Elegantly Drifting Art-Rock from the Snow at Union Hall

For Pierre de Gaillande to be playing in just two bands means he must be busy with other things – there was a point when he was playing art-rock with Melomane, and the Snow, and doing more of an indie thing in Morex Optimo, and also getting his Bad Reputation project, which does English-language versions of Georges Brassens songs, off the ground. Last night at Union Hall, de Gaillande and co-bandleader/keyboardist Hilary Downes led the Snow through a haunting, somewhat stripped-down set of material from throughout the band’s career. To the songs’ credit, they sounded practically as lush with just acoustic guitar, keys, violin and trumpet as they do in their more lavish studio guise.

The show opened on a quietly intense, brooding note with Russians, a snidely allusive look back at the less desirable aftereffects of perestroika: “Mama I’m home, mama I’m sick, I ate too much candy, sucked too much liquor,” went the punchline. The band ended it with a long, creepy walk down the scale, ending with a single ominously sustained spaghetti western guitar chord. They followed that with a new song, a slow, steady, nocturnal art-rock ballad sung by Downes. True Dirt, an elegant chamber pop tune about getting messy – metaphorically, at least – kicked off with a big flamencoesque trumpet/guitar intro.

Downes sang the melancholy, metaphorically bristling Undertow with a richly nuanced, Julie London torchiness over the steady insistence of the guitar, the trumpet adding an unexpected jauntiness. They followed with a late Beatlesque art-folk ballad, its distantly aching atmosphere enhanced by Karl Meyer’s austere violin lines.

But everything wasn’t so serious. Union Hall for some reason has become a magnet for amusing cover bands – there’ll be a couple doing twisted  Hall & Oates and Dionne Warwick covers here on Halloween – and in keeping with that theme, Downes hammed it up – but just a little – by closing with a surprisingly plaintive version of Olivia Newton-John’s Hopelessly Devoted to You. Whatever you might think of ex-model pop singers, John Farrar – who wrote most of ONJ’s songs -wasn’t a bad tunesmith. It says a lot about the Snow that they’d be able to make something substantial out of one of them.

Unexpectedly Edgy Americana from Lindi Ortega

Lindi Ortega hails from Canada, whose government supports the arts, and as a result Canadian artists’ albums typically have superior sonics compared with American recordings made on the fly, DIY, with Protools and a couple of mics haphazardly set up in somebody’s bedroom. Which in the case of Ortega’s new album Cigarettes & Truckstops is important, because producer Colin Linden gets the excellent band behind her to really breathe, as they make their way through a diverse mix of oldschool honkytonk, highway rock, bluegrasss and some surprisingly intense blues. Ortega comes across as more of a rocker who discovered Americana than someone who’s been immersed in it since day one. However, there’s as much Dolly Parton influence as there is Jolie Holland in Ortega’s energetic, occasionally raspy, fluttering melismatic vocals.

The album’s title track has a Gentle of My Mind vibe, but with hushed contemporary alt-country production: brushed drums, tremolo guitars and Rhodes piano – and a Dolly reference that will have her fans cringing. Things get better from there. The Day You Die, a brisk bluegrass shuffle, reminds of Demolition String Band, right down to the biting electric guittar solo. Ortega reverts to a country nocturne vibe with Lead Me On, a sad, resigned ballad with the same tasty acoustic/electric textures as the opening track.

Don’t Wanna Hear It contrasts Ortega’s languid vocals with a big snarling, Link Wray-inspired garage rock arrangement. A Canadian twist on outlaw country, Demons Don’t Get Me Down reminds a bit of Lorraine Leckie, with some bright honkytonk piano handing off to a tasty slide guitar solo. Murder of Crows sounds like it’s going to go down to the delta crossroads until the electric guitars kick in and it turns into a big, murderous blues anthem, like Holly Golightly airing out her pipes, and her band, with big-room production values.

