Iconic Noir Pianist Ran Blake Offers a Dark Salute to the Great George Russell

It’s autumn in New York. Finally, in this overheated age, we’ve made it there. And what better way to conclude Halloween week than with the latest album by the definitive noir pianist of our era, Ran Blake, which opens and then after fifteen additional tracks, concludes with that song? The cd, Ghost Tones, a tribute to Blake’s old pal George Russell, sadly isn’t streaming anywhere on the web, but you can get a sense of its magically shadowy gravitas from the momentary clips up at cdbaby.

Throughout the record, the saturnine majesty of Blake’s playing is undiminished. Like Dave Brubeck at age eighty, he’s never played with more depth or poignancy. The album is a mix of pieces by Russell – one of the great individualists of the last half-century, an underrated but vastly influential composer who shares Blake’s dark sensibility – alongside Blake originals and a handful of chilly, sepulchral reinventions of jazz standards. The album’s opening track is a clinic in how Blake, playing solo, uses his signature, Messiaen-esque close harmonies to take a moody ballad far deeper into the night than its composer ever dreamed. Then, to wind up the album, Blake offers a spare, guardedly optimistic, far more straight-up take that hews much more closely to the original.

Alice Norbury (Blake’s shout-out to Russell’s wife) opens stately and stern, but then the clouds lift a bit, Blake multitracking his piano with string synth, broadening his usual noir cinematic sweep. As becomes crystal clear, this is a portrait of a profound and formidable personality. Drunmer Charles Burchell’s clave drives the first Russell composition, Living Time, with a white-knuckle tension as bassist Brad Barrett bubbles, Blake swirls and ripples and the horns – Peter Kenagy on trumpet, Aaron Hartley on trombone – punch in, Doug Pet’s tenor sax soaring like a vulture overhead. It’s 70s noir Morricone taken to the next level.

Blake’s solo piano miniature, Paris, perfectly captures that city’s twilit, rain-drenched angst amid the ghosts of centuries past as it rises to an insistent peak, again recalling Messiaen. Telegram From Gunther, a tongue-in-cheek miniature by Blake and another old third-stream pal, Gunther Schuller, makes an intro to the cumulo-nimbus electroacoustic industrial decay of Biography.

The best-known Russell number here, Stratusphunk, gets stripped to its austere, rust-tinged chassis as a solo piano piece. Another, Jack’s Blues rises artfully from a wary foghorn fanfare to an alllusive stroll through a desolate South Street Seaport or Boston Wharf of the mind, lowlit by Kenagy’s Miles-like muted trumpet. Then Blake makes a good segue with a solo take of Rodger & Hart’s Manhattan, taking that same tangent to its logical, briskly walking conclusion. After that, Russell’s Ballad of Hix Blewitt marks a return to plaintive, cinematic sweep with strings and Dave Fabris’ resonant pedal steel.

One of the most dynamically menacing Blake solo numbers here is his Cincinnati Express, building to twisted ragtime and then back. With its bell-like multi-keys,Vertical Form VI shows just how far into the avant garde – think Louis Andriessen – Russell could go and includes a sample from a 1998 London big band concert recording by the Living Time Orchestra. After Blake’s ominoulsy swaying solo version of Jacques Crawls, a spare, spacious take of Russell’s Lonely Place makes a brilliantly apt segue, Pet’s desolate, wee-hours upper-Broadway sax and Hartley’s trombone enhancing the ambience. Another well-covered Russell tune, Ess-Thetic, gets an insistent, menacingly circular solo piano treatment; there’s also an austerely reinvented take of You Are My Sunshine introduced by vertigo-inducing strings and steel. It’s noir music in its most brooding, bittersweet, distantly heartbreaking perfection, and ought to help introduce the brilliance and individualism of Russell to a new audience.

There’ll be a best albums of 2015 page here at the end of the year, and this will be on it. On the other hand, this album deserves a page all its own: there’s nothing in its category released this year that can compare. Blake gets a likely star-studded 80th birthday tribute at Jordan Hall, 290 Huntington Ave in Boston, his longtime New England Conservatory stomping ground, on November 13 at 7:30 PM.

