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.

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.

A Roaring, Haunting, Angst-Fueled New Album from Shannon Wright

One of the most distinctive and purposeful guitarists around, Shannon Wright has a new album, In Film Sound, due out May 7. It’s every bit as dark and intense as you would hope for. Wright’s world-weary, exhausted vocals channel doom and despair over overtone-drenched, buzzing, roaring sheets of poisonous lead-grey guitar sonics. Millions of bands have tried in vain to capture the surreal menace that Sonic Youth immortalized on Daydream Nation but this album achieves it. Wright’s writing is a lot more succinct and lyrically focused than Moore, Ranaldo & Co.: the presence of a defiant, mud-splattered young PJ Harvey towers over many of these songs.

The opening track sets the stage with its layers of guitar, absolutely satanic, chromatic central hook and tricky rhythms. The Caustic Light reminds of Randi Russo with its hypnotic, vamping verse and overtone-drenched chorus. Tax the Patients works the political as personal, and vice versa, evilly trumpeting guitar buildling to a prickly, circular waltz theme. As it reaches fever pitch, Wright’s mantra is “try to accept this just a bit longer.” But do we have to?

Who’s Sorry Now sets what could be either keys or a guitar synth tune over echoing, dirgey drums, rising to an apprehensive swirl fueled by misty cymbal crashes. Bleed begins as a trance-inducing piano piece and takes on a Philip Glass-inspired creepiness, while Mire reminds of Thalia Zedek and her band  Come, dirgy bludgeoning riffage lightened unexpectedly by what sounds like the woodwinds sestting on a mellotron.

“Burst into flames, pieces on the ground,” Wright murmurs as Captive to Nowhere begins, skeletally, then exploding in a blaze of distorted guitars. The best song on the album, Surely, They’ll Tear It Down brings back the Randi Russo edge, this time as a slow, towering art-rock anthem, stately organ juxtaposed against a smoldering guitar melody: “Such waste, such decay,” Wright snarls. It could be sarcastic: an anti-gentrification broadside? The album winds up with  a dark harmonium theme playfully titled Mason & Hamlin (do they make harmoniums as well as pianos?). Wright is at the Mercury Lounge on June 7.

GBV Work Toward the Record for Most Singles From an Album

Could be true by the time these folks finish. The latest limited-edition Guided by Voices vinyl single from the forthcoming English Little League (their fourth album in a year, no joke) is the best one. Xeno Pariah has a Pollard title but Tobin Sprout roar and catchiness, vintage Britrock that draws on the Kinks, glam, Britfolk and everything good coming out of the UK prior to 1975. Little Jimmy the Giant, the b-side,  is a catchy, bouncy lo-fi powerpop romp that shifts the focus a couple of years forward into the pub rock era . Collect ‘em all, they’ll be worth something someday!

And as nice as it’s been to have all these singles to fill the front page here on days where there’s a lot going on in that you can’t see, it’s tempting to say, enough already, before the jokes start and people start to refer to this thing as a Guided by Voices fan blog…

A Rare Two-Night Stand by Legendary Postpunk Pioneers the Bush Tetras

CBGB-era no wave/funk/postpunk pioneers the Bush Tetras are playing a couple of nights on March 29 and 30 at 8 PM at the Slipper Room (the red-curtained strip club at the corner of Stanton and Orchard), of all places, and if you’re planning on going you should get there early: these shows are likely to sell out. After fifteen years in major label limbo, their long-awaited second album, Happy, has been released by RIOR on both vinyl and the usual digital formats. Brilliantly produced by noiserock maven and noted archivist Don Fleming, the album is a lot heavier than you might expect after hearing Too Many Creeps. For anyone lucky enough to have seen the band at, say, Brownies, around the time it was recorded and wondered when we might get a chance to hear studio versions of these songs, it’s a special treat.