Heaven Has No Vacancy, a creepy, slow, noirish open-tuned slide blues, reminds of John Mellencamp’s self-titled blues album with guitarist Andy York about ten years ago. Once again, the layers of guitars are absolutely exquisite, and in this instance, pretty bloodcurdling (musician credits weren’t included with pre-release downloads). “I’ve got some pain to medicate and I’m all out of pills,” Ortega intones on the next track, High, a stoner take on Jimmy Webb-style countrypolitan: “I ain’t that sane, honey, I just want to fly…I’m not into razorblades so I thought I’d try something new.” And then on the casually stomping song after that, she’s telling a guy not to use crack, or shrooms, or ecstasy – if the effect is to induce a few chuckles. it works. The album ends with the swirly, creepy noir 60s pop charm of Every Mile of the Ride, hinting that Americana may not be Ortega’s ultimate destination. But while she’s doing it, she’s doing it with class: who says Canadians can’t play blues or country music? Lindi Ortega is on US tour right now with Social Distortion.

M Shanghai String Band Packs the Jalopy, Again

M Shanghai Strng Band’s sold-out cd release show at the Jalopy Friday night started at nine and ended a little before one in the morning. Brooklyn’s best-loved oldtime string band do it oldschool, Grand Old Opry style, virtually all ten band members stepping to the mic for a couple of bars at a time, an endless parade of hot licks and cool ideas. The parade of talent began before they did, with a series of cameos by their friends (when you have ten people in a band, that translates to a LOT of friends). Karla Schickele and Kristin Mueller each sang pensively catchy folk-pop songs; Pierre de Gaillande of the Snow contributed a couple of cleverly artsy, amusing acoustic rock and soul tunes; Jan Bell sang plaintive, bittersweet country waltzes, followed by a couple of eerie minor-key blues tunes, Ain’t Gonna Rain and Broken Arrow, sung ruggedly and rustically by Will Scott. And as much as taking the stage after Kelli Rae Powell could be a recipe for disaster – she’s a hard act to follow – M Shanghai took that chance. Nine months pregnant and looking ready to pop, she nonetheless made her way way through her best song, Don’t Slow Down, Zachary, playing up the comedy rather than the grimness of its rockers-on-the-road narrative. And with the indelibly catchy Bury Me in Iowa City – a track from her sensationally good, forthcoming live album, recorded at the Jalopy – she both set the stage and raised the bar for the headliners.

And they delivered. What a fun night this was! Their first set comprised the entirety of their eclectic new album, Two Thousand Pennies; the second was almost as long and took the energy even higher. In the style of an oldtime community band, everybody gets to contribute, some more than others. If there were any individual stars of this show, they were violinists Glendon Jones and Philippa Thompson, blending and contrasting styles – he’s got more of a gypsy bite, she typically goes for a more fluid country fiddle approach. One after another, band members traded off solos, harmonica player Dave Pollack handing off energetically to mandolinist Richard Morris, or to banjo player Hilary Hawke, or one of the violinists. But ultimately none of this would have mattered if the songs weren’t so good.

The new album is the best thing they’ve ever done. They began with the anxious steampunk sway of Sea Monster and its catchy major/minor changes, followed by Made in the Dark, an apprehensive, gypsy-flavored tango – this band goes far afield of traditional country music a lot of the time. Many of their songs – the dustbowl ballad Leaving Oklahoma, the stern seafarer’s narrative Sailor’s Snug Harbor, the rousing outlaw shuffle Dillinger and the British folk-style ballad O Lucy – could have been classics from Bakersfield, or Staten Island, or Yorkshire, decades or centuries ago. Shanghai Mountain lept from a stark banjo tune to a fiery bluegrass dance, while the catchy Two Thousand Pennies – the album’s title track – alluded to this era’s Great Depression.

Guitarist Matthew Schickele – who seems to be in charge of writing all this band’s funniest songs – led the bunch through a surprisingly sad, irony-tinged waltz, Marlene, as well as the Staten Island sea chantey and also the night’s most amusing song, Zombie Zombo. Morris sang Entropy, which began as an upbeat swing tune but quickly took on a disconcerting edge. Wrecking Ball Savior, with its fetching guy/girl harmonies and country gospel tinges, might be an anti-gentrification number, while Boxcars, sung with a carefree charm by Thompson, voiced a hobo’s defiantly optimitic point of view. Pollack, who’d been punctuating pretty much eveything with a boiterous bite, finally got the chance to take a long solo on the offhandedly ominous railroad ballad Sleeping Engineer and made the most of it.

