Distinctive Postrock Instrumentalists Tigue Return Home with a Greenpont Show

Tigue – percussionists Matt Evans, Amy Garapic and Carson Moody – play an imaginative, distinctive, hypnotic yet kinetic blend of indie classical, minimalism, postrock and drone music. On their latest album, Peaks – a suite, streaming at Bandcamp – each play various drums and other bangable/rattlable objects, along with a kitchen sink’s worth of other instruments. For example, Evans also serves as the group’s main keyboardist, but also plays shruti box and melodica, as his bandmates also do. Garapic also adds vibraphone throughout the album’s most tuneful moments. They’re just back from a midwest tour, with a homecoming show at 11 PM on December 3 at Manhattan Inn in Greenpoint.

The best way to experience the album is when you’re not multitasking. Otherwise, the subtly shifting, cantering rhythms of Cranes won’t catch your attention. From there, they segue with a crash into Sitting, slowly adding bagpipe-like, droning synth chords as the sonic picture slowly brightens and the swaying beat recedes back into the mix, then rises and falls with a propeller-like insistence. Mouth is where the pace picks up even faster and the tempo gets tricky as a catchy, vamping tune slowly develops.

Then there’s a brief, static, ambient interlude followed by the pretty self-explanatory Drips. Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan and James McNew add guitar and bass, respectively on Dress Well as its circles expand outward from neo Steve Reich to echoey, lingering yet propulsive psychedelia. From there they follow a methodical downward tangent into Cerulean, with its trippy sheets of white noise shifting through the sonic frame. The final cut, Ripped, brings the suite full circle, sometimes primal, sometimes icily elegant. Fans of similarly pulsing, hypnotic instrumental groups like Dawn of Midi should check them out.

Advertisement

Visions of a Deadly, Rainy Friday Night This December, In and Out of Focus

This is not a dream.

The gleep struts and waltzes in from the shadows, licking his lips. Is that blood? Maybe. Whatever it is, there’s a lot of it, and it’s energized him. He makes a mad dash at your face, only to swerve away at the last second as his foot catches something on the rain-slicked cobblestones  – no pavement down here in what’s left of the old city. Better leave him in his rubber raincoat to slink away now that he’s made an impression. Damn, it’s cold out here, and it’s wet. Global warming be damned. Where is that umbrella?

The funeral procession wears sombreros. Black ones to match their vests and bolo ties, which are only visible in a trick of the light from the lamppost, at the top of its arc as the flickers oscilllate downward to blackness. Suddenly the parade scampers off and in a second it’s clear why, as an ancient if immaculately preserved, jet-black 1956 Nash Ambassador police cruiser enters the picture in a rush of oxygen and exhaust and then is gone in a split second. Where did that come from, and was there any police department anywhere in the union that actually used that make and model in 1956?

This isn’t a dream.

Pan in on that warehouse a block away. Who’s that going up the fire escape, how did he get there and why is it taking him so long? Suddenly he sprints up the wrought iron and vanishes. Is it the gleep from the first few frames? Probably not, considering how fast he moved. Everything is moving too fast now to focus for very long anyway, even if everything is also simultaneously moving very slowly. Will daylight ever come? At this point, that’s doubtful.

[What if Nino Rota had a secret life beyond the erudite, irrepressibly witty Italian intelllectual cinemaphile composer that everyone took him for? What if he was a serial killer? Just asking.]

Timothy MacVeigh and Suspect #2 (remember him?) are cruising cross-country in their loaded rental van, headed blithely for Junction City, Kansas. It’s a comfortable, big-sky afternoon, but one that feels inevitable, heavy despite the wide-open expanse above them. Remember, this is not a dream. MacVeigh floors the loaded-down vehicle to get past an eighteen-wheeler and the big V8 delivers an unexpected roar to get the job done.

These are just a few of the kind of images that might come to mind at a Big Lazy concert. New York’s creepiest, most cinematic noir soundtrack instrumental band has a monthly Friday night residency at Barbes. Their next gig is at 10 PM on December 4 – and if you’re coming, get there on time because the last time they played here, they gave away their second set to another band (the awesome Mercury Radio Theater – more on them here a little later).