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Imaginative, Lynchian Chanteuse Karina Deniké Slinks Into Brooklyn and Manhattan This Weekend

Darkly eclectic San Francisco singer/organist Karina Deniké plays with her band at Union Hall tonight, October 30 at 9:30 PM for $12. Then she’s at Cake Shop on Nov 2 at the same time. Her excellent latest album, Under Glass, is streaming at Bandcamp – it’s a ride packed with both thrills and subtlety, the rare collection of songs that’s so good that you don’t notice that there’s no bass on any of them.

“First you rev it, then you move it, but you never park it here for good,” Deniké sings on the bouncy, oldschool 60s style number, Park It, that opens the album. Anchors Away opens with ethereal, creepy vocal harmonies that bring to mind late, great New York rockers DollHouse, then shifts back and forth: “What shall we do with a drunken sailor?” ponders Denike with a tender menace that brings to mind Karla Rose in a rare semi-vulnerable moment.

Aviatrix, a starkly strutting Weimar cabaret waltz, is over way too soon. Musee Mecanique, the album’s title track more or less, blends layers of funereal vintage organ over a simple lo-fi 70s drum machine beat: imagine a more soul-oriented Siouxsie. Then the lurid ambience really sets in with Sideshow, Aaron Novik’s bass clarinet lingering under blippy organ and Meric Long’s staccato reverb guitar: “Do we get whatever we want at the Sideshow?” Deniké asks, completely deadpan. The song wouldn’t be out of place in the Carol Lipnik catalog.

Boxing Glove brings back the cabaret strut, fueled by pianist Michael McIntosh’s blend of ragtime and grand guignol. The best track is the menacing, plaintive bolero-soul ballad Stop the Horses, reverb-drenched guitar and Eric Garland’s vibraphone echoing in from the shadows: it draws a comparison to Marianne Dissard’s brooding desert rock. Then the band picks up the pace with Havin’ a Go, a deliciously upbeat mashup of early 60s soul, doo-wop and macabre garage rock with a decidedly ambiguous Novik solo.

Golden Kimonos opens with what’s either the vibes or an ominously twinkling glockenspiel setting on the organ, then picks up with a moody 80s sway. Balmy backing vocals bolster the album’s sparest track, the distantly gospel-tinged soul ballad You’re So Quiet. Deniké offers sympathy for the doomed on the metaphorically-loaded Persephone, Bay Area tenor sax great Ralph Carney (who just played an AWESOME show at Barbes a few weeks back) adding his signature, darkly soulful touch. The album winds up with the stately, elegantly poignant piano ballad Až Budeš Velký, Deniké drawing on her heritage as the child of expat Czech dissidents. Albums like this make every night Halloween – or Blue Velvet – if you’re in the mood.

A Menacing Masterpiece and an Annual Halloween Celebration from Pam Fleming’s Dead Zombie Band

Trumpeter Pam Fleming‘s Dead Zombie Band are the inventors and possible sole practitioners of a relatively new and incredibly fun style of music: Halloween jazz. Fleming, who’s played with everybody from Natalie Merchant to roots reggae legend Burning Spear, brings her signature eclecticism to the band’s album Rise and Dance, streaming at cdbaby. Leading an all-star cast of New York talent, she’s playing the band’s annual Fort Greene Halloween dance party starting at around 6 PM this Saturday on Waverly Avenue between between Willoughby and DeKalb Avenues. Take the C train to Clinton-Washington.

The band slowly rises, as if from the grave, as the album gets underway, Fleming’s somber trumpet leading the funeral procession. And then they’re off on a wry reggae pulse, Tine Kindemann’s singing saw flickering in the background. Fleming’s fiendishly fun vocals are the icing on this orange-and-black cake. Fleming’s trumpet, Karen Waltuch’s viola, Jenny Hill’s tenor sax and Buford O’Sullivan’s trombone all have chromatically delicious fun. It’s a lot more Black Ark noir than it is Scooby Doo.

Zombie Drag is a slow, muted, misterioso carnival theme: the way Fleming slowly marches the horn chart out of the mist, then back and forth, is Gil Evans-class inventive. Pianist Rachelle Garniez goes for icy Ran Blake noir on The Bell behind Fleming’s whispery, ghoulish recitation. Then Garniez – who’s also playing Barbes at 8 on Nov 5 – takes over on the similarly crepuscular Two Lovers and winds it up with a gorgously ghostly improvisation that dies on the vine far to soon.

