Richard Buckner’s Most Mysterious Album

Richard Buckner plays the Mercury Lounge tonight, Dec 12 at around 9:30. His most recent album, Our Blood features Sonic Youth’s Steve Shelley on drums on several tracks along with distantly resonant pedal steel from Buddy Cage of the New Riders of the Purple Sage. It’s not known if either will be on the bill tonight but whatever the case, Buckner has never written or sung better than he did on this album, which came out midsummer 2011. Vocally, in recent years he’s gone deeper into his lower register, his hooks have never been more resonant and his lyrics are creepier than ever. This one’s an audio film noir with country/folk and indie touches. What happenedin the storyline here is never clear, and whether the unspecified crime in question is real or simply metaphorical is up to the listener to figure out. Buckner has always one of the more interesting, literarily-inclined songwriters out there, and here his narrator addresses each of these songs to the perpetrator, to whom he may or may not be related, by marriage or otherwise.

Buckner is good at suites – his 2000 album The Hill took Edgar Lee Masters’ caustic Spoon River Anthology and set it to growling electric rock. This album veers between catchy janglerock that Buckner frequently takes into atmospheric, Stereolab-ish territory through an endless supply of vintage keyboard patches, with touches of the meandering, folk-flavored acoustic sounds of his early years.

The narrative doesn’t follow a clear trajectory, deepening the mystery. The first track, Traitor, makes its way from insistently jangly to broodingly carnivalesque, with a long, hypnotic outro, one of a couple clear references to The Hill here. As it turns out, someone is coming “to laugh, to make you finally live it down,” whatever that may be. Track two, Escape implicates the narrator in this – at least as far as encouraging the perp to get the hell out while there’s still time. As usual, there are multiple levels of meaning here: with its noirish Rhodes ambience, the song is equally resonant as a cautionary tale for anyone wanting to leave it all behind.

Over some hauntingly ominous changes, Thief alludes to a relationship gone wrong; Buckner adding a spaghetti western feel with elegantly minimalist baritone guitar. Collusion sets the album’s most harrowingly surreal lyric over nebulous, sustained sheets of ebow guitar and keening synth: “You hear them sing the distant songs with familiar rings, luring you out until you could remember the chance you took.”

After Ponder, a lusciously Lynchian instrumental, Witness veers between the indie ambiguity of the Clean and Matt Keating-esque Americana. “How could we have been surprised by things that only we knew, waiting though you couldn’t stay, keeping little ones away,” Buckner muses.

“I guess I’m the one they warned you about,” he tells his accomplice on the most folk-flavored track, Confession: maybe the narrator is the traitor here! Hindsight goes back to insistently rhythmic indie rock spiced with echoey Rhodes, drenched in regret:

Did you hear it in the wind?
 I couldn’t make it down
Cloudy in the light…
Folded in a letter that I found
Remembered just in time
Forgetting to forgive
Never turning back around

The album ends on an enigmatically chilling note with Gang, organ pulsing ominously beneath the torrent of images: someone might be about to be executed, metaphorically at least. Adding to the intrigue is Buckner’s casual delivery, although he doesn’t let his lyrics trail off like he used to, a trait that could be maddening. The only maddening thing about this album is that it isn’t better known (full disclosure: this came over the transom here just as this blog was first born, when all the rock stuff was being transferred over from NYMD’s sister blog and in the process got lost in the shuffle. Therefore, this attempt to make things right.).

Fearless Oldschool Punk Rock from Sweden’s Terrible Feelings

Swedish punk rockers Terrible Feelings’ Blank Heads ep is out officially for the first time in the US, and it’s one of those rare albums that stand up to being played over, and over, and over – which is what you may end up doing when you hear this. They play as if time stopped in 1979 – it’s punk rock informed not by the Warped Tour but by the Avengers, the Clash and the Sex Pistols. A sense of doom and foreboding pervades their music, and it has a genuineness rather than sounding as if they’re just out to ape a style that’s been done to death. Frontwoman Manuela Iwansson rasps when she goes up the scale – singing in pretty good English – over an unexpectedly rich bed of clanging, roaring, screaming guitars and a pummeling rhythm section. The whole thing is streaming at Soundcloud.

