Red Jacket Mine Takes You Back to 1979

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

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

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

Nashville’s Western Medication: Catchy Postpunk and Dreampop

Western Medication’s new 7″ ep, Painted World, leaves the impression that they’re a British band, right down to the declamatory, half-shouted vocals half-buried in the echoey wall-of-sound guitars. But the band is actually from Nashville. Frontman Justin Landis joins forces here with Adam Moult and Kevin Kilpatrick from noise-punks Bad Cop and Alycia Wahn of Useless Eaters for an original mix of old ideas. They’ve got the snide quirkiness and menacing post Syd Barrett chord changes of early Wire, and also the ringing walls of guitar that defined dreampop bands like My Bloody Valentine and Lush.

The first track, 50 Foot Dive sounds like Wire through the prism of mid-90s Blur, its catchy early 80s vibe fleshed out with plusher sonics, bassline rising over a briskly strolling beat. Track two, Big City sets G-L-O-R-I-A riffage to a hardcore beat and multitracks it into the stratosphere. If Roky Erickson was still alive he’d be into this.

The title track, the album’s longest and most hypnotic song, has the feel of New Order’s Ceremony done as a mashup of Clinic and MBV. It’s bookended by a couple of miniatures, the first with a languid, distantly apprehensive guitar line over a murky drone, the second a funky surf/garage groove with more of those shouted vox. It’s out now on the band’s own Jeffrey Drag Records.

Mike Rimbaud Captures the State of the City

No other songwriter has captured the current climate in New York better than Mike Rimbaud. One powerful influence on Rimbaud’s work, lyrically speaking, is Phil Ochs, (check out the absolutely vindictive version of The Ringing of Revolution from Rimbaud’s 2012 album You Can’t Judge a Song by Its Cover). Rimbaud’s latest album Midnight Rainbow – streaming at his site – is an eclectic, characteristically tuneful, savagely lyrical, cleverly amusing mix of songs that span from straight-up four-on-the-floor rock, to new wave, garage rock, psychedelia and reggae. Rimbaud has listened deeply and widely; his thinly veiled references to other songs, especially from the Rolling Stones, are cruelly spot-on. Rimbaud plays all the guitars as well as banjo, backed by tersely tuneful bassist Chris Fletcher and excellent drummer Kevin Tooley, with occasional keyboards from Marc Billon.

Image by image, Rimbaud portrays a city and a world on the brink, reeling from natural disasters, terminally distracted by the vapidity of status-grubbing and social media, the luxury of the corporate elite juxtaposed against crushing poverty and despair. Ultimately, this album is a call to action and revolution – and also one of the best  of 2013 by a Broadway mile.

The classic cut here is Jackhammer Jones. Over wickedly catchy, psychedelic minor key rock spiced with searing wah solos and guitar sitar – with a nod to the Lovin’ Spoonful – Rimbaud paints an allusive picture of a city being destroyed from within by gentrification:

Turn off your phone, what can you hear, baby?
Call it noise or call me a liar
Ears can bleed and eyes can weep
When you read between the lines

The jauntily swinging title track pictures an unlikely rainbow over the Empire State Building at night – hey, this is the global warming era, stranger things have happened. On Big Bad Bully, as he does on many of the other cuts here, Rimbaud takes aim at a target and riffs surrealistically on it, in this rounding up the Wall Street bulls who “treat everyone like cattle.”

Slow Down to Get Ahead layers clattery percussion over a reggae bassline and builds from there, an anthem for anyone tempted to unplug from the rat race. Rimbaud returns to that idea toward the end of the album with Time Burglar, a rapidfire stream of dissociative, sardonic imagery: “Swing over the Williamsburg Babylon, catching flies in one hand…relax with some hillbilly music, a song from another ice age.”

Sandy Must Be Crazy, a hurricane memoir, builds from dub reggae to roaring Stonesy rock. On one level, Rimbaud’s images capture an unfortunately indelible New York moment, on the other he’s also captured the more disturbing context that rose to the surface in the wake of the storm.

The sarcastically bubbling Teacher’s Got a Bad Mouth takes a counterintuitive look at schoolroom insanity, from the point of view of a teacher struggling to focus the attention of a class lobotomized by Facebook. Rimbaud revisits that theme a little later with the nonchalantly brooding, Indian-flavored Learning More About Less.