The narrative gets very, very ghostly for a bit, Fleming’s ominous intonement backed by Ursel Schlicht brushing the piano strings, a “cackle cocktail party” and then the band goes up into Satan Is Waitin’, a mashup of saloon blues, Danny Elfman soundttrack shenanigans, jajouka (dig Jessica Lurie’s alto sax solo!), Jimmy Smith (that’s Adam Klipple on organ) and oldschool soul. After that, there’s some storytelling – imagine a Dr. Seuss Halloween tale set to Hollywood Hills noir boudoir soul.

Klipple’s droll roller-rink organ anchors some pretty joyous solos from tenor saxophonist Lily White, Hill (on baritone now), and Martha Hyde on alto throughout the reggae-soul number Rise and Dance – hey, if you were a zombie, you’d be pretty psyched to be getting out of the cold ground at last. Forget anything you’ve heard before: this is the real Monster Mash.

An Ambitious Take on Some Familiar Challenges by the Park Avenue Chamber Symphony

It’s often overlooked how changes in one field of music often mirror those in another. The rise of the Park Avenue Chamber Symphony into a reliably bonafide vehicle for first-class classical performance mirrors how the demise of the big record labels has relegated the realm of rock and other amplified original music to independent artists. Other volunteer New York orchestral ensembles – the well-loved Greenwich Village Orchestra, the innovative Chelsea Symphony and the fearlessly individualistic new Queensboro Symphony Orchestra – deliver quality programming, but in the past several months especially, none of them have surpassed their Park Avenue colleagues. Nor, it seems, has the New York Philharmonic.

Conductor David Bernard never made a connection he didn’t want to share with the world, an especially ambitious goal at the Park Avenue group’s concert this past Saturday night. First on the bill was a spine-tingling take of Borodin’s Polyvestian Dances. As a curtain-lifter, it was a whale of a challenge, but the maestro’s clenched-teeth, “we’re going to pull this off come hell or high water” presence pulled every available ounce of energy and impassioned playing out of the musicians onstage. A few years back, this group’s weak spot was the high strings, which would lag sometimes or fall out of sync. No more. Wow! What a thrill it was to hear the shivery, staccato cascades of this rampaging Russian dance suite fly with equal parts abandon and minute focus from stage right.

The intensity continued courtesy of guest pianist Jeffrey Biegel, who stunned the crowd with a fiercely and similarly impassioned, marathon run through the fortissimo torrents and machinegunning virtuoso volleys of Saint-Saens’ Piano Concerto No. 2 in G Minor, Op. 22. While the dynamically rich, goosebump-inducing High Romantic swells and dips through triumph and angst and finally more triumph in the end were centered in the piano, the orchestra is also highly engaged rather than a backdrop, and the lushness and frequent solo passages from throughout the group were robust and assured.

Concluding the program was a particularly ambitious multimedia performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherezade, with violinist Bela Horvath in the solo spotlight with his silken, often downright plaintive resonance. There were also projections, and narrator Peninnah Schram in the role of “storyteller.” Many times an orchestra will provide a program listing the various points in a piece that illustrate one thing or another; Schram, with her precise, rhythmic cadences, kept perfect pace with the music as she related the story, a triumph of feminist pacifism over a power-and-grief-crazed tyrant.

Here’s where things got crazy, and not because the orchestra and Schram weren’t locked in, because they were. When the narration was audible, the effect was a refreshing change from, say, flipping through the program like you might do with a paperback edition of Shakespeare at Shakespeare in the Park to follow along with the plotline. Trouble is, it wasn’t always, and this was neither the fault of the orchestra – which Bernard kept on a steady, dynamic pace through the work’s famously austere, ambered quasi-orientalisms – nor Schram either. The problem was that the speakers she was running through were placed too close to the stage, and facing the crowd rather than, say, facing each further back, along the sidelines where sonic competition with the mighty group onstage wouldn’t have been an issue. And this wouldn’t even have been a factor had the orchestra been playing Jazz at Lincoln Center or Carnegie Hall, both venues where they’ve performed before with richly good results.

The Park Avenue Chamber Symphony’s next concert is December 6 at 3 PM at Rose Theatre at Jazz at Lincoln Center, focusing on a theme of innovation and paradigm shifts, pairing Gershwin’s Concerto in F with pianist Ted Rosenthal alongside Bartok’s challenging, high-voltage Concerto for Orchestra.