The second set kicked off with stark twin fiddles and a raucously gypsy-fueled dance, Thompson out in front of the band. Guitarist Austin Hughes, who writes many of the bnad’s most memorable songs, sang a catchy gospel-tinged banjo tune. Schickele delivered Stay Calm, a deadpan Neil Young-flavored number. Thompson played spoons on a lickety-split bluegrass tune, and then singing saw on a haunting noir swing number a little later on. Drummer Brian Geltner, who’d held back with a terse groove all night, finally got to cut loose with a stomp on a lively, crescendoing country song lit up with more of those gorgeous harmonies and a searing Jones violin solo. And the most intense instrumental moment of the night was a casually menacing, all-too-brief cameo by clarinetist Ken Thompson – that’s how this band does it, they always leave you wanting more, even after two hours onstage. Like most of the best of the NYC country and oldtime Americana scene, they make the Jalopy their home: they’ll be there at 9 PM on Nov 3.

Diverse, Dusky Desert Sounds from Terakaft

Music is an even more intrinsic part of the fight for freedom in the third world than it is in the west, perhaps because music from those cultures hasn’t been as corporatized and bled dry of meaningful content as it has in the US and Europe. From a non Tamasheq-speaking point of view, to listen to desert blues band Terakaft’s new album Kel Tamasheq – “Tamasheq Speakers,” in the Tuareg nomads’ native tongue – strictly for the music is like a non-English speaker trying to make sense of the Clash or the Coup. But like those two bands, while their potent antiwar message is inseparable from their music, the tunes stand for themselves. Begun as something of a harder-rocking side project for members of iconic duskcore band Tinariwen, Terakaft have since solidified their identity; this new album, their fourth, is their most eclectic, and surprisingly, a lot quieter and more pensive than Aratan N Azawad, their album from last year.

While it’s amazing how interesting these guys can make a one-chord jam, this isn’t all just long, mesmerizingly cyclical vamps. Although that is how they start the album; a spare, lingering guitar phrase opens it, then they’re off and scampering with an unusual force and drive for this kind of music. Credit producer Justin Adams for beefing up the rhythm section and allowing for separation between the guitars, which enhances the psychedelic factor. Given the shared vernacular with American blues – which goes back to Africa, after all – a lot of these songs sound like electrified, rhythmically altered versions of tunes that might have come out of the Mississippi delta a hundred years ago. The album’s second track is characteristic, a north Malian counterpart to a swaying blues-rock song, fluid hammer-ons alternating with sparse, stinging guitar accents over an undulating pulse.

The third track has an unexpectedly bouncy soukous influence; the one after that sounds like a Tuareg response to noir cabaret, with its catchy riffage and ba-bump rhythm. After that, the band goes into a more low-key, dusky, traditional desert atmosphere, then follows that with the briskly walking Imad Halan, a broadside directed at the fundamentalists who’ve fueled the catastrophic civil war raging in Mali.

They then return to a warmer, hypnotic desert blues vibe, which picks up when they segue into the gorgeously pensive, visceral longing of Imidiwan Sajdat Ahi, which reaches for a psychedelic, polyrhythmic, intertwining sound that evokes the Grateful Dead, especially as it speeds up at the end. From there, they keep the bracingly modal, polyrhythmic pulse, then sway soulfully through a glimmering nocturne and then the album’s catchiest number, a straight-up rock song, its precise, careful guitar leads resonating over a steady backbeat: it’s the most western thing here. They end the album with a return to sparser, duskier ambience.