Robin Hood in Reverse is a stompingly snide Springsteen-style singalong: “Money talks, money is speech, this is a protest song and talk is cheap,” Rimbaud intones breathily. The metaphorically-charged Dark Money Can’t Buy Her Kisses grows from mysterious psych-pop to a brooding 70s soul sway. The album ends with a long, scruffy cover of the Beatles’ Baby, You’re Rich Man, bringing it full circle. Britain in 1977 had the Clash: New York in 2013 has Mike Rimbaud. That’s a start. Now bring on the revolution.

Changing Modes: Hard to Figure Out, Easy to Sing Along to at Spike Hill

Isn’t it a pain to have to choose between two equally tantalizing shows? Saturday night, it was impossible to resist the temptation to sneak away from the Brooklyn What’s album release gig at Public Assembly while the opening acts played, since Changing Modes were on the bill around the corner at Spike Hill. With two keyboardists, guitar, bass and drums, their music is complex yet manages to be extremely catchy. Frontwomen Wendy Griffiths and Grace Pulliam both play synthesizers, and while they aren’t above hamming it up once in awhile with a woozy oscillation or a fat phony horn patch, their sound isn’t cheesy. As much as what they do has a very 80s feel, their sense of that decade’s sounds zeros in toward dark, often menacing new wave rather than cliched radio pop.

To say that this band has an edge is an understatement  Throughout the set, the two women worked an inscrutably alluring, sometimes dangerous vein. Pulliam swayed with just the hint of what might have been a sadistic smile as she fine-tuned her pedalboard for minute orchestral adjustments, while Griffiths pogoed behind her keys, at one point emerging to put her foot up on a monitor and fix a thousand-yard stare on the crowd. But she also has a quirky sense of humor: at one point, she let out a random “whoop” seemingly just for the hell of it, later on putting on a pair of red shades with blinking lights, only to discard them seconds afterward. Meanwhile, Yuzuru Sadashige played nimble basslines for a couple of songs before switching to guitar, at which point a bassist came onstage to team up with their tight drummer Timur Yusef.

Unexpected tempo changes, loud/soft dynamic shifts and unpredictable song structures met their match in singalong choruses, Griffiths and Pulliam trading off verses or individual lines when they weren’t blending their voices for some soaring harmonies. Pulliam sang Down to You, a standout track from the band’s latest album In Flight, with a cold vengefulness, Sashadige cutting loose with a searing bluesiness as he would do all night, Griffiths adding a terse classically-tinged piano solo.  A wickedly catchy, insistent new song, Jeanine (sp?) might have been about a cat, or someone with feline tendencies. The album version of Ghost in the Backseat is a dead ringer for early X, but this time out they slowed it down, making it more gothic than punk, at least until another blazing Sashadige guitar solo.

They followed a burning, ominously riff-driven cover of Jamiroquai’s Deeper Underground with a slow, creepy, watery art-rock anthem, an apprehensive new wave tune with an Afrobeat-flavored guitar intro and then a creepy version of Here, the darkly unpredictable title track from their 2010 album. They closed with what might have been a cover, Griffiths and Pulliam harmonizing energetically over a catchy new wave beat. Although the turnout was good and the crowd was into the show, a band this smart and original deserves more exposure. Somewhere there has to be an indie suspense movie that would be a perfect match for Changing Modes’ eclectic, moody yet upbeat songs.

Strange, Clever French Pop from Benjamin Schoos

In French rock, the Cure were for many years what the Beatles were in the Anglophone world: a template for how to do things. So it’s no surprise that Benjamin Schoos’ album Chinaman vs. Chinagirl has a cold 80s sheen, with a couple of tracks that come close to nicking melodies straight from the Robert Smith songbook. But the album is a lot more musically diverse than that. On one hand, it’s partly a teens update on Serge Gainsbourg. In a smooth Gauloise baritone, Schoos talks his way through a pun-infested Chinese wrestling narrative – how’s that for surreal? On the other, it’s artsy 80s pop with chilly faux-retro teens synth timbres keeening and woozing through the mix, sometimes over a stiff new wave beat, sometimes swaying forward another ten years with a trip-hop rhythm.

