Tift Merritt and Simone Dinnerstein Bring Down the Lights

Tift Merritt, southern intellectual, put out what was arguably the most delicious guitar album of 2012 with a searing rock band including both Marc Ribot and Eric Heywood. Having convinced the eminent noir guitarist to play country and the country pedal steel virtuoso to play noir, Merritt has taken an abrupt detour into moody art-rock with her new album Night with pianist Simone Dinnerstein. As the title implies, it’s a nocturnal song cycle. As a singer, Merritt has never stopped growing: here she reminds that she’s just as competent at jazz as Patsy Cline probably would have been had she lived. As a songwriter, Merritt doesn’t appear to have any ceiling, leaping effortlessly from oldschool C&W to hypnotic chamber pop. Although she made her first big splash playing Bach – her recording of the Goldberg Variations topped the classical charts a few years back – Dinnerstein’s close attention to emotional detail makes her a perfect bandmate for Merritt in more Romantic moments such as these. The whole album is streaming at NPR (don’t forget to mute the sound for about the first thirty seconds of ads). They’re playing Merkin Concert Hall tonight, March 21 at 7:30 PM; as of this writing, tickets are still available.

Only in Songs sets the tone, a understatedly aching, terse, almost skeletal waltz, voicing a longing for a place “where people believe things can really change” and all the implications of that line. Merritt gives it the same kind of understated, crepuscular tension that Sam Llanas often evokes in more subdued moments. From there Dinnerstein takes over and they segue into an English translation of Schubert’s Night & Dreams, marvelously lowlit by Merritt’s harmonica in the background. Don’t Explain reaches beyond Billie Holiday wee-hours mist to a vivid ache as Dinnerstein alternates between spacious block chords and rapidfire, precise ripples – third-stream vocal jazz has seldom been so affecting.

The two reinvent Dido’s Lament, a Henry Purcell theme, with a plaintively neoromantic gleam. I Shall Weep at Night, a co-write with jazz piano icon Brad Mehldau, is a showcase for Dinnerstein’s ability to channel any emotion she wants, moving from creepily hypnotic to a big reflecting-pool crescendo and then back.

Merritt blends both starkness and bluesy sophistication into a solo guitar version of Wayfaring Stranger. Dinnerstein anchors her arrangement of a Bach E Minor Prelude (Bach wrote more than one: this one’s numbered BWV 855a) with an understatedly jazzy touch in the lefthand. The acoustic version of Merritt’s Still Not Home here strips it to a lingering, bluegrass-tinged, restless unease. The duo follow a hypnotically dreamy take of the old folk song I WiIl Give My Love an Apple with Merritt’s Colors, which with its guarded optimism and nuanced vocals against minimalistically resonant piano has the feel of an early Dolly Parton classic.

Cohen Variations, a series of solo piano variations on Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne by Daniel Felsenfeld, builds to an austere, wary, indie classical edge. It’ll resonate with anyone who’s ever sat down at the piano to play  Hallelujah and thought, “hmm, let’s make this really dark.”

The two elevate the title track, a Patti Griffin tune, to an elegant majesty. With Merritt’s nuanced, smoky vocals, Feel of the World is an uneasy, gospel-tinged reflection on triumph and joy that without a firm grip would be lost forever. The only time the record falls flat is at the end, with a brave but misguided attempt to redeem a cloying easy-listening radio ditty. Otherwise, chamber pop doesn’t get any better than this.

A Chilling, Cinematic Classic from Ward White

Ward White’s new album, Bob, is a suspense film waiting to happen. White has made a career out of slashingly literary janglerock and chamber pop for over a decade: to call this surreallistically menacing concept album his best yet would be a disservice to brilliant earlier releases like 2007′s Maybe but Probably Not and his 2009 collaboration with keyboard maven Joe McGinty, McGinty and White Sing Selections from the McGinty and White Songbook. This new one is his most literary yet, a nonlinear narrative that may be about drug trafficking, white-collar crime, several murders and the apocalypse, a combination of all or some of the above. It is an engrossing story that is impossible to turn away from, best appreciated not as individual songs but as an integral suite.

