on the new album’s lush title track as well as the last of the encores, So Long. The night’s most intense moments came midway through, “the death segment,” as Ellyson called it: a brooding take of My Father’s Waltz, anonchalantly chilling version of Walking Past the Graveyard and then the murder ballad Carry Me Home, rooted in Messe’s gospel-infused piano. The high point of the night, appropriately enough, was Not California, its narrator ill at ease with the wave of clueless second-wave gentrifiers hot on her tail, foreshadowing total annihilation. The band also debuted We’ll Meet Along the Way, a new number – “our death metal song,” as Ellyson termed it – with the night’s most brooding, overtly menacing melody. Hem return to the road on June 1 at the Sinclair in Cambridge, Massachusetts before heading further south. Keep up with Hem’s archive.org channel to see if any enterprising soul had the presence of mind to record the show: if so, it’s a keeper.

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.

Raw, Smoldering Middle Eastern Rock from Mild Mannered Rebel

In the summer of 2008, oud virtuoso Mavrothi Kontanis released two brilliant debut albums. The first was a mix of stark classics from the Greek rembetiko underground of the the 1920s and 30s. The second, Wooden Heart, was originals influenced by the music of that era, with a similar restlessness and unease. Kontanis’ new album Ear to the Sky, with his band Mild Mannered Rebel, includes more of those plaintive, intense acoustic songs, but also psychedelic rock featuring Kontanis on – take a deep breath – guitars, bouzouki, baglama and tambouro lute. The band is playing the album release show at Drom on April 26 at 9:30; tix are only $10 and still available as of today. It’s a prime opportunity to get to know some of the songs from what might be the best album of 2013 in any style of music.

As in much of Greek music (Kontanis being second-generation Greek-American), the tempos on this album tend to be very tricky. Kontanis’ English lyrics are as serpentine as the music. While many have a smoldering, vengeful anger, Kontanis’ vocals have a low-key confidence and understatement: he lets the lyrics speak for themselves. Most of the acoustic songs set Kontanis’ oud and Megan Gould’s violin out in front of Brian Holtz’s bass and Shane Shanahan’s percussion; the rock stuff gives Kontanis a chance to be a one-man army of stringed instruments. Either way, the interplay between the instruments is luscious, whether it’s genuine teamwork or simply Kontanis’ intricately intertwining multitracks.

The album opens with a lithe, dancing acoustic intro titled Flight of Ikaros and ends with Fall of Ikaros, a metaphorically bristling lament with a long, hypnotic but biting violin solo as its centerpiece. The best song on the album is a brooding string quartet of sorts (a requiem for Kontanis’ father), sung in a richly low, suspenseful, elegaic alto by the ubiquitously brilliant Eva Salina Primack (who has a fantastic solo album of her own just out). The most psychedelic track is Dancing in My Dreams, Kontanis playing swooping, sitar-like lines over droning, dirty Velvets-style guitar distortion and a funereal bass pulse.

The menacingly nocturnal title track is a galloping, syncopated feast of chromatic minor-key guitar. Feel the Night and See You Through to the End both juxtapose carefree verses against edgy, anxious choruses, while the kiss-off anthem Don’t Need You Here works a bittersweet bucolic vibe. Mercy reaches toward a darkly seductive rembetiko ambience, while the viciously sarcastic Heart of Gold mines a psychedelic Greek folk vibe much in the same vein as Magges or Annabouboula. Rage finally reaches fever pitch in the revenge anthem The Climb, lit up by edgy oud/violin harmonies and Kontanis’ murderous lyrics. As stylistically diverse as this album is, Kontanis’  wicked chops on all those instruments connect them with a simmering, wounded angst. It’s one of the most hard-hitting, featlessly intense albums of the year.

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.

More of the Sunday Salon and Such

In a lot of ways, New York Music Daily’s Sunday Salon at Zirzamin is a misnomer. It’s a sophisticated scene, but it’s not exactly sedate. There’s no telling what’s going to happen. A lot of the time there’s something during the parade of performers leading up to the 7 PM featured set that upstages the headliner. Drina Seay covering LJ Murphy’s Waiting by the Lamppost for You was one of them. On one hand, watching her sing “I’m hungover and showing my years” was just plain funny (she looks about grad-school age: if you were a bartender, you’d card her). But that didn’t matter: she can wail when she wants, but she hung back and gave it a poignancy and dignity that you wouldn’t expect in a portrait of sheer dejection and despair.