Do you have to speak French to get this music? As catchy as the tunes are, not necessarily, but to have any appreciation of Schoos’ sense of humor, yes. He’s as influenced by French rap as he is by Gainsbourg – everything is a pun, some of them very funny, some less so. There’s actually hardly anything Chinese about the album, although wrestling – both the real and phony kinds – and boxing serve as recurrent metaphors for guy/girl tension. The album’s bouncy first song, Marquise doesn’t really set the stage – it’s a kiss-off to an ice queen and may have literary or political resonance (a thinly veiled Carla Bruni dis, maybe?). After that, Schoos duets with Laetitia Sadier on a catchy new wave pop song that, predictably, sounds like Stereolab covering the Cure. Profession Catcheur (Pro Wrestler) works a series of jokes – and a particularly amusing one about Margaret Thatcher – into a trip-hop spy theme, followed by the lush, artsy, faux-angsted piano ballad La Chinoise.

The album wouldn’t be French if it didn’t have a fingersnapping faux lounge jazz number, would it? This one’s a snidely satirical portrait of a pop culture maniac: “Some people like the art of smoking, putting on the patch…me, I live only for wrestling,” he tells the world. That prosaic English translation doesn’t do justice to Shoos’ wordplay.

As a centerpiece, the title track is a letdown, ripping off Bowie’s Ashes to Ashes. But Schoos gets the jokes going again with Le Combat, sort of a rewrite of the duet with Sadier, this one personifying the idea of love, Schoos insisting that he’s going to kick love’s ass. After that, over ominous, icy chamber pop, Schoos revisits the famous fight between surrealist icon Arthur Cravan and world heavyweight Jack Johnson: “That’s the life I’m embracing, I invite you, my friends, come help with the party, throw a white guy a crumb,” Schoos declares. The album ends with an absolutely evil duet between Chrissie Hynde (who gamely makes an attempt to sing in French) and Marie France, two girls yucking it up about how much they like to make men suffer. There’s a twelfth track, but it’s anticlimactic…and it’s in English.

Who is the audience for this? In English, probably the same crowd who’ve embraced Gainsbourg: silly as much of this album is, it can be a lot of fun. By the way, apropos of the title, “Chinaman” doesn’t carry the racist connotation in French that it does in English. Neither the album nor its tracks seem to have made it to youtube or dailymotion (the French youtube), although it is on Spotify.

Catchy, Exuberant Stuff from the Aves

The Aves, from Adelaide down under, have their latest album, Panic up at their Bandcamp page. It’s one of those albums that people would be claiming bragging rights to after picking up a dusty 30-year-old copy of the import vinyl at a flea market. You know, “forgotten classic from the 80s,” that kind of thing. Except that it’s from 2012. The four-piece band flex some serious classic pop chops through ballsy guitar rock – two genres they list themselves under are “squonk” and “space pop” – with influences that never quite make it to the 1990s.

The best track is Grow Up, a pulsing vintage Kinks musichall-rock tune with an absolutely searing, noisy guitar solo about halfway through. “We look through the window and we look to the sky, in the suburb which the monsters swallow up,” seems to be one of the lines in the chorus. The vocals are totally early 80s androgynous, so it’s not clear who out of Lucy Campbell, Thomas Williams, Tasman Strachan and Clair O’Boyle might be doing the singing.

There are two verisons of Standby: the first is 80s Britpop with a boisterous barroom singalong vibe, the second is almost two minutes longer and worth sticking around for a very cool outro, the bass artfully handing off to the lead guitar on the way out. The two other tracks are the minor-key, reggae-tinged Panic, which looks back even further to the very beginning of the new wave era, and Thick As Thieves, which reminds over a Johnny Cash gallop that indifference can be even harsher than outright hostility.

Bern & the Brights: Better Than Ever

The Rosie the Riveter style portrait on Hoboken, New Jersey band Bern & the Brights’ new album Work echoes their 2010 debut, Swing Shift Maisies – these women (and guys) have really been busting lately. Their second album signals a major shift in the band’s sound: with the departure of violinist Nicole Scorsone, they’ve tightened their songwriting, with greater focus and emphasis on hooks instead of psychedelic vamps and chamber-rock interludes. Frontwoman/lead guitarist Bernadette Malavarca’s vocals are more casual, more diverse and a lot more subtle: she’s getting twice the impact out of half the effort, often with a coy chirp similar to guitarist/singer Catherine McGowan’s own style. Bassist Sean Fafara serves as a second lead guitarist with his edgy, melodic runs when he’s not holding steady and terse alongside drummer Jose Ulloa Rea. As much as the band has gone for a more cohesive style, their songwriting is still impressively diverse and unpredictable.