A Deliciously Grim, Old-Fashioned Multimedia Creation from Curtis Eller and the New Town Drunks

This year’s most memorable and individualistic Halloween artifact is Baudelaire in a Box: Songs of Anguish. It’s an ep by charismatic noir Americana songwriter/banjoist Curtis Eller in collaboration with Chapel Hill folk noir/circus rock band the New Town Drunks. And it’s a whole lot more than just a playlist or a cd. It’s a digital release – streaming at Bandcamp – that comes with a handcrafted volvelle that allows you to follow along with the songs’ grim imagery through a window above the wheel of Jamie B. Wolcott‘s colorful, matching illustrations underneath. Such “spinnies,” as they were called in the 19th century, are cousins of the flipbook and predecessors of the crankie. The text of the four tracks comprises imaginative English translations of four poems from Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal. The songs were written for performances of the “serialized recasting” of Les Fleurs Du Mal by Chicago’s Theater Oobleck.

Eller sings the first cut, The Joyful Dead (Le Mort Joyeux: for purposes of consistency between languages, we’re gonna stick with title case here, ok?). An alternate translation could be “The Contented Corpse.” Louis Landry’s macabrely twinkling glockenspiel fuels the simmering intro before the track gets going with a haphazardly jaunty bounce.

Eller also contributes The Albatross (L’Albatros), done as one of his signature noir blues numbers over a subtle backdrop of accordion and funeral organ textures behind his animated vocals and stark banjo. The translation is vivid: Eller goes the big picture rather than word-for-word, and he doesn’t bother with a rhyme scheme. The mashup of the final stanza is artful to the extreme, driving home Baudelaire’s equation of the tormented poet to the tortured bird amid the drunken sailors, crippled beneath the weight of its vast wings.

The New Town Drunks’ first track is Always the Same (Semper Eadem), a menacing tango sung with unselfconscious angst by Diane Koistinen over a pouncing beat, Doug Norton’s ominously chromatic Balkan accordion swirling through the mix. This particular translation, voicing Baudelaire’s proto-existentialist anguish over distractions from the inevitable, is a challenging one and takes some poetic license. The band’s other song is Le Vampire. Interestingly, they set Baudelaire’s savage kiss-off of a lyric to upbeat after-the-rain jazz-pop livened with Robo Jones’ trombone. As short albums go, there’s been nothing released this year that compares with this, unfair as that comparison is, considering the source of the lyrics. And the package is an Antiques Road Show type of piece, a limited edition bound to appreciate in value as the years go by.

Regular Einstein and Lazy Lions Reprise One of 2015’s Best Concerts at Rock Shop on Friday Night

What if you could live your whole life over again? Even better, what if you could just relive the fun parts? Unlikely as that may seem, there’s a fun part of your life just waiting to be relived, if you were one of the lucky hundred or so people who went to see genius lyrical rock bands Regular Einstein and Lazy Lions in late March at Rock Shop. If so, you can revisit that wild, intense night of wicked lyricism, catchy tunesmithing and fiery guitars this October 30 at 9 PM…or you can live it for the first time and be jealous of everybody who got to see this before spring arrived. Cover is ten bucks.

If memory serves right, it was a chillly walk downhill from Atlantic Avenue, but frontwoman/guitarist Paula Carino’s band played a searing set to open the show. This is why we go to concerts – not just to hear a group play all the tracks on their new album, as Regular Einstein did – but to rip the hell out of them. You hear Carino’s velvety voice and cool, clean, lean guitar lines, and you might expect subtle, and there was plenty of subtlety at this show, especially when it came to the lyrics, but the energy was through the roof. Carino’s voice took on a menacing edge as the grimly propulsive Never Saw It Coming got underway with its two-guitar crunch. The Queens Tornado and its sardonic outer-borough wordplay had a similarly pouncing intensity. They hit an electrified, chord-chopping Celtic ballad sway, then took the mood down into the bittersweetly gorgeous territory that Carino has made a career of mining with Hydrangea and its dynamically shifting metaphors.