The first track, Trash and Burn comes together out of a chaotic verse. This stuff’s a lot more interesting musically than just verse/chorus/verse: there’s pickslides, tremolo-picking and twin riffage from drums and guitar. The ominously minor-key title track brings to mind the Avengers, especially as the rolling beat comes in like a tidal wave and the layers of guitars build to a firestorm. “We’re damaged” is the closing mantra.

The Moon is even more like the Avengers (specifically, the stuff that Steve Jones produced) with its uneasy balance between desire and dread, both musically and lyrically: “I see him walking by frustrated and alone,” Iwansson muses before she realizes how “forlorn and scared he was because he knows that we all die alone.” The final cut, Hollow nicks the riff from Blondie’s One Way or Another on the verse and builds to an anguished crescendo on the chorus. “Everyone I know has become so hollow,” Iwansson rages.

For an only slightly less polished take on these same songs, download their surprisingly tight 2010 demo ep here.

Guided By Voices Just Won’t Stop Making Good Albums

It’s been hard to keep up with Guided by Voices lately. In case you’ve been overwhelmed by Robert Pollard and GBV releases, the “classic” 90s lineup has yet another new album out today, The Bears for Lunch. Is it up to the level of Let’s Go Eat the Factory or Class Clown Spots a UFO? Actually, it’s better. The king of DIY has better equipment than he had in the 90s – ironically, it’s probably cheaper for him to record now than it was fifteen years ago during the band’s first heyday. And Pollard is still writing up a storm – the most recent trio of 2012 GBV albums (not to mention his more roughewn solo releases) turns out to be backloaded.

Is there another guitarist alive who gets a more luscious guitar tone than Tobin Sprout? It’s hard to think of one. As usual with this band, there are moments here where you’ll end up thinking to yourself, “c’mon, dude, just resolve the goddamn chord and get on with the song,” but those are few and far between. Episodes of self-indulgence are outnumbered by pure tuneful bliss by a factor of about 20 to 1 here, pretty impressive by GBV standards.

As usual, the tracks here run the gamut. Pollard sets the tone, “needles buried in the red” with King Arthur the Red, catchy verse paired off against nebulous chorus and all those lush, roaring, rich layers of guitar, a formula that he’s been working for decades and that he returns to again and again here. She Lives in an Airport does that with heavy chords and wry lyrics; Hangover Child sets biting hooks over rippling drum riffs and some tastily melodic bass. Pollard’s influences don’t take centerstage much beyond Up Instead of Running, which is sort of the Move done as indie, and the Pinball Wizard-ish Smoggy Boy.

The strongest of the louder songs here might be Amorphous Surprise, with its reverb-toned postpunk guitars and allusive menace. As expected, the album has several twistedly surreal miniatures, including the Wire-ish Dome Rust, the aphoristically anti-fascist Finger Gang, the wry, blues-tinged Have a Jug, and The Challenge Is Much More, which sounds like REM with balls and a British accent.

Surprisingly, the strongest moments here are the album’s quietest ones. Sprout contributes the attractively jangly, poppy acoustic number Waving at Airplanes and The Corners Are Glowing, which looks back to the Kinks’ Village Green through the prism of REM but more moody. Pollard veers from extremely direct, with Waking Up the Stars’ disarmingly attractive psych-folk, to completely off-center, as with the woozy cautionary tale You Can Fly Anything Right.

There’s also the Sonic Youth-ish, one-chord Tree Fly Jet; the growling indie powerpop of Skin to Skin Combat, the smirky antiwar vignette The Military School Dance Dismissal and a shot at 90s stadium rock, Everywhere Is Miles from Everywhere. Is this big news? Not for most fans of the band, but even so, it’s testament to the continued vitality of one of the most astonishingly prolific songwriters in rock history and the inspired group behind him.