Bassist Andrew Hall slinks and bows his lines, drawing on a tarpit of lethal low-register sonics. Guitarist Steve Ulrich is a surgeon, or a coroner, awash in reverb, armed with a sharp scalpel.

Drummer Yuval Lion rides the traps, very subtly. For the record, it’s hard to remember anyone playing the rims with as much nuance as he did at this particular show, whenever it was – October’s, most likely (the cassette isn’t labeled for reasons that will soon be obvious).

Listening back to the room mix, it swirls, as if through a flange. One second the sound’s distinct, front and center in the frame, the next it pans left and then makes its way to the middle again. Maybe because the recorder’s owner might have been swaying in front of it, obscuring the sonic picture, adrift in a haze of whiskey and PBR? That’s a possibility. Barbes is a place to drink. They take good care of you there. It’s up to you to take care after you head uphill through the shadows to the F train, or to the Donut Diner on 7th Ave. if you don’t have to rush home to file your story.

Violinist Sarah Alden and Her Band Play One of the Year’s Funnest, Most Counterintuitive Shows at Barbes

Violinist Sarah Alden is a founding member of the late, great Luminescent Orchestrii, who were as definitive, and multistylistically amazing, as any New York circus rock band ever was. After that boisterous unit was pretty much finished, she put out a similarly brilliant 2013 album, Fists of Violets, her first as a fulltime frontwoman. Since then she’s been in demand in both bluegrass and Eastern European folk circles. She’s also got a long-awaited new album, Up to the Sky, due out momentarily. A copule of weeks ago at Barbes, she and the band treated the crowd to a sneak peek that was as eclectic and adrenalizing as any other project she’s been involved with up to this point, which says a lot.

With Rima Fand on violin and piano, Kyle Sanna on guitar, Matthias Kunzli on drums and Ben Gallina on bass, Alden opened with a reggae tune. Uh oh, was this going to be just a pale approximation, like the Zach Brown Band? Nopr. The rhythm section had a great time with it; it was like watching Bob Marley’s drum-and-bass team backing a spiky, kinetic chamber pop band. Sanna jangled enigmatically as the album’s swaying title track got underway, Alden leading the group up to a catchy, Talking Heads-like peak on the chorus, both the strings and vocal harmonies swirling with acidic, Bartok-like close harmonies that quickly turned out to be one of this group’s most distinctive traits. “Strangers are we,” Alden and Fand harmonized with a similar edge to kick off the number after that, a mashup of 70s folk-rock and indie classical.

Next was a funky, quirky song with Sanna playing a simple, catchy, circling guitar riff over a trip-hop beat, the violins stabbing at the melody with their pizzicato accents. Alden’s pensive rainy-day vocal intro after that hinted that the song would stay in pastoral territory; instead, the band took it up with a guitar-fueled art-rock gravitas; then the band gave it a doublespeed Keystone Kops scamper. Some of the material reminded of cellist Jody Redhage’s pastoral chamber-pop quartet Rose & the Nightingale; others, like the heartbroken, elegantly crescendoing number that came next, reminded of Tin Hat, when that group has vocals out front.

Fand’s wide-angle, Asian-tinged piano mingled with Sanna’s steadily austere strums under Alden’s airy vocals and violin on the night’s most anthemic tune. After a turn back in a catchy, cyclically bucolic direction, the band picked up the pace with biting, insistent, minor-key guitar funk, like ELO’s Evil Woman but with a better singer out front. Alden credited her childood trips with her grandmother, searching for the grave of a long lost relative in Sugar Grove Cemetery in Wilmington, Ohio, as inspiration for the plaintive, Appalachian-tinged Aunt Viola’s Waltz. From there the band blazed through a careening take of the noir guitar-driven title track from Alden’s previous album, ablaze with sizzling tremolo-picking and cascades from Sanna. Persuaded to play an encore, they did the reggae tune again. Alden’s next gig is a free show at the World Financial Center on December 15 at 5:30 PM; she and the band are also there on the 19th at 4:30 PM.