Likewise, they picked up Jimmyville – a pensively defiant adolescent escape anthem on the new album Chimp Haven – with resonance and stomp, lead guiitarist Dave Benjoya teaming with Carino, drummer Nancy Polstein and bassist Andy Mattina, whose gritty lines made him a second lead guitarist. After a detour toward punk rock with Bad Actor and its snarky Rotten Tomatoes movie references, they brought it down into nocturnal tropicalia rock with the album’s title track. From the riff-rocking Three-Legged Race – a double-entrendre-loaded mashup of early Kinks and the Pretenders –  they hit a high point with the most unselfconsciously haunting number of the night, The Good Times and its morosely punchnig 6/8 minor-key sway. The loudest and punkest number was the snidely and blackly amusing Old People.

Lazy Lions frontman Jim Allen made his mark in the early zeros as a sort of New York counterpart to Elvis Costello and Graham Parker. A guitarist by trade, he plays organ in this outfit, who draw deeply on classic new wave while taking the style to new places. And they very rarely play out: this gig, the album release for their brilliant new one When Dreaming Lets You Down, might have been their first since a sizzling Lower East Side gig way way back in 2008. They opened with a look back to early 80s Parker in I Don’t Think That It’s Gonna Stop, guitarist Robert Sorkin blazing over the tight backbeat of bassist Anne-Marie Stehn and drummer Sean McMorris. Allen didn’t waste any time hitting a lyrically scathing peak with Susannah Rachel, a kiss-off anthem rivalled by few others. Allen’s narrator can’t wait to “get high above this vale of tears” and disappear like steam into a chilliy night sky.

They made their way from a funky shuffle to a jauntily soaring chorus on the next number, then a slinky Elvis Costello Goon Squad groove on the enigmatc It’s Just the Night, an anthem for all of us nocturnal creatures who can’t resist all the delicious and also the less delicious things you find in the shadows, literally and metaphorically. Allen took an all-too-brief, swirly organ solo on the next number, then hit another punchy peak with the snarling She’s Your Nightmare Now, Sorkin’s guitar raging as the organ reached distortion point.

They went back to Parker new wave soul sway and got funny with Scientific – as in “she’s not coldhearted, she’s just scientific…you don’t wanna mess around with someone like that.” The band switched out all the extraneous rhythm of the album version of the irresisitibly catchy Let the Bad Times Roll for a burning, backbeat drive, then Stehn pushed the creepy new wave disco groove on the number after that. The straight-up, deadpan cheery cover of the Go-Go’s Our Lips Are Sealed was a lot of fun, right down to the murky “hush, my darling” bridge, Allen reaching way up from his usual baritone and nailing the notes. They closed with the cynical, self-effacing Magellan in Reverse, from the band’s auspicious 2008 debut ep. Hit Rock Shop on Friday night and avoid the Halloween plague from out of state.

A Dark, Surreal, Original, Carnivalesque Romp by Fable Cry

Nashville band Fable Cry play what they call “scamp rock.” It’s an interesting, original, frequently creepy sound. Lickety-split, theatrical noir cabaret gives way to roughhewn Irish punk rock, or darker Appalachian-tinged sounds. Sometimes all of that in a single song. Among current bands, the Dear Hunter – who’ve got a new album of their own – seem to be an obvious influence, but Fable Cry are their own animal. Since their debut a couple of years ago, the group have expanded from brother-sister multi-instrumentalists Zach and Kirstie Ferrin to include cellist Joshua Dent, violinist/singer Jo Cleary, bassist Scott Fernandez and drummer Rachel Gerlach.

Their album We’ll Show You Where the Monsters Are – streaming at Soundcloud – kicks off with Onion Grin. The frontman’s stage-whispery, Brecht/Weill-inspired persona comes through immediately, although the grossness implied in the title isn’t part of Zach Ferrin’s shtick. Dead Or Alive (For Now) would be a period-perfect 80s goth anthem if it wasn’t anchored by growly, rattling bowed bass and cello: “You won’t think I find eyes at the top of the hill,” the narrator leers. Cleary eventually caps it off with a savagely shivery violin solo.

The Good Doctor alternates between a sea chantey-ish waltz and a vastly less cartoonish, quieter theme: it’s sort of a mashup of Kotorino and Not Waving But Drowning. The pirate-anthem vibe continues, with a Pogues-ish punk rock edge, in From Myth To Moon: “What’s beyond is better than what’s behind,” Zach insists. Once again, it’s Cleary’s witchy, swirling violin pushing the track to peak velocity.