An Album of Drinking Songs for Your Halloween Pleasure

In celebration of Halloween, here’s an album about a deal with the devil. Like most deals with the devil, some of it is great fun, some less so. Haley Bowery’s debut album Born Strange is a trip through one particular vomit-saturated part of hell: Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Much of what’s left of the LES is so NOT New York: at best, it’s Bloomington, or Chapel Hill, or Northhampton. At worst, it’s Rodeo Drive gone to the Jersey Shore.

Backed by her band the Manimals’ tunefully impretentious, fist-pumping four-on-the-floor glam-flavored rock, Haley presents the point of view of somebody who’s uncomfortable with buying into this scene, taking a leap of faith with the noose of conformity around her neck. Some people will hear these songs and say that the narratives are just a pretext for singalong choruses whose message is invariably something along the lines of “let’s get fuuuuuucked up!” But there’s more to them than that. Haley’s protagonistas want the whole city to be smart and weird like they are. Her characters make their way cynically, sometimes savagely through a wasteland of tourist traps and dashed dreams, fueling themselves with near-lethal amounts of booze. Alcohol figures into these songs as much as heroin in Elliott Smith’s music, or pot in Bob Marley’s – it’s everywhere. People drink to escape from drinking. The album’s centerpiece, appropriately titled Halloween, builds from a screaming postpunk verse to a big singalong chorus, crystallizing the theme here: “Fuck the rest of them, let’s party!”

The title of the big kiss-off song here is Blitzed. Likewise, the revenge anthem Undertow, which takes a pensive, uncertain folk-pop tune and turns it into a defiant glamrock singalong, an order to “drink your whiskey up for all the people who never thought you’d be more than a zero.” From the screaming intro to the backbeat chorus of Jukebox Dive, its semi-hopeful protagonist thinks back on listening to her dad’s Jesus & Mary Chain records as she insists to the guy she’s just met that she’ll drink with him til the sun comes up. And right before the luscious layers of guitar kick in on the chorus of Lobotomy, Haley reminds that “I know how a bone can break, I know what a liver can take.” In case you’re wondering, she’s been known to spray crowds at her shows with a giant squirt gun filled with whiskey.

All this reaches a peak on Dream of the Chelsea Hotel, a catchy, Patti Smith-inspired number whose main character ponders whether or not to “drink til we’re dead like Dylan Thomas did.” When these people aren’t sauced, they’re not having an easy time. 29, a wistful power ballad, looks at the angst of staring down the big three-zero and still having to hide stuff from the ‘rents. All Lies ponders whether or not there’s any hope for happiness at all, drunk or sober, in the face of competition from younger, prettier women who’ve “got command of the room.” And on the album’s Blondie-esque title track, Haley admits feeling “like an alien assembled in this skin.”

And that’s the rub – some might ask why would anyone want to live like this. Wouldn’t it be a lot cheaper, never mind less stressful, to stay out of the tourist traps, away from the conformists and the self-centered rocker boys whose main occupation, at least as they’re portrayed here, is to break womens’ hearts? Hearing these songs, you want to reach into them and shake these girls, and ask them, is all this drama worth it? Maybe Haley Bowery can tackle that question on her next album. She and the Manimals – Attis Jerrell Clopton on drums, Patrick Deeney on guitar and Joseph Wallace on bass – play the National Underground on Nov 8 at 9 PM.

CMJ 2012: Make Music NY for Kids with Badges

When the Figgs played their first show in 1987, CMJ was a marketing idea whose time had come. By then, just about every college was sending at least a couple of representatives of the campus radio station to the annual festival. In reality, since it was a pretty much all-expenses-paid New York vacation, most of the kids who went to CMJ didn’t go to more than a show or two. In those days, New York had plenty of cheap bars where underage drinking was openly encouraged, and if you knew where to look, there were drugs as good as anything available on campus for half the price. Other than the overabundance of cheap drugs making up somewhat for the disappearance of dives catering to an under-21 crowd, it’s hard to imagine that things have changed much for CMJ attendees since then..