Simmering, Relevant, Lyrical, Cutting-Edge Americana Rock Sounds from Fireships

Accessible and anthemic as Fireships are, they’re also as cutting edge as rock bands get these days. More often than not, they play a style of music that barely registered on the radar fifteen years ago: you could call it Americana chamber pop. As Americana became this city’s, and this nation’s default music, it seems that a lot of musicians in that style wanted to create something more hefty than, say, country blues, but also more substantial and tuneful than Coldplay or Fleet Foxes. That’s not the only hybrid that Fireships cultivate: frontman/guitarist/banjoist Andrew Vladeck writes fearlessly populist, Dylanesque narratives, and the band gets gritty with some pretty straight-up highway rock from time to time. Their debut album is streaming at Bandcamp; they’re playing at the big room at the Rockwood on November 30 at 9 PM. Drinks at the Rockwood are scary expensive, and they enforce a drink minimum there, but you can get a seltzer for three bucks.

After a bit of a false start, the album gets cooking with Going Down Fighting and its mashup of Penny Lane Beatles, gospel and strummy Americana, a moody but ultimately optimistic anthem for the current global depression. Living the Dream follows even more of an epic, Roger Waters-inflected sweep, the violins of Hannah Thiem – who’s also a darkly brilliant solo artist in her own right – and guest Skye Steele teaming with Lauren Balthrop’s electric piano to provide a pillowy backdrop for Vladeck’s vividly torrential lyrics.

Likewise, Long Shadow takes Blonde on Blonde Dylan into Deer Tick territory as Vladek paints a grimly picturesque but defiant portrait among the down-and-out:

I went away to get my blood changed
Had my wires rearranged
You might think that I’m acting strange
I’m just acting tough
I fired a shot thru the floor
The circus ran straight for the door
You asked me what I did that for
I guess I I had enough…
Flying cars and ricochets
Not a soul escapes unscathed
You might think those were the days
The best left to the past…
Blinds are drawn and a deadbolt clicks
Those dirty dogs will rip you to bits
All that funky junkie shit, you just ask my mates…

Countdown Time also traces a troubled trajectory, a gloomy drinking-and-driving anthem set to an oldschool disco groove: “Kill the rocket boosters, we’re on cruise control, we’ll make a tiki bar out of the console,” Vladeck intones. Then drummer Jason Lawrence and bassist Chris Buckridge push the fiery revolutionary anthem Chasing the Sun with a symphonic Phl Spector ba-bump beat, Vladeck channeling both the angst and the withering dismissiveness of a milllennial generation sick of living without a future and those who’d steal it away: “You can’t distract us, you’re old and your done,” he snarls.

Likewise, All We Got reflects on a now-or-never choice of sticking with a broken system or breaking free: it’s the Wallflowers updated for the teens. Vladek again looks back to Spector with the ballad Words Escape Me. Carried Away builds an ominous, oldtimey bluesy ambience, shivery strings mingling with Vladeck’s steady fingerpicking. The most savagely funny number here is Passing Knowledge of the Sexes, a spot-on, creepily cynical look at the realities of online dating.

Fantasy is another really funny track, caustically chronicling how people fall for celebrity culture: “Are you meant to hang from a velvet rope?” Vladeck challenges. The album winds up with the dreamily surreal 99-percenter folk-rock of Unplug the Stars. If you want to know what the smart kids are listening to these days, this is it.

An Auspicious Glimpse of This Year’s Greenwich Village Orchestra Season

The buzz at the reception after Sunday’s Greenwich Village Orchestra concert was electric. On one hand, that’s to be expected after a show full of thrills like this one was. But people were still raving about the season’s first program, one veteran concertgoer venturing so far as to call that particular performance of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 the best she’d ever seen. “I keep telling people, you can spend a hundred and fifty bucks for the New York Philharmonic…or you can drop twenty bucks here, and it’s every bit as good,” said another. Much as Alan Gilbert has done very good things with the Philharmonic, one thing he hasn’t – to be fair, this probably isn’t part of his job description – is to lower ticket prices. The cheapest advertised seats to a recent performance of Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances – a suite that’s a lot of fun but hardly the composer’s best work – were forty bucks. Suggested donation to the GVO is $20, $10 for seniors and kids. And afterward you can schmooze, grab a glass of wine or a snack if you’re so inclined and bask in the magic of what  you’ve just witnessed.