It opens with the slow burn of Heart Attack, Pat Place’s guitar resonant and grim, then delivering a mean, minimalist metallic menace, Cynthia Sley’s vocals channeling her usual visceral unease. The second track, Slap, raises the menace factor, setting eerie minor-key janglerock over drummer Dee Pop’s suspenseful groove: “Could you slap me real hard, could you wake me up?” Sley asks plaintively.

Trip turns on a dime from a catchy two-chord funk vamp to snotty, straight-up rock. Nails reverts to the roaring, multitracked blue-flame ambience of the opening cut – what’s cool about this album is that as much as Place does the noisy/atonal thing more succinctly than just about anybody, here she gets to fill out the sound with a lush roar that she doesn’t often get the chance to create onstage.

The hypnotic, echoey instrumental Chinese Afro sets crashing percussion over the tiptoeing bass of Julia Murphy (who by that time had replaced Laura Kennedy in the group, and has since left). It makes a good segue with Pretty Thing, which  takes the atmospherics up a notch for an unexpectedly artsy, Velvets-tinged ambience.

At this point, the album hits a peak and stays there, beginning with You Don’t Know Me, a beefed-up take on the band’s abrasive early-period sound, Place firing off wickedly atonal swirls and macabre chromatics over a tight funk beat. Buckets of Blood works a slow, lingering, distantly menacing 80s jangle, Murphy hovering just underneath, Sley’s angst-ridden vocals overhead. Unlike what the title might suggest, Motorhead keeps the tensely simmering menace going.

Theremin (which actually has a theremin on it) builds from surreal no wave funk to a snarling groove that reminds of what Thalia Zedek and Come were doing around the time this album was made. Likewise, Ocean follows an arc from a hypnotic but harsh backdrop to a paint-peeling guitar workout. The album ends with Swamp Song, an off-kilter riff-rocker that evokes the Chrome Cranks, but funkier, a reminder that the Tetras were constantly evolving and keeping up with what was happening around them in New York. Kind of sad and funny that an album made in 1998 would be one of the best released in 2013 so far.

Another Year, Another Beautifully Brooding Album by Low

Low’s new album The Invisible Way is out today, March 20 and they’re celebrating the release with a show at the Ethical Culture Society, 2 E 64th St. off Central Park West. Indie classical ensemble ACME opens the night at 8 PM and then will join the band later during their set for an enhanced evening of art-rock. Tickets are $30 and still available as of today at Ticketmaster outlets (no service charge applies) as well as at the door.

The new record is fantastic. It’s hard to believe that Alan Sparhawk, Mimi Parker and Steve Garrington have been doing this for twenty years. For starters, there are a couple of free downloads up at Soundcloud, both sung by Parker: the haunting, plaintive, hypnotic If I Could Just Make It Stop, and So Blue, fueled by gorgeous Jayhawks-ish harmonies and a desperation that goes beyond even seeking revenge.

The rest of the album is just as good, cynical and catchy as you would expect. The opening track, Plastic Cup,with its spare, low-register piano and Beatlesque keys (is that a mellotron?) mocks trust-funded junkies while pondering how history will judge an archaeological artifact once used for pee samples. They keep a somber trip-hop groove going with Amethyst – which may have a snidely metaphorical political message – and then go deep into slow, Beatlesque gospel with Holy Ghost.

They keep the slow gospel thump going with the tersely bitter Waiting and follow that with Clarence White, an apprehensive anthem for a possibly would-be killer inspired by a Charlton Heston movie, building to a sudden, creepy crescendo. Four Score is a paradoxical study in accumulation that adds up to nothing; Mother is a ghoulish and understatedly vindictive elegy. The album’s longest track, On My Own has an unexpectedly savage guitar solo that starts out like the Melvins but quickly goes in a vintage Lou Reed/Velvets direction. The album ends with To Our Knees, its stately, echoey sonics contrasting with Parker’s anguished trail of metaphors through the wilderness. All the way through the album, there’s everything we’ve come to expect from this band: beautiful vocal harmonies, smartly crafted lyrics, sardonic anger, dark humor and singalong tunesmithing, one of the best two or three albums of 2013 so far. Head over to Soundcloud for a sample or two; with the string section, the show should be killer.