Musically, it’s White at the top of his game as a satirist. While many of the songs are attractive, Bacharach-esque bossa-pop spiced with Jeff Hermanson’s tasteful trumpet, others veer closer to parody, toying with vaguely bluesy 70s radio pop and 80s power balladry. White’s a great guitarist and adds a handful of long-winded solos that hint at raw cheese everywhere. Yet he teases the listener, only crossing that line when it’s time to go straight for bigtime laughs, as in a ridiculously funny, cruel vocoder interlude midway through that’s straight out of Midnight Starr circa 1983.

Likewise, White’s storyline is a nonstop barrage of calamities including but not limited to a plane crash, a disastrous pandemic, possible starvation, cannibalism, a dirty deal gone drastically awry and a potential murder-suicide, its doomed arc interrupted by what seem to be flashbacks. There are at least two voices here, possibly more, possibly different sides of a single personality. There’s a bossy corporate type whose clueless sense of entitlement White absolutely nails – one moment he’s telling somebody to stay the hell away from his woodpile, the next he’s cajoling that same person to put down the gun. There’s also a guy whose druggie wife is divorcing him but seems to be planning a far quicker and more conclusive final break. The Bob in the title is addressed several times – he may be the only survivor here – and is referenced throughout, bitterly, but never speaks for himself. The author whose work this most closely evokes is Russell Banks.

White gets the story rolling with a bang: “I’ve suffered too much to give in to gravity, I hit the ground; I saw my chance to escape so I did… Bob, you’re an expert, survive on my blood as long as you can and I’ll see you in hell,” instructs the bossy type over sarcastically attractive. anthemic 6/8 rock, White reaching falsetto altitude, part Jeff Buckley, part Broadwayesque sneer. Even as the end seems to be closing in, this is as close to human as the character gets. White ups the Broadway factor with some impressively nimble vocal acrobatics on the first of what seem to be the flashbacks, the trumpet in tandem with McGinty’s keys wry and deadpan behind the marriage-gone-to-hell tableau.

Not all the music here is satirical. While none of the songs follow a standard verse/chorus format, often shifting from gentle pop to hard-edged rock to ornate chamber pop like jump cuts, White occasionally drops the veil and goes straight for menace. That’s how the third track begins, as does the final interlude, its desperate protagonist encouraging an unnamed conspirator to join him at his little hideout cabin: they can just disappear and leave a note on the front door for Bob, he suggests.

White’s laserlike sense for the mot juste is in full effect, as usual: “You won’t feel the impact, so savor the fall,” the wronged husband tells his soon-to-be-ex. “Fences make good neighbors, and there’s no fence that I can’t crawl through,” the character guarding his precious woodpile tells the man with the gun. The tension is relentless, “Waiting in the cupboard, waiting by the bedside, waiting on the street where I walk, waiting in the headlines, waiting in the subtext, waiting in the things that I can’t talk about,” wails the bossy type.

As the story reaches fever pitch, memories of Hollywood shenanigans sit side by side with the conspirators holed up and running low on pretty much everything. There is at least one death, possibly a murder, possibly more. As the narrative peaks, hallucinations set in and eventually oscillate out sarcastically, possibly an allusions to the plane crash – or whatever it may be, metaphorical or not – that opens the album. Years from now, assuming that pause and rewind still exist, listeners will be pausing and rewinding this over and over to figure out who dies, who survives here and what the hell White is talking about the rest of the time. In the meantime, you have the opportunity to do the same with a genuine one-of-a-kind classic. Look for an album release show sometime later in the winter or early spring.

Haunting Lyrical Intensity from Jodi Shaw

Songwriter Jodi Shaw’s chamber-pop song cycle, In Waterland, is being re-released mid-month. By “song cycle,” that is to say theme and variations; forty years ago, people used to call these things concept albums. The obvious comparison is Aimee Mann, both in terms of brooding, wounded persona and purist, artsy pop sensibility. Shaw plays the album release show on May 15 at 7 PM at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe: if smart, biting, literate lyrics, catchy tunes and unselfconsciously attractive vocals are your thing, you should go see her.