And the GVO draws a crowd that’s more committed and critical than most, an artsy bunch, many of them musicians themselves. They’re considerably younger, more diverse and more representative of the population of this city as a whole, compared to your typical blue-haired Lincoln Center audience. This time out there were plenty of families and kids along with the expected slate of retired folks and just average everyday people. If you’d put everyone who’d been at this performance n the same train, you’d never guess that they were all coming from the same concert. What did they see that made them so excited?

Music Director Barbara Yahr led them through Verdi’s Forza del Destino Overture to get things started. It’s not heavy or particularly profound music, but it is a way to get a quick read on how ready an orchestra and conductor are to shift on a dime, from lush and sweeping, to lively and balletesque, or to wistful and pensive, and this performance quickly reminded how friendly and intuitive the long relationship between this orchestra and conductor continues to be.

Baritone Jesse Blumberg joined them for Mahler’s Songs of the Wayfarer, which posed different challenges, again an easy barometer for how well an ensemble can rise to meet them. The song cycle is typical Mahler in that it uses the entirety of the sonic spectrum, meaning that everyone in the group has to be on their toes, and they were. Especially Blumberg. There’s a point in this lovelorn suite where the singer really has to reach back and belt over the orchestra as the angst rises, and Yahr made it clear that she wasn’t going to sacrifice any passion in the dynamics of her interpretation, but Blumberg made clear that his destino was to go to the well for all the extra forza required. As a bonus – something that often happens at GVO concerts – the more somber, subtle Mahler song that followed, Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen (I am lost to the world), was a surprise, not originally on the program.

The piece de resistance was the best performance of Richard Strauss’ Death and Transfiguration that this blog has ever witnessed – and there have been several. Some will disagree with this opinion, but it’s the composer’s greatest work. In the hands of this orchestra, it became the most dynamic and explosive tone poem ever written, complete with a member of the violin section providing an informative reading of the poetry that inspired it. It was here that the thematic sense of this concert – the GVO loves theme shows – became most vivid, an uneasy and bittersweet late-life reflection heavy on dubious choices and missed opportunities. The confidently pulsing orchestration early on was steady and suspenseful, voicing the waves of regret as the narrative went on, all the more potently affecting in contrast to the silky calm as the strings took the piece out with a pillowy touch. The Greenwich Village Orchestra has been a downtown fixture for decades and has a devoted following, but this season looks like the best in years. The orchestra’s next performance, December 13 at 3 PM, is their annual interactive family concert, featuring the children of the Actionplay chorus along with works by Bizet, Beethoven and Richard Strauss.

Lounge Lizard Jack Ladder Brings His Rakish 80s Persona to Town Next Week

If you’re going to steal from someone, you might as well rip off somebody good, right? Unlike a lot of crooners from Down Under, singer Jack Ladder isn’t trying to be Nick Cave. He’d rather be Leonard Cohen. Which isn’t such a bad thing, in a very stylized, 80s, Everybody Knows kind of way. His latest album Playmates, with his band the Dreamlanders, is streamng at Spotify, with a trio of tracks up at Bandcamp as well if you want a taste and don’t feel like riding the fader to kill the ads. Ladder and the band have a couple of New York shows coming up: on December 1, they’re at Baby’s All Right at around 10 for $14. Then they’re at the Mercury the following night, December 2 at 7:30 PM for two bucks less if you get tix in advance. The Mercury box office is open Tuesday through Saturday, noon to 6 PM.

Sharon Van Etten guests on ethereal backing vocals on the album’s opening track, Come On Back This Way. It’s a good story, one that pretty much everybody’s known. A guy and a girl leave the bar, under “the magnesium moon, the streets all smell like piss…if tomorrow never comes, I wouldn’t ever care at all,” he says. She’s drunker than he is. She’s taken a glass from the bar, probably wonders why the creep she’s with won’t leave her alone and is pissed off about it. She does something reckless that she shouldn’t – a few things, actually. And the ending is less pat than you might expect.

Track two is Her Hands, an icy 80s downtempo number awash in trippy/cheesy synth patches, a portrait of a femme fatale. The cynical goth-pop Model World is where “The streets are alive with picket fences,” and “Where we need to know everyone is safe…this shit wasn’t built to last, the water’s overflowing, and privacy is a thing of the past, everybody knows it, you can’t escape what you create.”