At that point in history, bands were ostensibly auditioning for airplay. Then the urban myth that record labels were signing bands out of CMJ persisted for a few years. By the late 90s, crowds were often still good enough to make a CMJ show worth the hassle since it could be an opportunity to play to some fresh faces. But as the festival ran out of venues, spilling over into rice-and-beans joints and coffeeshops and anywhere a primitive PA could be set up, overkill set in. With the web and Youtube eliminating the need for any kind of live audition, a CMJ gig inevitably became no more of a big deal than any other random show – which it probably never had been, anyway.

But as much as the crowds, and the number of bands gets smaller and smaller every year, CMJ still comes around. And somebody had asked the Figgs to play a CMJ gig Saturday night at Rock Shop. It’s hard to imagine any other show on the slate this year being as wickedly fun as this one was, despite its brevity. “25 years, 25 minutes,” drummer Pete Hayes said sardonically, seconds after the set had ended without an encore – gotta run ‘em up and run ‘em off, after all, this is CMJ. But the sold-out crowd went wild, at least as wild as guys who probably saw the band at CMJ 1992 can get for an hour after leaving the wives and kids at home.

But the band is absolutely undiminished: after 25 years, their passion and energy puts most acts half their age to shame. It’s no wonder that they’re Graham Parker’s first choice as a backing band. This show had special significance for being a reunion of sorts with original lead guitarist Guy Lyons, who stepped back in as if he’d never left. Leaving barely a pause between songs, they blasted through one catchy tune after another. As powerpop bands go, do these guys have as solid a back catalog as the Raspberries or Big Star? No question. Is Hayes the most solid four-on-the-floor rock drummer anywhere in the world at this point? No question. Bassist Pete Donnelly added a darkly growling edge with burning chords, tree-snapping climbs to the top of the fretboard…or he’d deliver a laid-back soul groove, as on a wryly amusing version of Do Me Like You Said You Would, the first single from the band’s latest album The Day Gravity Stopped. And guitarist/singer Mike Gent got to indulge his Stones fixation as well as blast through both Kinks and Beatles-inspired riffage throughout the set, which was catchier than anything Chisel or any other of the Figgs early 90s contemporaries ever could have mustered.

Hayes drove the barely minute-long opening number with a grinning hardcore stomp; then they lauched into the considerably more tongue-in-cheek Favorite Shirt, a big crowd-pleaser from their 1994 Lo-Fi at Society High album. Lyons sang the biting, sardonic Bad Luck Sammie and the even more snarling Rejects. Did Wilco rip off the Figgs for Shot in the Arm? Hearing this show, you could make a strong case for it. As the show wound up, they messed with an insistent reggae pulse, then referenced the Ramones with Wait on Your Shoulders and finished with the Kinks/Who stomp of Something’s Wrong. The only thing wrong with this picture was that a band this good deserved a biggger venue – and if this had been Manhattan rather than the Gowanus, they would have packed it.

A couple of other acts who made CMJ appearances this year deserve a mention. Fiery, charismatic, literate rockers Hannah vs. the Many played an all-too-brief set here on Friday night: it was good to get to hear frontwoman/guitarist Hannah Fairchild’s blistering wail over the roar of the guitars and the macabre cascades of the keyboards (the band still seems to be without a bass player). It’s hard to think of any other band who has smarter, more incisive lyrics than they do.

And for what it’s worth, the single most impressive song of the entire festival – at least from this perspective,  it’s still impossible to catch each and every act – came from an unexpected source, jangly 80s-influenced Bushwick guitar pop band the Denzels. The version of the ominously swaying minor-key garage-rock anthem Waterfront up at their Bandcamp site doesn’t do justice to the majestic power they gave it onstage at the Knitting Factory on Saturday. Hearing a song that intense and smartly orchestrated makes you wonder, is there more where that came from? Throughout the rest of their show, some of which was more Britpop-inflected, some of which sounded like the Alabama Shakes without the girl singer, there wasn’t – but it was a short set. Which perfectly capsulizes CMJ’s appeal as well as the severity of its limitations.

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.