The arrangements manage to be stately and often majestic yet very simple, just Shaw’s piano and nuanced vocals along with terse string arrangements, shimmering guitar atmospherics and occasional low-key rhythm. Swimming is the central motif here, and it’s traumatic. It’s not known whether Shaw – pictured in a bathing cap, in water up to her neck on the album cover – is the strong but fading, emotionally depleted swimmer in the album’s harrowing title track, or whether she has other feelings for the water. That’s a major part of the album’s appeal.

The opening cut, simply titled Swim, sets the tone, the blithe bounce of the melody ultimately unable to conceal the hopelessness of the lyric, sharks circling as a “sound and steady ship” departs, promising to return someday to rescue the woman in the water. Cruelly surreal and evocative, The Witch (not the Sonics song, or the one by Donovan for that matter) pictures a former beauty all alone and facing a hostile, clueless crowd of conformists who’d gladly burn her as their forefathers would have done three hundred years ago. Jack and Jill takes a hypnotic post-Velvets melody and spices it up with piano and some watery tremolo guitar: Shaw’s perplexed narrator can’t figure out why the guy let go of the girl’s hand after the two had successfully made it down the hill.

The torchy Mystery of Love comes as a surprise, with its jaunty gypsy/cabaret vibe and a lyric that starts out seductive and turns unexpectedly menacing. The downward trajectory picks up steam with the swinging, bucolic To the Country (We Go), a late 60s-style psychedelic pop number that again shifts from blithe to bleak: “A soft rain falls on my blouse, and now there is no doubt I see Gallows Hill in that house,” Shaw announces quietly as ebow guitar oscillates hypnotically behind her. This Balloon (Ode to Zvezdochka) intermingles images of planes and trains with an exasperated anger over lush minor-key orchestration: it’s both the most classically-oriented and Aimee Mann-esque cut here. Then all the foreshadowing explodes with the kiss-off anthem Fortunate Prince, a violent tale cached in an elegant arrangement. After the bloodshed runs its course, the narrator muses on what she might say if and when she reaches the afterlife: “There was something exciting about him when he was alive.” And then despair settles in with the understated but towering intensity of the title track.

Hell’s Bells – not the song you’re thinking of – shifts from a precise tiptoeing hip-hop beat to a lush sway, a bitter chronicle of failure with neatly intricate layers of twin vocals a la David J’s Stop This City as it winds out. But as the album comes full circle, she’s ready for the breakup guy, and the deadpan sarcasm is deadly. The album’s concluding cut is a somewhat more brisk solo piano version of the title track, which is just as good as the studio take. It’s a quiet, relentlessly intense masterpiece. The audience for this is potentially vast: any morose indie film whose music director might be contemplating something by Aimee Mann, or for that matter Feist or Neko Case, also ought to have Jodi Shaw as part of the soundtrack.

Dylan Connor Releases a Catchy, Hard-Hitting New Political Pop Album

The cover shot of Dylan Connor’s new album Primitive Times shows a carful of monkeys with assault rifles. He dedicates it to Syrian freedom fighters killed in the ongoing revolution there. Which makes sense: Connor has a broader worldview than most songwriters. He’s got an easy way with a pop hook and can be a ferociously incisive wordsmith: a lot of these songs scream out for the replay button. Connor plays most of the instruments here – guitars, bass and keys – alongside Merritt Jacob’s tasteful lead guitar and Joe Izzo’s drums. His surprisingly wide-ranging vocals are nonchalant, unaffected and on-key, qualities that used to be a requirement but these days are a welcome exception to the rule.