Then there was Charming Disaster  – Kotorino’s Jeff Morris with Elia Bisker – doing a jaunty yet absolutely creepy four-handed ragtime piano piece and managing not to claw each other, Bisker’s moonscape resonance over Morris’ deadpan romp. They headlined Salon number 22 with a menacingly charming duo set with Morris mostly on guitar and Bisker on ukulele. She’s got the distant femme fatale persona down, dead cold, the perfect foil for Morris’ brooding gypsy and swing-spiked bounces and waltzes. They did not one but two songs about murder conspiracies gone wrong, a similarly failed twin grifters’ tale as well as moody, nocturnal material from each others’ catalogs. They make a good team, and they play a lot of shows: watch this space.

Lorraine Leckie followed them on a rare doublebill. This time out she had Calum Ingram on cello playing ominous low register ambience, with Banjo Lisa adding her stark, scary-beautiful otherworldly vocal harmonies. You would think that Leckie would have used this configuration to air out the darkest side – which is very, very dark – of her recent chamber pop songs, but instead she flipped the script and took a lot of her more upbeat rock catalog down into the abyss. What once had a T-Rex feel in this configuration sounded a lot more like Ziggy-era Bowie but with better vocals. She’s at the big room at the Rockwood on April 22 at 8.

To backtrack a little, Serena Jost headlined Salon 19 a couple of weeks previously . The multi-instrumentalist bandleader/chanteuse had a Joe’s Pub show to warm up for, and counterintuitively, instead of bringing the band and doing what would have been an open rehearsal, she went to a similarly stripped-down configuration featuring the eclectically brilliant Amanda Thorpe on slide guitar, keys, wood flute and also stark, scary-beautiful harmonies. Jost gets props for her cello work, but she’s also a brilliant singer – hanging out with Thorpe all these years has rubbed off. Through lithely jangling chamber pop, stark cello-and-voice tableaux, a stately 6/8 art-rock anthem, she radiated a lowlit allure with her precise, measured vocals, ripe to the point of drawing everyone in without falling off the vine. Then at Joe’s Pub, she and her full band – Julian Maile on guitar, Rob Jost on bass and horn, Rob DiPietro on drums, a keyboardist, and Thorpe and Greta Gertler on harmonies – soared and occasionally roared through most of the songs on her sensationally good new album A Bird Will Sing. The high point of the show – and maybe the past month, in terms of sheer sonic bliss – was the trio of high harmonies on an irresistibly pulsing, crescendoing version of Sweet Mystery, a song that could not have been more aptly titled.

The star of Salon 20 was Seay, who brought a full band featuring Eric Seftel on drums, Monica Passin a.k.a. L’il Mo playing bass as if she’d been doing it her whole life (she had about a week’s worth of practice, it turned out – who knew). “Is there a better guitarist in New York than Steve Antonakos?” one audience member wondered aloud as Seay’s lead player fired off keening pedal steel-style lines, cooly menacing Nashville gothic riffs and soulfully intricate jazz leads. Sassy, sophisticated country songs like the catchy shuffle Whatcha Gonna Do and the soul-infused, stop-time bounce Can’t Fight Falling in Love paired off against the absolutely gorgeous, minor-key Waking Up Crying, an absolutely evil, slide guitar-driven, oldtime swing-flavored All For You and the torchy, Julia Haltigan-esque Where Is the Moon Tonight. The high point of the set was when Seay segued from a slow, slinky, absolutely lurid take of one of her best ballads, Chase My Blues Away to Francoise Hardy’s Le Temps de L’Amour and gave that one a New York noir edge, singing in perfect French. A week later, Antonakos  would be the headliner at Salon 20 with his own tuneful, sardononically humorous songs, joined by Seay who this time added harmonies as she did so memorably back in the day at Banjo Jim’s before she started her own band.