You Ain’t My Baby No More is a bouncy, cheery punkgrass number. Fancy Dancing has a creepy, balletesque sway, Gorey-esque call-and-response between band members and a refrain that might be either “hide your fear,” or ‘hide your beer.” Both make sense in context.

The Zoo of No Return is just plain kooky, a surreal blend of Weimar cabaret, Romany punk and hip-hop. Set Me Loose brings a return to waltz time, jumpily stabbing strings and an escape theme (about time, from the looks of things). The Train Song shuffles and shambles along, taking a familiar railroad theme completely over the top and off the rails. The album winds up with the mostly-instrumental Slow Down, part bluegrass, part garage rock. There seems to be a central concept here: a journey across land and sea is involved. Where it leads is open to interpretation, but it’s a fun ride all the same. Fable Cry sound like they’re a great live band. Watch this space for future NYC appearances.

Cult Favorite Italian Art-Rock Band Rises From the Grave

Today’s Halloween album is the video game kind. The original Goblin, one of Italy’s best-known art-rock bands from the 70s, are best remembered for their horror film soundtracks, most notably Dawn of the Dead. Goblin Rebirth pick up where that band left off, with a new album streaming at Bandcamp.

After a brief early-zeros reunion by the original band (whose lineup was always in a state of flux, more or less) Goblin Rebirth got their start playing rarer archival repertoire, and soon found themselves writing new material. Stormy clouds of synth! Soaring, snapping, trebly bass! Big, dramatic drums! Heavy, lingering, one-foot-up-on-the-monitor guitar chords! If anything, the new songs – all of them instrumentals, essentialy – are even more epic and propulsive then the group’s famous 70s and 80s output, maybe since the lone original members are bassist Fabio Pignatelli and drummer Agostino Marangolo. The new group also includes dual keyboardists Aidan Zammit and Danilo Cherni along with guitarist Giacomo Anselmi, who also plays bouzouki. If you like your soundtracks packed with nonstop action, put in your earbuds and crank this puppy up: it’s the audio equivalent of a double espresso.

The opening track is Requiem For X – it doesn’t take long before its wistful whistling gives way to a couple of King Kong drumbeats, Dracula’s castle piano rivulets, a a churchbell or two and then Pignatelli enters with his treble turned up, the guitars ringing and rising overhead as the track reaches escape velocity. With its loopy, trebly synth lines and echoey guitars, Back in 74 brings to mind Kraftwerk with a real rhythm section: again, Pignatelli’s incisive lines put him front and center in the role of terse second lead guitarist.

Book of Skulls is slower and closer to something you might hear in a classic game like Castlevania – tongue-in-cheek oscillations and swirls abound, then make way for Anselmi’s ornate David Gilmourisms. Creepy/twinkly electric piano, droll portamento flourishes, choral samples and more of that achingly climbing lead guitar rise over the pounding sway of the rhythm section throughout the somewhat less-than-mysterious Mysterium. Evil in the Machine, unlike what its title might imply, is the least techy, most straight-ahead stadium rock-style track here – and also one of the most genuinely menacing, as it builds to a tense peak before taking an unexpected turn toward funk.

The band take their time bulding out of suspenseful atmospherics in Forest: again, it’s the drums and guitar, Anselmi fighting off any direct path to an easy resolution, that move front and center as the theme rises to a peak and then subsides. With its wary mashup of Andalucian and Balkan sounds, the album’s best and most genuinely menacing track, Dark Bolero features emphatic cello from Francesco Marini. The final cut, Rebirth, with its endlessly cyclical phrases, is the closest thing to what you might call prog here. As a whole, this isn’t particularly scary music, but there’s never a dull moment.

Joanne Weaver’s Noir Electro Glistens and Gleams From an Icy Distance

Going out in costume this Halloween? Nobody really wants to be the Boston Bomber, or a Republican operative, or a laughingstock, but we can all dress up at the expense of Dzhokhar Tsareyev, or Hillary, or Trump, right?

Speaking of dressing up, the blip on the radar that was Lana Del Rey seems to have jumpstarted a cottage industry of would-be femme fatales who think that a slinky black dress, fire-engine-red lipstick and a smoky come-on of a voice somehow equates to noir. Among the genuinely noir artists here in New York – Karla Rose & the Thorns ripping it up at CMJ a couple of weeks ago, Liz Tormes haunting the American Folk Art Museum last night – Joanne Weaver factors in. Her latest album Interstellar Songbook II is streaming at Soundcloud, and it’s one of the most original, interesting noir releases of recent years. Imagine Jeff Lynne circa 1981 producing an album of jazz standards reinvented by a swing chanteuse with a completely unadorned delivery that’s all the more disarming for its directness.