Another Day, Another GBV Single

If you’re a legacy rock act, how can you make money off recordings in the internet age? With vinyl, for starters. Everybody talks about how Robert Pollard has been on a tear writing-wise in the last year, but his bandmate Tobin Sprout hasn’t been far behind. The previous Guided by Voices single Islands (She Talks in Rainbows), which came out in a limited-edition thousand-copy vinyl pressing this past March 5, is a Sprout tune, slowly coalescing into a lushly delicious, hazy mix of psychedelic jangle and clang. And they’ve got another one, by Pollard, titled Trash Can Full of Nails, coming out on the 19th. That one’s a lumbering, staggerstepping anthem with typical, surreal lyrical wit. Both singles have multiple B-sides (C-sides?) penned by both songwriters, presumably all from the sardonically titled forthcoming album English Little League. If everything on it is as fully realized as the singles have been so far, it’s going to be special.

A Catchy Update on Classic Dreampop with Butter the Children

Today’s free download is from Brooklyn guitar band Butter the Children. Cool name for a band, huh? Two perfectly innocuous ingredients combine for a creepy command. They have an interesting sound, one that looks back to the 80s, catchy but nebulous, part dreampop, part retro new wave.Their debut album came out last year and is up at their Bandcamp page as a free download.

With a bent-note scream or two, the retro Motown fuzz bass comes in, and then they’re off into Robyn Byrd with an insistent downstroke pulse. Frontwomoan Inna Mkrtycheva’s vocals are half-buried in the mix so it’s hard to tell how this relates to the legendary host of what all New Yorkers back in the 80s knew as “the naked talk show” on public access tv.

Earthbound puts a dreampop swirl on a very, very, very familiar mid-80s Cure riff with some attactively weird, tone-warping guitar EFX. Flesh Wound in Ithaca blends Guided by Voices catchiness via the bassline against a wall of shoegaze guitar opaqueness. Vermin $upreme kicks off with a stomping backbeat and a sly Stones allusion but quickly goes in more of a vintage Sonic Youth direction complete with cool bass chords.

Prognosis Negative is  over in less than two minutes, something this band does a lot: nothing here makes it to the three-minute mark. This one’s a chirpy pop song with a lead guitar line echoing PiL and vocals higher in the mix: “A temporary friend or a born-again, I should have known by now,” Mkrtycheva laments with a cold bitterness. Rochelle Rochelle takes Johnny Marr jangle and sandpapers it roughly, while Lupus, the final track adds layers of cool guitar sonics as it builds over another one of those fast downstroke beats. Butter the Children are even better live than on record; they’re at Big Snow Buffalo Lodge in Bushwick tonight, Saturday, March 9 at 11ish.

Another Day, Another New Guided by Voices Single

OK, the new Guided by Voices single, Flunky Minnows b/w Jellypop Smiles (limited edition vinyl, 1000 copies) is out today. Here’s the press release: “The first single from the upcoming Guided By Voices long-player English Little League is a classic Pollard-penned power-pop gem, as catchy as anything in the band’s canon, backed with ‘Jellypop Smiles,’ a reverb-heavy acoustic number with out-of-tune recorder that wouldn’t sound out of place next to Bee Thousand’s “Gold Heart Mountaintop Queen Directory.”

Should we believe this, or trash it? Hmmm…the A-side is catchy to the point of cruelty, staggering along the fine line between purist powerpop and exasperating refusenik indie nebulosity. In other words, classic GBV. The B-side sounds like something left over from one of the Pollard solo albums – is there anybody on it but him? It’s not bad, and it’s over sooner than it could be. Again: classic GBV. Bring on the album, dammit!