Reputation Amputation reaches for squizzling industrial ambience, a dirtier take on what Iggy was going for on the Idiot, maybe. By contrast, lingering Lynchian guitars echo in from the shadows on the bolero-tinged Let Me Love You. Van Etten adds her wounded understatement on To Keep & to Be Kept, a new wave update on angst-fueled Orbison noir 60s pop. With its dry-as-a-bone drum samples and warptone synth, The Miracle is period-perfect late 80s new wave.

Ladder takes a stab at heavy-duty stadium goth grandeur with Neon Blue, while Our Ascension brings to mind Billy Idol with a worldview. The final cut is the aphoristic ballad Slow Boat to China and its shameless Leonard C. quotes. While the album’s production is cold and techy, there are some neat touches, like the faux Hawaiian guitar licks oscillating from the portamento lever here and there, and a decent approximation of gritty guitars. And a look at the red-jacketed Ladder (not his real name, obviously) on the album cover suddenly makes twisted sense: OMG, that’s Rick Springfield! And wasn’t he Australian? Are we ever going to escape the 80s or are they going to be stalking us forever?

Darkly Cinematic Pianist Romain Collin’s New Album Transcends Category

Pianist Romain Collin is one of those rare artists who can’t be pigeonholed. His music defies description. Much of it has the epic sweep and picturesque quality of film music, although his noir-tinged new album, Press Enter is not connected, at least at the moment, to any visual component other than your imagination. Some of it you could call indie classical, since there are echoes of contemporary composers throughout all but one of its ten tracks. And while it’s not jazz per se, it ends with a muted, wee hours solo piano street scene take of Thelonious Monk’s Round About Midnight. For those of you who might be in town over the Thanksgiving holiday, Collin and his long-running trio, bassist Luques Curtis and drummer Kendrick Scott are playing a three-night stand, November 27-29 at Iridium at 8:30 PM.Cover is $27.50.

The opening track, 99 (alternate title, at least from the mp3s this blog received: Bales of Pot). Is it a reggae number? Nope. It’s a brief series of variations on a tersely circling, Philip Glass-inspired theme. If Rick Wakeman could have figured out how to stay within himself after, say, 1973, he might have sounded something like this. Like Clockwork, true to its title, takes that motorik riff and then expands on it, with echoes of both Glass and Keith Jarrett, slowing it down for more of an anthemic sweep. It sets the stage for how Collin will use his trademark textures – acoustic piano echoed by very subtle electroacoustic textures, from simple reverb, to doubletracking on electric keys, to light ambient touches.

Raw, Scorched & Untethered actually comes across as anything but those things: it’s a stately, brooding quasi horror film theme that picks up with a jackhammer insistence, in the same vein as Clint Mansell might do. Cellist Laura Metcalf adds elegantly austere textures as she does in places here. Holocene hints that it’s going to simply follow a rather effete series of indie rock changes but then edges toward pensive pastoral jazz before rising with a catchy main-title gravitas and then moving lower into the reflecting pool again. The Kids circles back toward the opening track, but with a wry, Monkish sensibility (although that whistling is awful and really disrupts the kind of subtly amusing narrative Collin could build here without it).

The darkest, creepiest and most epic track is Webs, alternating between stormy menace and more morose foreshadowing over stygian, bell-like low lefthand accents. Another menacing knockout is Event Horizon, which eerily commenorates the eventual exoneration – courtesy of the Innocence Project – of seven wrongfully convicted men. Separating them, San Luis Obispo is an unexpected and pretty straight-up take of the old Scottish folk song Black Is the Color. Collin then reverts to no-nonsense macabre staccato sonics with The Line (Dividing Good and Evil). The album isn’t up at the usual places on the web, although there are three tracks streaming at ACT Records’ site, and Collin has an immense amount of eclectic material up at his Soundcloud page.