The title track opens. It’s catchy, backbeat-driven 80s new wave pop with tersely resonant, bluesy lead guitar, layers of keys and what sounds like a drum machine:

Secret prisons for nameless crimes
Faceless enemies serving time
King doesn’t care what his people say
Great floods wash their homes away…
Countless languages, borderlines
It doesn’t take a genius to read the signs
In high rise buildings where cash is king
Corporate crooks all dance and sing
In the evolution of the modern mind…

Tattoo on Your Bones is an anthem that evokes a more lo-key Midnight Oil, a third world scenario that could be the first world someday soon:

Dry river soaked in rum
Drunk policemen
Stationed anywhere
Hopeless in the
Prayer-filled air
No buyers
When the power’s down
Dead heat hangs
His hat on the town

The poppiest of the A-list songs here, Pressure Point works a bit of a funk groove with jazzy chords and another lyrical bullseye:

You know that a watched pot never boils
Get to the point
The snake lashes out and then recoils
You thought that you could save your own ass
But all the pews are filled for midnight mass
And the prayer candles glow
Dogs play in the snow
And a voice is telling you to go

Not everything here is as lyrically oriented. A couple of tracks reach for a hazily apprehensive, distantly Beatlesque, Elliott Smith-style janglerock vibe; another is a Springsteenish plea to a girl to stay in and drink one of the world’s most ghetto beverages; there’s also an anthemic requiem for a powerpop guitarist who “Toured every dive bar on the west coast/His was the sound that cut the most.” And an awful folk-pop ditty that never should have made the cut (memo to Connor: stick with your good stuff, the record execs who might have drooled over that piece of schlock are all unemployed now). The album ends with the brooding, solo acoustic Feza Feza (Arabic for “Help, help!”), which Connor released last year as a fundraising single to help the people of Syria. Fans of literate, relevant tunesmiths who use catchy melodies to get an important message across (Mike Rimbaud, Fred Gillen Jr. and Stephan Said, to name just three) should check this guy out.

Walter Ego Plays the Show of His Life

Dylan said that you can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way. Saturday night at Otto’s guitarist/keyboardist (and frequent bassist) Walter Ego played what could have been the best show of his career, something you might not expect from a guy who was out of music the entire decade of the zeros (then again, if you had to miss a decade, that was the one, at least until 1/20/09). But Dylan didn’t say you couldn’t come back all the way and then some. What was most impressive is that the guy was playing on short notice, pinchhitting for the ailing but now apparently ok LJ Murphy. Murphy left big shoes to fill. Ego (or Walter – he likes to be on first-name terms with everybody) delivered in the clutch, more of a Rusty Staub blast than a Lenny Harris bloop (deliberate gratuitous Mets reference: Walter knows who they are).

Maybe not so ironically, the night’s most powerful moment was a cover of a Murphy song, Sunday’s Assassin (which by all accounts Murphy has played live once in the past ten years). Walter played this one on piano, giving it extra low-register grandeur, in the process helping to humanize the guy who kills not only Sundays but people, all the while vaccillating between the desire for tabloid notoriety and the reality of being so depressed that he can’t get out of bed. “Only fools keep trying to forget the price on my head,” he boasts one minute, the next dreading the moment when the cops scrape under his nails for blood and hair.

Walter usually has props and skits and jokes galore, but this time, maybe because it was short notice, it was all about the songs. The bouncy Adventures of Ethical Man chronicled a superhero who wears shirts emblazoned with a big letter “E,” which Cynical Man would claim as a tax writeoff, while Practical Man would use them to wash his car. The funniest of all the songs was The No Trouble Blues, about a guy who’s so up it looks like down to him: whiskey never tempts him, and when he gets to the crossroads, the Devil runs off with his tail between his legs. Then there was the cynical, cruelly metaphorical A Million Monkeys, and the sarcastic Don’t Take Advice from Me.

There were also a lot of pensive moments: a Ray Davies-esque number told from the point of view of a mouse whose girlfriend dies in a trap: “Pain is excruciating when you watch someone you love cry,” Walter crooned ominously. A lush, Lennonesque piano ballad apprehensively affirmed how anyone can have a big life instead of a little one (or not – the ambiguity was chilling). Likewise, the ridiculously catchy Satellite coldly and subtly chronicled the kind of person who enjoys balancing (and manipulating) everything he touches. And the best of the originals might have been I Am the Glass, this decade’s equivalent of the Room’s classic Jackpot Jack, a brooding, stately piano anthem full of shards and shattered symbols. Walter Ego will probably be back at Otto’s sometime next month, watch this space.