The opening track, Slave Driver, is a reggae song with some deviously LOL dub tinges – and then suddenly it picks up to a warmly swaying, backbeat chorus. Malavarca adds an ominously spaghetti western-flavored guitar solo when least expected…and then the band takes it down to dub, and then back up again. The second track, War & Games nicks that cloying riff by the Cure that doesn’t seem like it’ll ever disappear and builds to brightly clanging 80s British guitar-pop, something akin to a female-fronted version of the Mighty Lemon Drops or the Railway Children. I See Red is not a Split Enz cover but an original, once again juxtaposing a biting reggae pulse against another one of those irresistibly catchy, bouncy choruses. They follow that with Sick of Seeing You – as in “sick of seeing you in my dreams, get out!” – it’s part Celtic-tinged stadium rock, part reggae, with luscious layers of viciously tremolo-picked guitar.

Irish Boys harks back to the band’s earlier sound, veering between minor-key soul and indie atonality until yet another catchy chorus kicks in. The band follows that with As Long As I’m Alive, a neat and guitarishly delicious mix of loping electric bluegrass and highway rock. The final cut, Thieves Creeps & Automatons looks at the kind of people who “throw their weight around and watch you drown,” who are gonna find you, the two women sing with a casual menace on the chorus. Malavarca’s jaunty, nimble bit of an electrified Irish reel afterward is one of the album’s high points. Another winner from a band that just gets better and better. They’re at Zirzamin on Oct 16 at a little aftter 8.

Wrapping Up a Good Month’s Worth of Shows

If you’ve been following this space over the last couple of weeks, you’ve probably been wondering where all the concert coverage went. That’s not to say that this has been a slow month for live shows – this is NYC, after all. To keep pace with what’s been happening, here’s a look at some of the highlights from the past month or so that didn’t get coverage here for one reason or another (the band just got written up here; the show wasn’t that good; it’s hard to come up with anything much to say about a performance where you show up late and only catch the last half hour).

After a long hiatus, a reconfigured version of psychedelic Greek surf/rebetiko rockers the Byzan-tones has made a scorching comeback in recent weeks. Their show at Otto’s in early August was off the hook and got a rave review here; a couple of weeks later at Zebulon, they were even better. The electric oud is sorely missed, but they’re incorporating more and more of the virtuosity of new guitarist Steve Antonakos into the show, a good idea considering his extensive background playing this kind of stuff with Magges. It was a feast of scary chromatics, and frontman/guitarist George Sempepos was getting all kinds of praise for his brooding baritone vocals.

Another first-rate instrumental unit that had been on hiatus for just as long, Dimestore Dance Band, is back together and has been playing a series of last-minute gigs as they reconfigure themselves (the drum chair has been rotating lately). They were a staple of the Tonic scene in the mid-zeros, and since guitarslinger Jack Martin and bassist Jude Webre decided to get back together, they’ve made Zirzamin - the closest thing to Tonic in New York these days – their new home. Like the Byzan-tones, their late July show at Zirzamin drew a rave here; their show there earlier this month was also arguably even better. Playing a borrowed guitar through a borrowed pedalboard, Martin broke a string on the first song, fueling a savage, volcanic performance that rocked harder than anything this elegant, cerebral gypsy/jazz/ragtime/jamband has done lately. Billing themselves as the Bob Dylan Deathwatch, they put Martin on vocals on a handful of searing, swampy, noir covers of Dylan, the Stanley Brothers and Martin’s old garage rock band Knoxville Girls. Sometimes musicians play their best when they’re pissed off: this show was a prime example.

One of the most reliably excellent free summer concert series in town is the jazz program put on by the Jazzmobile at a variety of indoor and outdoor spaces around the five boroughs. At the very end of last month, veteran pianist Barry Harris, who goes all the way back to the golden age of the 50s, played a suavely indestructible set of bop standards with a four-horn septet way up at Grant’s Tomb. Places to sit and watch (and try to figure out who the supporting cast was) were hard to come by: although the series’ site doesn’t list the concert, somebody must have spread the word because there was a big afterwork posse gathered around the monument with their picnics and lawn chairs. Does everyone in Harlem read the NY Jazz Record? It would seem like it.