Rich Purist Psychedelic Soul/Rock Sounds from Damian Quiñones

Damian Quiñones y Su Conjunto’s new album Gumball Ma-Jumbo - streaming in its entirety online - is a masterpiece of tunesmithing, an intricate mix of oldschool late 60s style psychedelic soul, rock and pop spiced with salsa, luscious horn charts, bubbling keys and nasty guitars. Quiñones is the man on the fretboard, jangling, slashing and taking all sorts of solos that blend sunbaked psychedelia with a terse, bluesy edge: he doesn’t waste a note. Likewise, as ornate as his arrangements can be, those don’t waste notes either. It’s one of the best albums of 2012.

Interestingly, the opening track is a wickedly catchy oldschool roots reggae song, a style that Quiñones will only come back to once here, but he nails it, with swirly organ, melodica flourishes, echoey tremoloing guitar and a lush horn chart. He follows that with the only song that really references anything after, say, 1975; it’s an attempt to blend retro 90s and 60s Britpop and it doesn’t really work. But the track after that is a treat – Barrio, pulsing along on a slinky clave beat, juxtaposes Fania-era Puerto Rican soul with a burning powerpop chorus and a tense, suspenseful interlude featuring two basslines. After that, Quiñones takes a pulsing soul song and makes it funkier every time the verse comes around, driven by blazing horns and judiciously slashing guitar fills.

Flyers starts out skeletal but quickly brings in a heavier psychedelic soul vibe: Quiñones’ distorted wah solo over Edwin Canito Garcia’s raw, slinky bassline after the second chorus is one of the highlights of the album. After Laura Mulholland’s tumbling piano intro, Malachi hits a punchy, swaying Big Star groove, Quiñones’ long, searing solo taking the song doublespeed until the end, where he doubletracks another solo alongside it: the effect is intense to say the least. The band follows that with I Know That You That I, blending 60s soul with noir Orbison pop.

What might be the best song – and definitely the best lyric – is Recuredos de Inez, sung in Spanish. Another richly arranged roots reggae tune, it builds to a majestic, regretful, noirishly anthemic crescendo lit up by artfully arranged horns. Or, the best song here might be the unexpectedly sarcastic, dismissive One Trick Pony, funky soul building to a scorching chorus and a series of jagged solos panning between the left and right channels: “It’s hard to discuss where you’ve been with a shoeshine part-time attitude,” Quiñones snarls.

The rest of the album includes Ollie Ollie Oxen Free, a psychedelically funky number like vintage Tower of Power but with more of a guitar-fueled edge; Shadow in the Sun, early 60s noir pop as Arthur Lee might have done it – but with a disco beat – and French Tickler, a tango-rock epic. What links all this together is that Quiñones and his band never play a verse or chorus the same way twice. There’s always a cool addition or subtraction, a subtle accent or rumble from drummer Seth Johnson or percussionist Brian Higbie, or a swell from the brass: trumpeters Brian Baker and Geoffrey Hull and trombonist Gregorio Hernandez lock together and rise like a single mighty horn. It gets better with repeated listening. Watch this space for upcoming shows.

End-of-the-Month Hell

The end of the month around here is always brutal because it’s time to put together the monthly concert calendar. In the meantime, enjoy this video by the alcohol-fueled Cudzoo and the Fagettes, who will have you spitting your drink laughing as you stare at their big…mouths. The intro and outro are especially spot-on.

Funny and well thought out as is this is, does any of this resemble a New York that you know? Food for thought….

By the way, if you like that one, check out their previous video, Daddy Issues.

The BoDeans Reinvent Themselves at City Winery

It never hurts to reinvent yourself, especially if your band’s been around for practically thirty years, as is the case with heartland rock legends the BoDeans. In this particular instance, that became a necessity in the wake of the departure of longtime co-frontman Sam Llanas. Last night at City Winery, this new version of the BoDeans led by lead guitarist Kurt Neumann proved to be a potently tight, road-tested machine, methodically churning out a mix of old concert favorites along with new songs from their recent album American Made. That there are four additional band members in Llanas’ place – returning original keyboardist Michael Ramos, fiddler Warren Hood, second guitarist Jake Owen and percussionist/harmony singer Alex Marrerro – speaks volumes to his role in the band.