Free Download: A Typically Entertaining Dan Bryk Show from 2009

Today’s free download is a fantastic live album. Dan Bryk’s Live at Bread & Circus Toronto is a solo performance from around 2009. Bryk’s unaffectedly clear voice soars and whispers and his piano playing is solid, but ultimately it’s the songs that knock you out. When it comes to purist pop tunesmithing, this guy is unsurpassed: Elvis Costello, Aimee Mann and Ward White could pick up a trick or two from him. Bryk’s 2009 record Pop Psychology, a corrosive concept album about the music business and people dumb enough to get involved in it, is a genuine classic. This one is more lighthearted, but it’ll give you a good idea of what this guy is all about: sardonic, self-effacing, unable to resist a good pun or a good joke, and a great storyteller. This is obviously a room recording, with sonics on the boomy side and plenty of crowd noise – Bryk takes a pause or two to get them to shut up, then gently assails one particularly chatty group. But by the encore he’s won everybody over, all the girls singing along with the chorus on Discount Store, a wickedly catchy, understatedly biting song that perfectly captures the cruel ironies of the current depression.

“If misery loves company, where the fuck did everybody go?” he asks with his first song; at the end of the set, the crowd wants a happy one, so he gives them the self-explanatory Just Give Up. The version of She Just Wants to Get High rhymes “Regent Park”(a Toronto slum) with “Maker’s Mark,” its harried narrator trying to save a girl from herself as much as from the cops: “Officer, I don’t have the money for this kind of weed.” He serves up a bouncy tribute to chunky girls – Bryk is a big guy himself – and then to a video game programmer he idolized as a teenager, imagining him living it up in California, “doing lines off the sand.” The punchline, where the programmer calls and leaves Bryk a message, is too good to give away. The strongest song here is The Next Best Thing, one of only two tracks from Pop Psychology to make it onto this one, and it packs a wallop. It’s as self-critical as it is angry at execs who won’t go near artists who aren’t ”cute and quirky and complacent:”

They wonder why I get so nervous
Airing my laundry to the weak and curious
I know it’s really not a public service
Supplying the freakshow to the circus

When you download this, you’ll see that Pop Psychology and Bryk’s 2007 Discount Store ep are still available, both hints worth picking up on.

More from Mike Rimbaud

At the risk of Mike Rimbaud overkill here – in case you’ve been paying attention, his two most recent albums are amazing – here’s his new video for You Make Love Like You Make War, a delicious blast of southwestern gothic from his Funeral Lover album. This guy just doesn’t stop.

Mike Rimbaud’s Coney Island Wave Is a Riptide

Any conversation about great lyrical songwriters since the punk era needs to include Elvis Costello and Graham Parker…and Mike Rimbaud. Rimbaud is younger than they are; stylistically, he’s closer to Parker, both in terms of surreal, aphoristic, dark lyrics and excellent guitarslinging. In fact, Rimbaud’s the best guitarist of all three, equally interesting whether he’s working an oldschool soul vamp, playing twangy noir surf licks, angry punk rock or glimmering, nocturnal Stonesy lines. His most recent album of originals, Coney Island Wave is one of the great New York rock records. It’s both a celebration of this city as well as an often savagely spot-on look at the state of the world, 2012, set to catchy, usually upbeat tunes that run the gamut from vintage new wave, to creepy garage rock, to oldschool soul. It’s the rare album where the melodies are as good as the lyrics, which are just plain kick-ass pretty much all the way through, Rimbaud handling all the guitars, keys and occasional harmonica and backed by a no-nonsense rhythm section of Chris Fletcher on bass, Andrea Pennisi on percussion and Kevin Tooley on drums.