Another enjoyable end-of-the-month show was Demolition String Band’s Friday night gig at Rodeo Bar. Frontwoman/guitarist Elena Skye has never sung better or with more nuance, and lead guitarist Boo Reiners remains one of the most soulfully pyrotechnic players in country music. He flatpicked and twanged and jangled while Skye led the band through a mix of well-received, biting twangrock and C&W originals from earlier in their career along with some more rustic material from their sensationally good new album Gracious Days, plus a handful of bluegrass classics.

Quirky instrumentalists This Spy Surfs, who’ve been around forever, made a return to the stage Labor Day weekend at Otto’s and proved no worse for a long layoff. The bass growled and popped, the guitar snaked and slashed and the drums switched from a new wave scamper to a surprisingly funky pulse. The band name is a misnomer: what they play is basically catchy 80s rock without the vocals. It’s good to see such an original band back in action.

One of the year’s most amusing concert moments happened about a week later at Tompkins Square Park, where David Peel forgot the lyrics to The Pope Smokes Dope. The original stoner freak-folk songwriter has only been playing the song for about 45 years – and he had to stop in the middle and then restart it when he remembered what they were. Maybe he’d had a marijuana….duh, of course he’d Have a Marijuana at a time like this.  That’s the title of his John Lennon-produced debut album, which reputedly went multi-platinum despite being banned from radio and the Top 40 charts for obvious reasons. He sang that one, and a new song for the Occupy movement, and a handful of other singalongs. There seemed to be just about as many people gathered in front of the crowd, playing with Peel – there’s a reason why his scruffy band is called the Lower East Side – as there were watching. The band before Peel, a tunefully sludgy metal trio called the Aliens, who sounded like the Melvins doing Social Distortion, weren’t bad either. They’re also impossible to find online (try googling “aliens” and “Tompkins Square”…)

While the summer concerts are over, there’s still plenty of interesting free music around town. The series of ongoing performances of new music by an eclectic mix of European composers – primarily from Austria - programmed by the Austrian Cultural Center on 52nd Street got off to a good start Friday night at the Bohemian National Hall with the Talea Ensemble. The respected avant garde chamber group’s first piece was Ondrej Adamek’s Ca Tourne Ca Bloque, an electroacoustic work that had the ensemble mimicking spoken phrases in French and Japanese. There was clearly some improvisation going on along with what was on the scores; it wasn’t easy to figure out which was which, particularly when the piece began swirling as the laptop started spitting out random spoken phrases. Music is often described as having the quality of speech – emphatic, conversational, laughing, teary, you name it – and this was an interesting exploration of that concept, even if it went on a little long.

The group followed that with a percussive suspense movie for the ears, Pierluigi Billone’s Dike Wall, interspersing tense washes of sound from the strings amidst even tenser scrapes, scampers, suspenseful footfalls and the occasional ominous crash from inside the piano as well as from the vast collection of instruments employed by percussionist Alex Lipowski, who was given centerstage and got a real workout. The series at the Austrian Cultural Center is ongoing: reservations are required..

Much as it’s been a typically good month for concerts in this city, there were a few disappointments as well. That Summerstage show last month was a sad reminder that just because a girl has a southern accent and plays the banjo, it doesn’t make what she does any more interesting than what you’d hear in the dentist’s office. That classical pianist with the lovely musical name did her best with a difficult program, but it wasn’t enough to overcome the screeches of the security gates at that ill-advised anniversary tribute series way downtown. And that rock & roll reverend needs to drop that hideous hair-metal cover from the set list. It’s worse than a bathroom tune: it’s enough to clear a room.

Another Great Album by the Larch

For more than a decade, the Larch have been making first-class British rock in Brooklyn. Frontman/guitarist Ian Roure’s status as an expat has a lot to do with that. Like Squeeze, or Elvis Costello – an artist he’s often compared to – Roure writes sardonically about dysfunctional office scenarios, schizos with cellphones and post-9/11 American fascism to rival any scheme Margaret Thatcher ever devised. After a flirtation with sci-fi rock on 2009′s Gravity Rocks, Roure’s worldview has become bleaker, his cynicism deeper. His songwriting hit a high point with Larix Americana, a masterpiece of lyrical New York underground rock, released just over a couple of years ago. Where that album took a richly successful plunge into psychedelic rock, the band’s new album Days to the West blends new wave and psychedelia, Roure’s withering lyricism as acerbic as ever. If Larix Americana was their Argybargy, you could call this their West Side Story, a richly eclectic and powerful followup to a classic.