Like their Tinariwen brethren, the band has a somewhat rotating cast of members: this particular unit includes Liya Ag Ablil on guitars, Sanou Ag Ahmed and Abdallah Ag Ahmed on guitars and bass and Mathias Vaguenez on percussion. Pretty much everybody sings. The lyrics – in Tamasheq – address the here and now: the horror of war, the alienation of exile and pride for the group’s nomadic heritage. The album is just out from World Village Music.

Clare & the Reasons Take It To the Next Level

Fronted by husband-wife duo Clare and Olivier Manchon, Brooklyn chamber pop band Clare & the Reasons have a new album out, KR-51, taking its name from a German autobahn. Like their previous three albums, the songs on this one feature a swirly, hypnotic blend of icy electronic keyboards and lush orchestration. Imagine Kate Bush at her most straightforward, or a more psychedelic version of the Universal Thump, and you’re on the right track. Clare’s chirpy high soprano is more expressive, more varied and more somber here: it sounds like she’s been listening to a lot of Marissa Nadler. Likewise, the music has a lot more gravitas than their more quirky previous releases: there’s none of the grating whimsy that would occasionally rear its self-indulgent head where least desired. There’s nothing here quite up to the level of Murder, They Want Murder – the gorgeously mysterious noir pop vignette from their 2009 Arrow album – but this one is solid all the way through. There literally isn’t a bad song here.

The opening track, The Lake sets a deceptively poppy tone, a vividly lyrical portrait of clinical depression matched by the coldness of the music, capped by an echoey synth hook that wouldn’t be out of place in a song by, say, Missing Persons. Similarly, Make Them Laugh is surreal but has a disquieting edge: steel pan and banjo add liveliness over the cloudy banks of strings and loopy broken chords on the synths. They follow that with the trippy, minimalist new wave tune Bass Face, punctuated by staccato blasts from Bob Hart’s guitar.

This Too Shall Pass blends goth angst with a steampunk vibe: it’s the closest thing to Marissa Nadler here, a long, hypnotically orchestratd vamp growing stormier by degrees, subsiding and then rising again. One of the coolest things about this album is that the song structures never follow a predictable verse/chorus pattern, and this is a prime example. Woodwinds bubble incongruously over a creepy modal electric piano riff on The Mauerpark – it sounds like a mashup of vintage Moody Blues and late-period ELO. Biting, offcenter Robert Fripp-style guitar, fuzz bass and hammering keys drive the next track, PS, an equally strange but compelling blend of mid-70s King Crimson art-rock and buzzy early Wire-style new wave. Then they go back to the artsy trip-hop of much of their previous work on the pulsing, hypnotic Step In the Gold.

The best song on the album is Colder, a brooding anthem that eventually hits a towering, majestic angst: “When will it get better, when will it better?” is the mantra, Clare’s voice rising to a rare, gritty, imploring tone. After that, Last Picture Sbow is somewhat of a letdown, nicking a popular Radiohead riff. They follow that with the shapeshifting Westward, which begins fluttery and minimalist and then shifts back and forth from a catchy noir pop melody, orchestration and guitars joining the mix and then receding: it’s a triumph of imaginative tunesmithing. The last song is Magpie, a rather stark, distantly Beatlesque, artsy folk-pop song. If you managed to catch one of their recent Bowery Ballroom shows, you most likely got to hear a lot of this in a more stripped-down format. The album is out now on their Frog Stand Records label.

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.

Smart, Edgy Swamp Rock and Country Blues from Holly Golightly and the Brokeoffs

Holly Golightly & the Brokeoffs – that’s retro rock icon Holly Golightly and Lawyer Dave – careen through the same swampy, loosely wired, punked-out country blues muck as the Gun Club and Knoxville Girls. This primitive, sometimes feral, lo-fi stuff is great fun. Most of the songs on thei duo’s new album Sunday Run Me Over are originals, although they also do a surprisingly elegant, slightly noir-tinged version of the Davis Sisters’ 1953 country classic I’ve Forgot More Than You’ll Ever Know About Him, along with an amusingly sarcastic cover of Hard to Be Humble, Mac Davis’ dubious attempt to write an outlaw country song. And the best song here is We Need a Whole Lot Less of Jesus and a Lot More Rock N Roll, an offhandedly savage reworking of the Ramey Family’s country gospel standard We Need a Whole Lot More Jesus. And as funny and vicious as it is – you see, they’re running out of cash up in heaven, which is why the church needs so much of it – the music is good too, with resonator guitar and fiddle adding to the rustic mix.