The first track is Burning the Night Out Early, set in a vivid late night Coney Island of the mind where “it’s getting early”- that kind of night. If you’ve experienced one of those there, this will resonate mightily. Rimbaud follows  it with Dance with a Mermaid, a noir garage rock song packed with loaded metaphors, the mermaid dancing on the Titanic since the ocean’s full of oil and global warming has brought the mix to a boil, so to speak.

With its clever Like a Rolling Stone allusions, Don’t You Love This City keeps the sarcasm at boiling point. The next track, Everybody Needs a Daddy sounds suspiciously sarcastic as well, especially with the Simpsons and Darth Vader references – could it be a jab at the Bloomberg nanny-state patriarchy?

Got to Sell Yourself is just plain great, an anthem for anyone who’d like to take the world’s oldest profession to the next level: “You’re a failure when nobody’s buying, you’re something else when you’re sold out; you’re a loser ’cause you only own yourself,” Rimbaud snarls over the song’s casually biting, insistent hook. Here Comes the Subway Sun could be a tribute to the joys of tripping on the train; Mamma Say Something Nice follows in a brooding blue-eyed soul vein, like something Parker might have done in the late 70s.

The album really heats up at this point. Puppet Man, with its soul organ groove, is packed with more politically-charged sarcasm. “Like Pinocchio, go to Tokyo,” is one recurrent motif: a Fukushima reference, maybe? The album’s funniest, and probably most timely track is Put Your Facebook on the Shelf:

Don’t let it get in your head
Slavery’s not dead…
Your password’s not a secret
Eyes wander on the page
Your tongue hangs out like a hungry dog
How many friends can you count on?

Rimbaud rasps over a catchy groove that’s part Elvis C., part Bob Marley.

Saving to Go Bankrupt – an anthem for the Occupy movement, with some very insightful and useful background from Rimbaud here – offers both a succinct condemnation of the one percenters’ bankrupt system as well as hope for the future: “Wake up from your American dream!” Rimbaud follows that one with Tears for the Rich and Famous, a searing, guitar-fueled condemnation of celebrity shallowness capped by a sweet, vengefully swinging guitar solo. The last track, Unicorn, is the most retro 80s of all the songs here – with its goth tinges and synthesizer, it sounds like an outtake from a previous session that might have been tacked on here to end the album on a more upbeat note. Rimbaud also has a killer new album just out, Can’t Judge a Song by Its Cover, which imaginatively reinvents an impressively diverse mix of classics and standards by Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Dave Brubeck, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Marley, Tom Jobim, the Beatles and others. That’s up next here. Rimbaud is also featured on the upcoming Occupy This Album anthology, a benefit record for the Occupy Movement featuring some obvious suspects along with several refreshingly not-so-obvious ones including Immortal Technique,Willie Nelson and Toots & the Maytals plus New York talents My Pet Dragon, Taj Weekes & Adowa and Stephan Said.

Two Drummers Make a Difference

Drummers do all the heavy lifting and usually get none of the credit, so this is to give credit where it’s due. As dynamic as Jenifer Jackson and LJ Murphy are, each got to take their shows this past weekend to the next level because of who was behind the drum kit. Each show was intense, in a completely different way: Jackson dreamy and hypnotic, Murphy careening through one catchy, blues-infused rock song after another. At Rockwood Music Hall Friday night, Jackson was unselfconsciously blissed out to be playing with most of the New York crew she’d made her 2007 Outskirts of a Giant Town album with: Matt Kanelos on piano, Elysian Fields’ Oren Bloedow on guitar, Jason Mercer on bass and Greg Wieczorek behind the kit. The original Rockwood space is small, and some drummers just don’t get it, hammering away like John Bonham. From his first suspenseful brushstroke, Wieczorek set a mood and never wavered, sometimes pushing Jackson’s often inscrutable grooves with just a shaker and a muted kick beat. And when a chorus would rise to a swell, he’d let the band take it. He was just there enough to swing the beat, almost imperceptibly shifting it into bossa nova, or adding quiet, counterintuitive cymbal splashes or hi-hat accents: had he not been there, it wouldn’t have been the same.