The new wave pulse of Tons of Time sets the tone: “We don’t know what we’re going for, but it’s not here,” Roure sings with a gentle insistence: it’s a knowing anthem for any would-be rockers “watching the game you’re not sure you can win…rock criticism with your pickle and cheese, living the life but you’re feeling the squeeze.” But there’s hope to ” meet the word outside this penny market town.” Roure takes a long, rippling, lickety-split wah guitar solo out.

Monkey Happy Hour makes a slightly less caustic companion piece to LJ Murphy’s Happy Hour, a scenario that equates fratboy grotesquerie with post-office overindulgence, set to a terse riff that hits the chorus hard with a nice biting change. Already Lost Tomorrow is just as sardonic: like much of the Larch’s catalog, it could be just a bitter, brooding tale of a guy grabbing for all he can, or it could be a metaphor for disingenuous yuppie consumption, Liza Roure’s trebly organ mingling with a growling web of guitar and Ross Bonadonna’s melodic spiral-staircase bassline. Similarly, the title track, a lushly orchestrated, distantly Scottish-flavored 6/8 ballad, could simply be a reminiscence of watching a comet, or a metaphor for something far greater.

Honey Bee works a catchy, Kinks-influenced verse, an upbeat look at “balancing the nectar and the sting.” With its hypnotic space-rock intro, outro and sizzling lead guitar, Midweek Nebula looks at a memorably twisted bunch of office weirdos from the other end of the telescope, a milieu that gets revisited even more caustically with Second Face, a warmly Costelloish new wave pop tune that grimly ponders the loss of an office alliance. And The Bishop’s Chair, with its synthesized bells and tongue-in-cheek backing vocals, pokes fun at how “before you know, those old beliefs are stretched beyond repair.” This particular bishop may think all eyes are on him, but they’re not. The album ends with a darkly ornate, keyboard-driven, late 60s style psychedelic Britfolk anthem, and a return to the more 80s-flavored psych-pop that has been the band’s stock in trade throughout their career. Not a single miss on this album: another winner from a group that deserves to be much bettter known than they are.

Ferocious Psychedelic Rock and Catchy Guitar Pop from Black Water

Jersey City’s Black Water put out an excellent debut album, Disasters, a couple of years ago, setting anthemic 80s-influenced anthems to a bunch of different styles, from ska and reggae to dreampop. Their latest album, Friendly Fire, takes it to the next level: the addition of guitarist Gary Laurie has given them a much more ornate, artsy, psychedelic edge. The first part of the album is a series of ferocious art-rock songs, while most of the rest of it is more pop-oriented. The whole thing is streaming online.

The opening track, Andorra, works a biting,hard-hitting, flamenco-tinged vibe, setting the tone with a couple of tersely searing guitar solos. It segues into the second song, Spin, raising the energy with a stomping menace. As the band make their way through a series of thematic and rhythmic shifts, they evoke artsy 70s jambands like Nektar. Likewise, Miel, the third track, juxtaposes a mellow, Brazilian-tinged verse with a funky, stampeding. furiously chord-chopping theme. Sarcasm and anger are front and center: “Would it be all right if I tied you down so you could be the one to squirm?”

Keep On Movin’ would have been a huge top 40 hit back in the 70s – which is a compliment. A simple, metalish riff gets welded to a catchy four-chord chorus, with an unexpectedly artsy outro. Then Kaleidoscope takes the influences ten years forward: it’s a more ornate take on 80s new wave Motown (think Dexys Midnight Runners). Likewise, Rose (My Old Ways) nicks a chord progression from the Cure for an edgy 80s guitar pop feel.

The poppiest song here is The Thief, its morose lyric contrasting with its catchy, upbeat tune, lit up by a burning but elegant guitar solo. The last song goes back to the art-rock of the earlier tracks. “The war on drugs is a war on us” is the mantra, layers of guitars building to a screaming forest of reverb and maniacal chord-chopping: it’s a great anthem for politically aware stoners.

And here is where this blog does an epic fail. Black Water put out this album last spring, played a bunch of shows and sent a link to the album this way…where it sat, as spring turned to fall, and then one of the band members moved to North Carolina. So Black Water are currently on hiatus. If this is the end of the band, they got the max out of their time together, with two excellent albums. If not, it’s reason to look forward to seeing what Lloyd L. Naideck, Gary Laurie, Adam N. Copeland and Gerry Griffin do next.