Several tracks, starting with the opening one, Goddamn Holy Roll, have a Mississippi hill country tinge, plus tasty, echoey slide guitar leads and exuberant guy/girl vocals. This particular one’s basically a one-chord jam, but they make it interesting. They Say takes a Fred McDowell style oldtime delta blues riff, stomps on it and rocks it out. Tank takes that hill country vibe and adds layers after tasty layer of guitar: lots of open-tuned slide work, and even a repeater-box track pulsing distantly in the mix. Likewise, they build Goodnight from a stripped-down, pissed-off, minor-key country waltz to a big anthem with layer after layer of swaying, clanging, ringing guitar lines.

Holly’s coy vocals take on a bit of an Amy Allison tinge on the country song Turn Around, while Hand in Hand blends Knoxville Girls-style swampy reverb rock with a slow Stonesy sway. They folow that with The Future’s Here, a surreal, absolutely spot-on early 50s-style hillbilly boogie with futuristic lyrics.The final track is the dirty, bluesy, JSBX-ish This Shit Is Gold; there’s also the lighthearted singalong One for the Road, an Irish-flavored drinking song with banjo. The album is out on Oct 9 from Transdreamer; the band is at Rock Shop tonight, Oct 6 at 10 for $10 and then at the big room at the Rockwood on the 8th at 9:30 for an extra two bucks.

Eraas Brings Back the 80s – In a Good Way

All right everybody, into your fishnets! Get out that black eyeliner, NOW! Eraas’ new self-titled album is stylized to the nth degree, as if 1987 never ended. The guitars ring with a low, morose, watery tone, straight through an oldschool Boss chorus pedal, awash in thick, foggy banks of synthesized strings over a tensely pounding beat punctuated by trebly minimalist bass. If you missed the days when the Sisters of Mercy were headlining at Radio City Music Hall – or if you were there and wish you still were – this is for you.

Long, hypnotic, drony vamps build slowly to catchy choruses, a blend of Clan of Xymox anthemicness and stygian, trancey sonics that occasionally echo Mogwai’s more low-key excursions. The New Order influence lurks ominously in the background everywhere here, but it’s the dark, early, Movement-era New Order, not the synthpop band they turned into shortly thereafter. The album opens appropriately with a murky drone that eventually rises to muffled drums on the offbeat – a recurrent motif, along with the bass playing simple, rhythmic octaves. Desolate keys and then an echoey choir of heavily processed vocals enter and then fade back to the opening riff: it’s a tintype for everything else here.

The third track, At Heart, channels early New Order with galloping, punchy bass, swirling keys, a dead-girl choir and a gamelanesque, gong-like loop on the horizon that eventually takes centerstage. Ghost, with its dub-influenced arrangement and synthy guitars, offers the closest thing to a narrative here, a call for a seance “down the stairs from a broken home while torches line the walls.” Skinning goes from stark and minimal with brooding piano to lushly orchestrated and then back again, while Briar Path is totally Sisters of Mercy as it moves from unexpectedly funky to a macabre clog dance of sorts. The band goes for a more percussive take on Bela Lugosi’s Dead with the next track, Crosscut, then shifts to more straight-up goth-pop with Fang. The album ends on a perfectly funereal note with a couple of dirges: Crescent, a slow processional, and Trinity, following a long, sinister walk down the guitar scale to its logical conclusion. There were a million bands like this out there 25 years ago; most of them have stood the test of time well. Give Eraas extra props for staying true to the style without being kitschy or stupid. They’re at the Cameo Gallery on 11/10 at around 10.