The rest of the band seemed to be just as blissed out to be playing with Jackson. Mercer’s moody, sepulchral solo on the night’s opening song, Maybe, set the tone right off the bat; Kanelos’ tersely majestic chords gave a mesmerizing glimmer to I Remember – done here as part Beatles, part countrypolitan – and a long, psychedelic take of The War Is Done. Jackson has been a great rock singer for a long time: she’s a great jazz singer now. The way she suddenly leaped off the page impatiently as the chorus rose on the brisk bossa shuffle Suddenly Unexpectedly, and the way she spun clever little circles around the ridiculously catchy chorus of Bring on the Night was impossible to turn away from. She ended the show with a mostly solo acoustic version of The Beauty in the Emptying, a wistful country ballad on the surface, underneath a characteristically resilient, tenacious resolution not to concede defeat. From a bon vivant like Jackson, it was a logical way to end this particular reunion with a crowd of longtime fans who were just as psyched to see her as she seemed to be to see them.

Saturday at Otto’s, Murphy went in a completely diffferent direction: this time it was drummer Andrew Guterman who kept the machine from jumping the rails. It’s not like Murphy had been freed from being behind a guitar – it’s an important part of his stage act – but on account of a recent hand injury, he had to stick to just vocals at this show. But instead of doing the crooner set, Murphy pulled out all the stops and all his big rockers, seizing the opportunity to unleash some of his inner James Brown, scatting along with outros, bringing the band almost to a stop in a split second and then back up again. And for what amounted to a pickup band, these guys – Patrick McLellan on piano, Tommy Hoscheid on Les Paul and Nils Sorensen on bass – were amazingly on top of their game. And Guterman kept the energy level going through the roof without drowning out his bandmates, whether elevating the bitter Same Trick beyond mere Stax/Volt homage, or giving the inscrutably caustic Nowhere Now a drive that went over the edge into punk.

Murphy is a 99 percenter to the core, and his lyrics resonated more than ever considering what was happening in Foley Square. Whether snarling about how “crosses and pistols are slung at our hips,” ridiculing the one percenter – an “elegant tormentor stripped of all his polyester” – getting his freak on in a dungeon just a stone’s throw from Wall Street, or warning of the day when “a sermon blares all night from the roof of a radio car,” there was a defiant I-told-you-so in his carnivalesque, blues-drenched vocal assault. The band careened through the afterwork nightmare scenario of Happy Hour with a deliciously sarcastic, blissed-out attack, only to follow with the tense apprehension of Bovine Brothers, a look at the kind of future that the Occupy protestors are also warning us about, where “the hand that you’ve been pumping turns into a handsome snake, with only one regret because he’s running out of bones to break.” After winding up the set with a punishing version of the surreal late-night psychology session Blue Silence and then encoring with an equally raucous Barbed Wire Playpen (the one about the S&M hedge fund guy), the crowd still wanted more. But the excellent Highway Gimps – sort of a cross between Motorhead and My Bloody Valentine – were next on the bill.

It’s Open Season in the Larch Vaults

What if Squeeze, or Elvis Costello, or for that matter, Robyn Hitchcock opened up his vaults and started to give away stuff? That’s what Brooklyn band the Larch – who evoke a lot of all three of those acts – have started doing. There’s a free download of The Larch by the Book ep of songs influenced by literature (Free Kick, on the Bat Boy Signs Up album; Chimera and Red Planet, from the 2008 sci-fi extravaganza Gravity Rocks; and The Long Tail, which is even funnier now than it was when it came out last year on Larix Americana).

There’s more free stuff: the cleverly twisted single Bat Boy Signs Up and its even better b-side, The Fall; The Larch a la Strings, a collection of the band’s adventures in chamber pop; and best of all, the Larix ep, which is three of the best tracks from Larix Americana (With Love from Region One, Strawberry Coast, and Tracking Tina, the Orwellian masterpiece that made at least one top ten list last year.