The regular cast has had more memorable moments than can be counted. The Salon’s own Lauraly Grossman’s Cat Power-ish narratives edge closer and closer to noir, shadowy blues. LJ Murphy kicked off Seay’s set with a ferocious, bluesy intensity, hot on the heels of his careening trio performance at Hank’s Saloon the previous Saturday with Professor Jim Porter guesting and adding a whole other level of creepy surrealism on washboard. And this past week, Amelia Belle-Isle graced the stage with her ridiculously tuneful oldtime swing-flavored songs and subtle, alluring voice.

There have been plenty of other great shows happening around town, literally too many to chronicle here. The last week of the past month, the Wu-tang Clan’s Raekwon delivered a nonchalant, impressively tight, seemingly endless medley of his 90s hits at the swanky new Stage 48 way over past 12th Ave. on 48th Street. The place was packed with a mix of older people who knew every word and practicallly drowned out the vocals (the sound here seems to be a work in progress), and kids getting their first look at one of the icons of 90s East Coast hardcore. The Chef began with Cash Rules Everything Around Me and just got hotter from there.

Violinist Courtney Orlando and cellist Lauren Radnofsky’s performance of Luciano Berio sequenzas at the Miller Theatre last month deserves a mention. These pieces are like wartime: frenzied, anxious, cruelly frantic cadenzas that suddenly give way to still, suspenseful ambience, and while neither musician made it look easy – that would have been impossible – just getting through them without breaking strings would have been a triumph. That they were able to mine those weird juxtapositions for genuine emotion made the concert all the more worthwhile. That, and all the free beer the theatre was giving away.

The night of the Drina Seay show at the Salon, New York Junk played one of those oldschool New York punk bills at Bowery Electric. On one hand, their tunefully growling, glammy early 70s style isn’t covering any new ground, but just like the Dolls and Lou Reed, they’re catchy and they have the sound, and the wry, black humor-driven, black leather-clad doom and angst down cold. The bassist – formerly of 80s punk legends the B-Girls – bopped and pushed the songs along with catchy riffage underneath the Stonesy roar of the two guitarists.

This past week had a trifecta of good shows. Tom Warnick & World’s Fair played their usual gallows humor-driven mix of blue-eyed soul, horror surf, Doorsy jamrock and New England noir at Freddy’s Saturday night. Jerome O’Brien, late of the great Dog Show played a mix of his endlessly entertaining, literate rock tunes solo on twelve-string guitar at…where else…Zirzamin. And Maynard & the Musties brought their mix of wry oldschool country and dark highway rock to Cowgirl Seahorse down in South Street Seaport, Naa Koshie Mills’ violin/viola lines soaring over Dikko Faust’s trombone and Mo Botton’s richly twangy guitar. Frontman Joe Maynard writes some of the most nonchalantly poignant, richly tuneful songs around: it was a treat to hear him and the crew swing their way through the dark-sky, Neil  Young-ish expanse of Lightly Honest and the gorgeous yet utterly twisted Elvis Museum.

Catching Up on Concerts…Again

The point of this blog’s Sunday Salon at Zirzamin is to create a scene. There are other good scenes in New York: all the good things happening at Barbes; oldtime Americana at the Jalopy; latin jazz at the Jazz Gallery, Jan Bell’s country and blues thing at 68 Jay St. Bar, Alexandra Joan‘s thematic classical series at WMP Concert Hall. But there’s no central rock scene in New York, unless you count the loser indie rock thing, whatever that is, in bush-WECK, as the gentrifier children there say in their funny accents. Because this blog’s focus is global, it’s been awhile since there’s been any report here on all the under-the-radar happenings at Zirzamin and elsewhere around town. So here we go!

Eclectic Canadian songwriter/chanteuse Lily Frost and her brilliant multi-instrumentalist husband Jose Contreras (not the guy who inadvertently springboarded the phrase “evil empire“) began their  most recent show at Zirzamin by cranking up Contreras’ phone, setting the mood with a delicious mix of vintage Hawaiian guitar tunes. Much as Frost had her sultry voodoo lounge voice in full effect, she was a whirlwind onstage, alternating between vocals, guitar, keys, percussion and theremin. She and Contreras gave a southwestern gothic menace to hazy Mazzy Star jangle, did Billie Holiday as gypsy jazz and Pink Floyd’s San Tropez as the cruel proto-Margaritaville satire that Roger Waters didn’t have the range to pull off. But Frost’s originals were the most memorable: lush Gainsbourg/Birkin style psychedelic pop, the deceptively biting if sugary bounce of Do What You Love and an especially menacing, noir cabaret-infused take of Grenade, the darkest song on her latest album. At the end of the set they channeled the Dream Syndicate and encored with an unexpectedly carefree Buddy Holly cover. Frost has been making frequent return trips here: let’s hope she makes it down again soon.