Julia Haltigan Takes a Torch to 11th Street

You heard it here first: there is no other singer in New York with as much raw, sultry power, or charisma, or purist intelligence  as Julia Haltigan. Last night at 11th Street Bar in Alphabet City, she may have been playing what was essentially a weekly rehearsal, but she took over the stage as if she was at Carnegie Hall. As many styles as she mines, expertly – fiery southwestern gothic, torchy swing, warm 60s soul and big Henry Manciniesque anthems – she’s always herself. Her brassy alto has a restlessness that just won’t quit, a knowing, purposeful quality: she may be in her twenties, but she’s an old soul. The band behind her was just as good: her dad Emmet Haltigan playing alternately soulful and biting lines on harmonicas and elecrtric mandolin, plus a jazz trumpeter, slinky bass, swinging drums and lead guitarist Sam Feldman wailing intensely throughout the set. They’ve got a new album, Magneto, due out momentarily: if it’s anything like this show, it’s going to be amazing.

Their jaunty opening swing tune, It’s a Trap, established the distant menace that characterizes a lot of her songs: she waited until the end to go up the scale and drive it home with a fiery apprehension. From there they went into a warmly laid-back, wistful oldschool soul number, then a blazing southwestern gothic robber ballad. She and the band brought back the torchy vibe with a gorgeously nocturnal, casually intense lament: “When you held my hand…those monsters weren’t real, they were just how I feel,” she sang, low and matter-of-fact and all the more powerful for it.

The title track from her album My Green Heart mixed noir blues with a sinister desert duskiness, some rich harmonies from the harmonica and trumpet all the way through, and a coy disco beat from the drums on the chorus. They followed that with another catchy retro soul tune, It’s Just the Way That Day Had To Go , which had the feel of a classic from the 60s even though it’s a brand-new original. Haltigan gave the lushly countrypolitan ballad Homesick for the Moon a restrained longing, searching for somewhere new that could be anywhere “as long as it’s a long way from home.” She put down her guitar for an absolutely lurid, steamy, innuendo-driven boudoir jazz tune: “I’m gonna take you way out, you won’t wanna come back,” she sang, swaying, lost in the groove. “I’ve got a hundred octane in my veins…c’mon over, make a lane change.” But that’s more than 100 octane, guys: that’s rocket fuel.

Feldman’s searing leads and Dick Dale-style tremolo-picking fueled the stomping rock number after that, followed by the most trad song of the night, the bluesy All I Can Think Of Is You. They wound up the set with a brave choice of cover song, Richard Thompson’s Vincent Black Lightning. Feldman hasn’t quite yet figured out how to make it his own, but he’ll get there. In the meantime, their version still blows away any other cover of that one. Haltigan sang the hell out of it, gently, with an understated bittersweetness that fit the lyrics like a motorcycle glove. She and the band are often at the Rockwood when they’re not at 11th Street; their next show is at the Allen Street club on at Oct 19 at 10 followed eventually by the excellent North Carolina bluegrass/oldtimey band Holy Ghost Tent Revival at midnight.

The Atlantic Antic: Real Brooklyn

The massive Atlantic Antic street fair on Sunday afternoon made one thing very clear: 99% of Brooklyn wants nothing to do with the Atlantic Yards development, the Brooklyn Nets or the shoddy new arena where they play – which is already rusting, since the developers who built it were too cheap to use good materials, or spring for a few cans of Rust-oleum. “Ratner building – douchebag!” Les Sans Culottes frontman Clermont Ferrand ad-libbed during the band’s version of Serge Gainsbourg’s New York USA, playing on the street a few blocks north of Sahadi’s. Out in front of Hank’s a little later, “psycho swing” band Tri-State Conspiracy’s guitarist pointed back at the rundown bar behind him and laughed: “Who would have thought, you’re not the biggest eyesore in the neighborhood anymore.” It’s not clear if the excellent gospel group out in front of the church a few blocks closer to downtown Brooklyn, or the mbira player a couple of doors down, or the funk or hip-hop acts past Hoyt Street had anything to say about the scam to seize private property in the name of eminent domain that paved the way for the neighborhood’s newest and largest eyesore. But it wouldn’t be a stretch. Meanwhile, Borough President Marty Markowitz, one of the arena’s most notorious shills, made the rounds, sucking up to the fair’s organizers, but the crowd paid little attention other than booing him vigorously.