Intense Pandemonium at the Brooklyn What’s Album Release Show

The crowd at the Brooklyn What’s album release show Saturday night was a lot more physical than you typically see at concerts by bands this smart. On one hand, that was to be expected, considering how many bodies were crammed into Public Assembly, a smaller space than these guys are used to playing. On the other hand, people dance to this band: within seconds of frontman Jamie Frey’s rapidfire lyrical assault on the opening song, Catastrophe Kids – which ironically is a diatribe about the too-cool-for-school crowd who’re too scared to move a muscle at shows – a friendly moshpit formed in front of the stage. Meanwhile, bumping and bouncing was happening pretty much everywhere else. By the end of their set, what looked like half the audience had gathered onstage with the band for a delirious singalong on the irrepressible, defiant outsider anthem We Are the Only Ones  In an era when the too-cool-for-school bands get so much undeserved attention, it felt good just to be part of this big messy crowd, feeding off the explosive energy of the tuneful nonconformists onstage.

In the three years since their 2009 debut The Brooklyn What for Borough President, this band has gotten incredibly tight. While it never really makes sense to say that one great band is necessarily any “better” than another, there is definitely no better band in New York right now than the Brooklyn What. Jesse Katz was a decent rock drummer when they first started; he’s a great one now. All the band’s constant gigging has paid off, especially for their two powerful, individualistic lead guitarists, Evan O’Donnell and John-Severin Napolillo, who teamed up for a gale-force assault that was as intricately tuneful as it was loud (and it wasn’t always loud). They hit a high point on a long, pyrotechnic duel midway through Punk Rock Loneliness, a cruelly amusing look at gentrification and its destructive effects on music and New York neighborhoods. They did the same thing on the encore, the Stooges’ I Wanna Be Your Dog, where Frey left no doubt what that song was all about, Napolillo dodging stagedivers as O’Donnell hung on the sideline, nonchalantly firing off searing, Ron Asheton-worthy bluesmetal leads.

In between, the dynamics shifted artfully from pummeling punk rock to slower, more pensive material, Frey’s goodnatured come-on croon leading the band upward on the impressively jazzy Winter Song and then the ridiculously catchy Late Night Travelers, an artsy anthem written by the band’s late guitarist Billy Cohen. Caught at a rare loss for words, obviously still hurting from the loss of his bandmate, Frey managed to explain that this band was originally a six-piece outfit and that Cohen – who if he was still alive would probably be doing film scores, and the indie classical music he had such an affinity for, in addition to this project – would be proud as hell. There’s no doubt that’s true. Then the band launched into Cohen’s wickedly shapeshifting, theatrically surreal Hot Wine, their new album’s title track.

Coy, sarcastic soul and doo-wop-influenced punk matched up against searing postpunk like the ridiculously catchy singalong In the Basement – an anthem for disheartened outsiders everywhere, not to mention this year’s Mets team. The biggest crowd-pleaser could have been a cover of Gimme Shelter that might have been even better than the original, bassist Doug Carey taking Bill Wyman’s growling lines and somehow making them even more menacing, the two guitars tuned down to perfectly recreate Keith Richards’ otherworldly eeriness, Saruh Lacoff (of side project John-Severin & the Quiet 1s) taking Merry Clayton’s backing vocal up several notches.

The Brooklyn What also happen to be a magnet for other good bands. Opening acts are usually hit-and-miss, but this lineup was strong. Butter the Children got the night off to a good start with their swirling vintage MBV/early Lush dreampop jangle and clang, their guitarist and bassist exchanging axes and playing equally tunefully on each instrument as frontwoman Inna Mkrtycheva sang uneasily about Casey Anthony and similar tension-inducing situations. Osekre & the Lucky Bastards followed with a tuneful, catchy set that mixed oldschool soul and Afrobeat. After that, Persian-American rockers the Yellow Dogs, who began with an artsy, biting Rickenbacker guitar anthem, wasted no time hitting a slinky, equally anthemic, swaying funk/disco groove. The Brooklyn What are at the Lab, 224 Wyckoff Ave in  Bushwick on Feb 22, L/M to Myrtle-Wyckoff.