The not-so-secret weapon throughout this album is an Omichord synthesizer (or a damn good digital facsimile of one), its shimmery oscillation building a starry-night ambience throughout each of the the eleven tracks on Weaver’s sophomore release. Like a late-period ELO or Pink Floyd album, it opens with some wry, sampled movie dialogue. Begin the Beguine sets the stage, awash in icy reverb, the tremolo on the funeral parlor organ wide open: it’s closer to Orbison than the material on Weaver’s more overtly jazz-oriented debut, which is why it works so well

Weaver freezes any possible Borscht Belt shtick out of Golden Earrings and turns it into hi-tech Vegas noir: the deep-space kettledrum completes the desolate picture in contrast to the come-hither lyrics. Moonlight Serenade takes the atmosphere back into the shadows, while Sway – the album’s first single – gets an aptly creepy trip-hop groove. The strongest – and saddest – track is Summer Kisses, Winter Tears, reinvented as a Lynchian bolero.

With its languid trip-hop beat and shiny, chrome-plated late 90s downtempo lounge production, If I Didn’t Care is out of place here. Weaver’s take of Autumn Leaves brings back the gloomy Sunday evening mood, its layers of keys and delicate electronic touches spiraling out into the darkness. From there she segues into the album’s most cinematic track, a lushly ominous, neoromantic version of As Time Goes By – if you can handle the anachronism, think Julie London covering Siouxsie.The final cut is a delicate, flamenco-tinged take of When the Swallows Come Back from Capistrano. Whoever produced this album is a genius. Weaver’s NYC hang is the swanky Flatiron Room, 37 W 26th St. (6th Ave/Broadway) where she’ll be with her band on December 18 at 9 PM.

Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats – The Ultimate 2015 Halloween Soundtrack?

The opening track of Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats’ latest album The Night Creeper- streaming at Spotify – is Waiting for Blood. What makes this band so macabre? The slow, creeping tempos? The burning, distorted minor-key guitar progressions? What might set this group apart from all the post-Sleep, third-generation Sabbath-influenced stoner metal acts is the vocal harmonies. And when lead guitarist Kevin Starrs finally sends his hammer-ons spinning through the channels, right to left and back in a second, that’s just the icing on the cake. Track two, Murder Nights, opens with a noxious swirl of distorted roto organ and three-part vocal harmonies that evoke the Move circa 1970 as much as they put Sabbath to shame: “People creep like poison in the mind.”

Downtown takes a lurid ba-bump stripper riff and makes stalker metal out of it: the Wytches come to mind. Pusher Man springboards off of Iron Maiden off their most scorching, wide-angle minor-key mid-80s intensity and strips it down for a searing, unrelenting sway that’s impossible to turn away from, Starrs adding one of the many tantalizingly brief acid-metal guitar solos that permeate this album. He’s the rare lead guitarist you want to hear more of.

Yellow Moon makes for an unexpected respite from the horror with its slowly unwinding early King Crimson-style psychedelia…until the reverb guitars of Starrs and Yotam Rubinger build to a terrified starscape and then fade out. Starrs gets the twisted Melody Lane going with his macabre organ over the stomp of bassist Vaughn Stokes and drummer Itamar Rubinger, a twisted tale of desire whose object “pulls a knife when she loves in the dark” and leaves a “bloody remark.”

The album’s swaying, menacingly crescendoing title track is the most retro – if you can imagine a collaboration between the late Carl Wayne and Tony Iommi. But then it picks up with an even more enveloping Iron Maiden sweep peaking with a searing rise to the rafters.

Stokes’ growling, pouncing, propulsive bass propels Inside, a mashup of Arthur Lee, the Kinks and maybe ELO at their most disturbing. The album’s most original track is Slow Death, which opens as a Move-like anthem but slowly builds to a volcanic, lingering peak that cruelly fades out. The album winds out with the unexpetedly subdued Black Motorcade, a Doors-influenced dirge that wouldn’t be out of place in the Frank Flight Band catatog. Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats’ current European tour continues with a gig at the University of Stuttgart on October 24.