But the music was great, and it was oldschool Brooklyn: no anorexic boys new to Bushwick standing slack-jawed, watching their former Evergreen or Hampshire classmates mumhling tunelessly over randomly awkward guitar chords. Tri-State Conspiracy mocked that element with their best song, The Clone, a slashing minor-key ska-punk tune:: “All your opinions match the crowd you’re hanging with…your voice is weak, yet you’re so authoritative every time you speak ,” their trumpeter/frontman snarled. A little earlier, Les Sans Culottes voiced the same contempt in Les Enfants Terribles, one of their more amusing faux-French garage rock numbers:

Ces precieuses ridicules
Avec leurs tetes dans leurs culs
Les enfants du parodie
Faisant pipi dans leurs lits

That translates roughly as “These ridiculous, precious parody kids, with their heads up their asses, pissing the bed.” Les Sans Culottes have been playing ferociously funny songs for a long time: they might have played the very first one of these Atlantic Avenue fairs back in the 90s. They still lovingly make fun of the French: Babar, baguettes and bidets each got a biting, minor-key song this time out, but lately the band has been shooting at larger game. The best song of their set was a savagely anthemic broadside directed at at a notorious French rapist: “C’est moi, le playboy international, un legend avec les initiels – ce ne’est pas un criminel, mais son client est Sofitel.”

That’s the genius of Les Sans Culottes – while their sometimes intentionally fractured French lyrics are very clever, evem if you don’t speak the language, it’s often easy to get the gist of them. Behind Ferrand (who took that name after a particularly egregious political scandal shook that part of his “native land”), harmony singers Kit Kat Le Noir and Courtney Louvre, bassist Pommes Frites, guitarist Geddy Liaison, keyboardist Johnny Dieppe and drummer Jacques Strappe romped through one catchy tune after another. Stealing riffs from Johnny Kidd, X, Dylan and Led Zep, the organ swirled and dipped, the guitar burned, the bass rumbled over a surprisingly tight swing beat as Ferrand and the two women made fun of hot girls, ungrateful ex-boyfriends, cactuses and French slang. The best jokes were so good that it wouldn’t be fair to spoil them. At the end of the set, the band played their biggest audience hit, Ecole de Merde (French for “school of hard knocks”); the mostly oldschool crowd gathered around wanted an encore, and they got one.

Tri-State Conspiracy seemed to have created the most spontaneous dancing of any of the Atlantic Avenue bands. Their crowd also screamed for an encore, and got a blistering version of Blitzkrieg Bop. Before that, the band blasted through a bunch of punked out ska tunes with murderous arrangements and solos from their four-piece horn section. Among the songs: a couple of sinister Dead Kennedys-flavored minor-key tunes; an undulating, creepy number about Bush-era paranoia; the viciously scampering Toss You Right Out of My Life; a couple of old soul hits, and a twistedly evil ska tune from the band’s 2001 debut ep. Who would have thought they would have lasted this long: they were good then and they’re even better now.

But the best band of the afternoon might have been the Middle Eastern group that played for what seemed all day near the corner of Hicks Street, backing an endless parade of graceful bellydancers. Oudist and bandleader Maurice Chedid played with a casually intense, edgy virtuosity alongside a terse violinist, a keyboardist who used a quartertone accordion setting on his synth when he wasn’t giving the dancers lush sheets of orchestration to sway and bend to, over the hypnotic beat of several percussionists. With several breaks for characters from the neighborhood taking turns stepping to the mic and saying their piece, the band ran through one vintage classic after another from Lebanon and Egypt, going all the way back to the 30s. One of the organizers even took a turn in front of the band, singing an innuendo-packed ditty that would have been risque fifty years ago. It’s groups of people like this who stand to lose the most as gentrification and the corruption that comes with it sucks the individuality out of New York neighborhoods and replaces it with a Ratnerville of parking lots and 7-11s.