From the opening notes of the catchy yet enigmatic anthem Stay On, Neumann set the tone with his signature terse, echoing, sustained lead lines, providing an example that his new bandmates followed with a mix of rigor and inspiration. Yet as strong as the playing was, there was something missing. Neumann’s sardonic, often distant persona was always balanced by Llanas’ dark, earthy charisma and wry sense of humor, and those elements went lacking, most audibly when Neumann reached for the bottom of his vocal register as the show reached a high point with the big crowd-pleasers Fadeaway and Still the Night. Much as he tried, Neumann never loosened to the point where he could evoke the mix of longing and ectasy that Llanas so effortlessly conjured, especially in concert.

But Neumann remains a strong songwriter, in more of a rock/powerpop vein than the country-influenced Llanas. Choosing such a traditional, rootsy lineup to play Neumann’s big, often atmospheric anthems turned out to be a strikingly original and effective move. The new songs were generally strong, notably the Johnny Cash-influenced Flyaway – which Neumann described as being “about finding liberation in incarceration” – and the new depression narrative America, a plea for solidarity that serves as the new album’s title track. The older material often benefited from this treatment as well. The fiddle in tandem with the accordion revisited the original rustic quality of older favorites like Dreams and Angels, and gave the sarcastic suburban narrative Paradise a welcome rawness. Other reinventions weren’t as successful. Trying to turn Llanas’ brooding Ballad of Jenny Rae into a straight-ahead anthem lost the haunting quality of the original, and reprising the Texas shuffle beat of Texas Ride Song several times throughout the show became tiresome quickly. And Idaho, the allusively alienated narrative that’s perhaps Neumann’s finest song, lacked both the crushing subtlety and tongue-in-cheek exuberance that Llanas would bring to it.

Yet this band succeeds on their own terms. As they wound up the set with a rustically tinged version of the 90s sitcom theme Closer to Free, the surprisingly young crowd responded with a boisterous enthusiasm seldom seen at shows by acts of this vintage. That Neumann, now fifty but not showing his age, would remain such a vital presence is something to be grateful for.

Yankee Bang Bang Put Out One of 2012′s Best Rock Albums, For Free

In case you’ve been misled into thinking that all the rock coming out of Brooklyn these days is fey, affected and wimpy, you haven’t heard Yankee Bang Bang. With a savage, punkish satirical edge, their music veers between punk, powerpop and art-rock, full of catchy hooks, cool guitar/keyboard textures and the occasional Bollywood influence courtesy of guitarist and sometime frontwoman Sita Asar. Their new album Color Me is up at their Bandcamp site as a free download and you should grab it now.

The first track, Silver Bullet opens with an icy piano flourish, a cough, a flat vocal and then they’re off. It’s got a matter-of-fact garage rock sway and an offhandedly vicious, sarcastic look at the Bushwick poser-rock scene. “This sound is so great, comes with an expiration date…love songs we couldn’t swallow from musician/actor/models,” bassist Glenn Baughman snarls. The satire slashes even more amusingly on the ba-ba powerpop song Love, Or, a clever juxtaposition of the down-and-out against the phony down-and-out: the jokes are too mean and too good to spoil here. That’s Love starts out with a sardonic bounce and Sean Spada’s silly 80s outerspace new wave keyboards and then goes unexpectedly majestic and noir with an eerie twinkle from the keys and Assar’s plaintive voice soaring over the din.

The catchy powerpop anthem Let’s Dance sets guitarist Asar’s nonchalant vocals over burning distorted chords that blend with blippy Wurly keys, sort of a major-key version of Siouxsie’s Hong Kong Garden, while Leaving Town Today, sung by Baughman builds to a ferocious electric Neil Young-style crescendo. Asar’s crescendoing, stoic torrents of lyrics create a deadpan apocalyptic vibe on the big, catchy 6/8 anthem Soon – that’s either Kevin Blatchford or Champ Jones behind the drums with all those swooshy cymbal crashes. The last track, World I Made works an unexpectedly low-key but bouncy acoustic vibe with some neat, passionate Bollywood-style vocalese from Asar: the band calls this a “radio mix.” We need more bands like this; watch this space for upcoming NYC dates.