Julia Haltigan Channels a Simmering Noir Intensity at the Poisson Rouge

Unlikely as it is that the leader of one of the city’s most dynamic bands would be just as entertaining and luridly gripping as a solo act, that’s what noir songwriter Julia Haltigan was Saturday night at the Poisson Rouge. It was a good gig for her, not her usual crowd, which tends to be on the young and wild side, something you might expect for someone who channels a torchy, retro allure and a menace that’s sometimes distant and sometimes in your face. This show gave her a chance to connect with an older, bridge-and-tunnel date-night audience who’d come out for an easy-listening evening with singer-songwriter Vonda Shepard. Haltigan’s regular backing unit has jazz sophistication but also feral energy; playing mostly by herself, with just her trusty vintage Gibson guitar and her reverb pedal, she used the moment to work the corners with a razorwire nuance that matched her songs’ simmering intensity.

Haltigan also seized the opportunity to make points with the audience via a couple of good stories. The first concerned some unexpected consequences in the wake of allowing her electric mandolinist dad – who also made a cameo during the show on smoky blues harp – to serve as an admin at her Facebook fan page. The second looked back to a past decade when people had Blackberries. Haltigan explained that she once went about a year without texting “hi” to anyone for fear of the gizmo translating that as “I’m horny.” Her phone ended up embarrassing her that way a couple of times, once in an exchange with her cousins, before she realized what was going on. That took awhile.

One day during rehearsal, she related the story to her bassist. “Remember that time I borrowed your phone?” he asked her. “I reset the autocorrect.”

That was the comic relief from the songs’ relentless, smoky disquiet. An appropriately spare take of Skeleton Dance, she explained, contemplated a sort of “Mickey Mouse version of death.” But that was the exception. A co-write with the Waterboys’ Mike Scott shifted from an enigmatic stroll to the kind of anthemic chorus you’d expect from that band; a little later, Haltigan led the crowd in a singalong of a similarly pensive, oldtime gospel-flavored Freddie Stevenson song. But her own material was the most memorable. She opened with a slow, haunting oldschool soul-tinged ballad, a woman on the run in her Waitsian hotel room in the wee hours, looking back on what she’ll never have again. From there Haltigan went toward dark rockabilly with the irrepressible Gasoline & Matches and the defiant I Don’t Wanna Fall in Love, airing out her powerful low register. The best song of the night was a murderously scampering border rock anthem that wouldn’t have been out of place at a Karla Rose & the Thorns show.

Haltigan next plays with her band on December 15 at 10:15 PM at the Manderley Bar at the McKittrick Hotel, 532 W 27th St. (10th/11th Aves, south side of the street, look for the little red light at the top of the stoop).

Haunting Noir Psychedelia and a Rare Williamsburg Show by Fernando Viciconte

“Everything you’re saying turned out wrong,” Fernando Viciconte muses. “Busted and broken or dead and gone.” Then a Farfisa keens, way back in the mix. And then the song explodes. The song is Save Me, the opening track on his new album Leave the Radio On, streaming at Bandcamp. And it’s killer. Sort of the lost great Steve Wynn album.

Viciconte hails from Argentina originally. Got his start in LA twenty-odd years ago, fronting a band called Monkey Paw. Eventually landed in Portland, Oregon. Wynn heard him and gave him the thumbs-up, as does his Baseball Project bandmate Peter Buck, who plays a lot of guitar on the album. You could call this noir psychedelia, for the sake of hanging a name on it, and you wouldn’t be off the mark, although there are a lot of different flavors here from both north and south of the border. It’s one of the best records of the year (and it is a record – you can get it on vinyl). Viciconte is making a rare New York swing, with a gig on November 27 at 9 PM at Pete’s. He’s also at the small room at the Rockwood tomorrow night, the 25th at 8.

The album’s second cut, The Dogs, is a lot quieter and vastly more surreal, with a similar sense of desperation and doom: Viciconte airs out his balmy, Lennonesque voice as the fuzztones come in with a swoosh of cymbals and a big exhaust fan blast of reverb. El Interior blends uneasy organ and mariachi horns into its Patagonian gothic resonance, an allusive tale of return and despair.

Icy, trebly layers of acoustic guitar mingle with eerily stately piano as So Loud gets underway, then picks up with a shuffling border rock groove up to a murderous series of drumshots out. The slow, brooding 6/8 anthem Friends and Enemies traces the last days of a dying relationship over Daniel Eccles’ elegaic guitar and pedal steel lines. Viciiconte hints that he’s going to take The Freak in a growling garage rock direction, but instead rises toward circus rock drama and desperation, David Bowie as covered by southwestern gothic supergroup Saint Maybe, maybe.