The featured artists at Sunday Salon 17 were Black Sea Hotel and they were as breathtakingly haunting and otherworldly as always. The trio of Sarah Small, Corinna Snyder and Willa Roberts have made a name for themselves in Balkan music circles for their original arrangements of large-scale Bulgarian choral works: that these Americans were invited to perform at the Bulgarian consulate pretty much speaks for itself. Small’s register-smashing range, Roberts’ wild ornamentation and Snyder’s powerful, soul-mutating wail matched against each other with eerie close harmonies, minutely gleaming microtones, rapidfire lyrical gymnastics balanced by lushly sustained passages. When Roberts announced that one of their songs had been featured in a horror film, that came as no surprise. They took care to explain the songs’ topics, from the idea of shoes as ghetto bling among the peasantry, to strange, shapeshifing, lethal dragon-men, to the town of Zborinka which apparently drew all the guys in centuries past since it was rumored you could always get a girl there. The more things change, etc. The trio closed with a new song which included a verse translated to English, and a brand-new arrangement with slinky polyrhythms and interwoven harmonies so tight they could have been a string section. Their debut album from a couple of years back is amazing, and they’re working on a follow-up. Canadian gothic songstress Lorraine Leckie – who’s been the most consistent star of the Sunday Salon since it debuted right after the hurricane last year – kept the lushly haunting intensity going with a stripped-down trio performance highlighted by several numbers from her most recent chamber pop album, Rudely Interrupted, a collaboration with social critic/journalist/personality Anthony Haden-Guest. And she and her band the Demons are back at Zirzamin on May 5 at 7.

The following Saturday at the National Underground, powerhouse ragtime pianist Jack Spann opened with a sizzling solo set of originals ranging from the haunting Roly-Poly Man – a chilling story of murder and karmic payback – to an unexpectedly pensive, catchy ballad written by his wife. Spann then joined lyrical rocker Walter Ego, amping up one of his bluesier numbers. Walter (to call him “Ego” just doesn’t sound right) was similarly on his game, running through a set that ranged from a morbid art-rock piano number told from the point of view of a subway motorman who’s just hit someone on the tracks, to the gorgeously, cruelly metaphorical I Am the Glass, to a couple of catchy guitar tunes that evoked influences as diverse as the Kinks, Elvis Costello and of course the Fab Four (this guy knows the Beatles like few others). The best of these – it’s hard to choose – could have been a sardonically catchy, jangly number about minimizing one’s life, to the point where the womb and points even lower on the evolutionary scale begin to look appealing. Walter Ego is at Zirzzmin after the Salon on Apr 28 at 7.

Raquel Bell headlined Sunday Salon 18 with her Mesiko bandmate, guitarist David Marshall  joining her for a characteristically uneasy, electric Neil Young-flavored tune. Bell has a history of brilliant collaborations: she co-led Norden Bombsight, an art-rock band who will be legendary someday when they’re rediscovered; lately she’s been singing and playing keys with violist Jessica Pavone in Normal Love, as well as fronting Mesiko with their dusky Americana menace. Bell has grown into an adept guitarist, playing solo on electric, shifting from distant jangly ominousness to an unexpectedly cheery, funky pop song titled Harry Partch. Then she switched to her vintage analog synth, sounding like a young Patti Smith backed by Tangerine Dream. The occasional moments where the synth went out of tune only added to the creepily carnivalesque atmospherics. Her voice lept and dove as the loops pulsed; she ended her set with a brooding, Marble Index-ish tone poem of sorts. She and Mesiko are at Zirzamin every Sunday for the remainder of April at around 10:30 PM.