Paul Brainard’s pedal steel and then Buck’s mandolin sail woundedly above Viciconte’s low-key, defeated vocals and steady acoustic guitar on another elegaic number, the vintage C&W-inflected Kingdom Come:

Stay in pale moonlight
Stand your ground and choose your side
We don’t believe you anymore
We’ve all crawled on your killing floor

Then the band picks up the pace with the backbeat-driven Burned Out Love, part blistering paisley underground anthem, part wickedly catchy late Beatles. The gloomiest number here, White Trees takes a turn back down into spare folk noir:

When you left the table, who followed you home?
The knives and daggers left flesh and bone
The moon moon was shining on that cursed white stone
And you were crying and crying, trying to let it go

The catchiest yet arguably most haunting of all the tracks is the surreal In Their Heads, with its echoey blend of backward masking and ghostly narrative of childhood memories of an execution. One can only imagine what Viciconte might have witnessed, or heard about, during his early years in Argentina in the days of los desaparecidos. The album winds up on its most Beatlesque note with the title track: “Illusion is only skin deep, like raindrops on your wall,” Viciconte broods, “It all comes to an end in the blink of an eye.” Enjoy this dark masterpiece while we’re all still here.

A Catchy, Smartly Arranged New Album and a Maxwell’s Show by Roots Reggae Stars Kiwi

Kiwi are the best roots reggae band in the tri-state area, maybe the best roots reggae band in the entire northeast. What elevates them above the other groups in what’s now a legacy genre, like bluegrass or Chicago blues, is how much they have going on in their songs. Bassist Steve Capecci anchors them with a fat, minimalist, wickedly catchy pulse: as with a lot of reggae from the golden age in the 70s, it’s the bass hooks that often serve as the songs’ central point. Likewise, drummer Ramsey Norman holds down the groove with a low-key, elegant approach, having fun with the occasional Sly Dunbar-style accent and oldschool one-drop flourish. Frontman/guitarist Alex Tea’s tunes shift shape in a split second, unpredictably and counterintuitively., with elements of oldschool soul music, dub, rocksteady and the occasional departure toward psychedelic art-rock. His arrangements, including horns and multi-keys, spread the textures across the sonic picture. The purist production of their new album A Room with a View – streaming at Spotify – looks back forty years.  They’re headlining at 10 PM on November 28 at Maxwell’s in Hoboken; one of the world’s great ska sax players, Dave Hillyard & the Rocksteady 7 open the night at 9. Cover is $10.

The new album opens with New Year Steady, its catchy, spare, fat low-register bass hook, Memphis soul-infused guitar, slinky organ and a jaunty horn chart straight out of mid-70s Stevie Wonder. Wait Until Tomorrow is a spare, bouncy number fueled by a catchy bass riff and airy horns, in the same vein as a Burning Spear hit from about 25 years ago. Likewise, the balmy horn arrangement for February, which hints that it’s going to go in a dub direction before it rises to a triumphantly anthemic chorus, fueled by an animated exchange between the horns – then, finally, it gets all trippy.

Against the Wall, with its edgy, tense horns over boomy, ominous bass and troubled lyrics, brings to mind vintage Steel Pulse, Barami Waspe adding an all-too-brief, brooding tenor sax solo. The band picks things up from there with How Many Times, which looks back to Bob Marley at his mid-70s sunniest. Long Ago pairs tersely chugging organ from Dave Stolarz with Capecci’s bare-bones yet bone-penetrating bass. I Come Around comes around from an atmospheric, art rock-tinged verse to yet another one of the band’s signature catchy choruses. They follow that with the bass-fueled lovers rock ballad As I Am.

All Through the Evening takes the music back up into big anthemic territory, the brass and keys giving it a mighty majesty before the band slowly makes their way down toward dub…and then they’re done. With Red, they go back toward vintage Burning Spear and mash that up with Steel Pulse, again working the dynamics from towering and triumphant to sparse and suspenseful. The best track on the album is the moodily reflective, noir-tinged, minor-key Simmer. The album winds up with Trees, its soul jazz-inspired tune looking back to early 70s Third World. If this thing came out back then, it would have ruled the album charts.