The Momenta Quartet Unearths a Rare Steven Swartz Chamber Work at Spectrum

Indie classical music has a long way to go before it reaches critical mass, but there’s no lack of ensembles here doing new and important work. And no end of New York premieres, and world premieres, many of them one and the same. And while history is full of surprise discoveries, from the Brandenburg Concertos on forward, it’s still quite rare that a worthwhile piece of music by a New York composer would sit in a drawer for thirty-three years before its debut. Such was the case last night at Spectrum, where the Momenta Quartet premiered Steven Swartz‘s Alignment. It’s not a Brandenburg Concerto, but it has an unselfconscious, mathematical beauty and, most importantly, it’s a lot of fun. Swartz, who was present at the concert, self-effacingly told a festive audience that “I think it doesn’t suck.” It’s a good thing it’s out of the drawer at last.

On one hand, it was a trip to hear this time capsule open wide to reveal some very clear, in-the-moment, postminimalist influences. There was Steve Reich, whose what Swartz spent plenty of time with during his postgraduate years. There was also his faculty advisor, Morton Feldman, whose fascination with articulation, attack and decay were also reflected in the roughly forty-minute quartet. One work that came to vividly mind that did not influence Swartz was Philip Glass’ In the Summer House, putting Swartz a full decade ahead of Glass. By the time that was written, Swartz was doing his witty uke-rock project Songs from a Random House.

What did this rescued obscurity sound like? A clever, Reichian rondo. No two bars were alike, and meters changed with each bar, a snazzy trick that hasn’t waned in popularity. A quirky, puckish pizzicato filtered throughout the entire quartet amidst calm, methodical, clockwork gestures, following a very subtle upward tangent. There was a striking and irresistible, rather tongue-in-cheek tempo shift in the third movement, shades of early 1960s Terry Riley. And the ending was very smartly timed: just when the Escher-like cells seemed like they’d go on forever, there was a a trick ending, followed so soon by the real one that the jape was still resonating by the time the second one clicked into place. Asked afterward if a studio recording or future performance of the piece might be in the cards, Swartz explained that the concert made him realize that there were very specific segments that he felt deserved to be revised. It’ll be fun to hear how he tweaks it, although let’s hope that we don’t have to wait another thirty-three years for it. It’s not likely that Spectrum will still be on Ludlow Street – or that Ludlow Street won’t be underwater by then.

The Momenta Quartet’s next New York performances is June 17 at 8 PM at Scandinavia House, 58 Park Ave. (37/38), with an all-Per Norgard program. Admission is $20.

Intense, Haunting Guitarist Rony Corcos Plays the Meatpacking District Tonight

Rony Corcos is the rare lead guitarist who makes every note count. She draws on classic Chicago and delta blues as much as darkly edgy songwriters like PJ Harvey. Corcos is leading her artsy, catchy power trio Rony’s Insomnia at the recently opened, sonically excellent Lively on 9th Ave. between 13th and 14th Streets tonight, May 20 at 8 PM.

Corcos’ most recent show found her doing double duty, first playing a rare solo electric set and then taking over lead duties with dark, powerful-voiced songstress Jessi Robertson at Hell Phone in Bushwick earlier this  month. After a brief set by a solid, purist acoustic delta blues guitarist, folk noir songsmith Lara Ewen channeled a simmering southern soul intensity, opening with the brooding, achingly angst-fueled soul tableau Breakdown Lane, the haunting centerpiece of her latest album The Wishing Stone Songs. The strings of her guitar rang out as she slapped them, instead of strumming, Ewen putting some grit in her typically crystalline, reflecting-pool vocals as she brought to life a Waits-ish procession of flophouse characters on their way down.

She kept the smoldering ambience going through the pensive number after that, then hit a hypnotic art-folk groove with Untethered, akin to what Aussie art-rockers the Church might have done with an acoustic number around 1985. From there she hit an uneasy trip-hop groove with Restless, an explosive kiss-off anthem that gave her a platform for some chilling flights to the upper registers. Then she took a detour toward disconsolate oldschool C&W with 20 Years, and its vivid portrait of a middleaged woman looking back in regret, telling the guy who’s hanging around her that he wouldn’t have stood a chance when she “had ‘em hanging from the chandeliers and put on quite a show.” Ewen’s funniest song of the night drew on her experiences visiting her cashier pal at an all-night supermarket in her native Queens and being regaled with stories about the ridiculous antics of the loser the poor girl was dating. Ewen closed with her big audience hit, the morbidly catchy Death Better Take Me Dancing, a good setup for the rest of an intensely excellent bill.

Corcos opened her set with an opaquely lingering, psychedelically-tinged anthem: “Are we still in control? Is there anybody in there?” she pondered, low and brooding. Playing solo on her Gibson, she did the artsy, psychdelic anthem Emerald City as a spare, hypnotic mood piece: “Cover up your scars, pretty one, I’ll give you new ones,” she murmured. She aired out a lot of new material: a ripe, bruised post-breakup ballad, an atmospheric art-rock tableau spiced with the occasional ominous chromatic, and a couple of catchy, slow-to-midtempo numbers that brought to mind PJ Harvey’s recent work. Corcos’ carefully modulated voice rose and fell amidst spiky chordlets, oldschool blues licks and rainswept, trippy washes of sound.

Robertson and Corcos’ headline set reached a white-knuckle intensity. The two opened with an insistently anthemic, hypnotic number: ?Challenge me, don’t give in easy,” Robertson intoned enigmatically. Corcos’ spare, sparkling blues lines lit up the stately, moody waltz after that, up to an angst-drenched vamp, Robertson insistig, “Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing” over and over again. Then the two went deep into the blues for an explosively fun singalong take of Lipstick, a sardonic barroom pickup scenario. Strangely enough, Robertson, with her harrowing, otherworldly, soaring voice, delivered the night’s funniest number, a wryly countyr-flavored tune with a chorus of “I hope I hurt you more than you hurt me.” Robertson is at Bowery Electric on June 9 at 8 PM for a rare free show there.

A Dark and Stormy Night at Berlin with Diane Gentile and Karla Rose & the Thorns

Get out often enough and once awhile you’re rewarded with magic synchronicity. Last night’s show at Berlin turned out to be a long launching pad for two intense, charismatic frontwomen airing out their defiantly wounded low registers. Diane Gentile is sort of a younger New York counterpart to the Motels’ Martha Davis. She puts her own individualistic spin on the dark side of propulsive 80s new wave sounds, and her band is killer. Karla Rose & the Thorns have noir intensity, a more psychedelic sound, and while their bandleader has a chillingly vast range, she can also belt way down in the lows. It was a seriously dark and stormy night without the cliches.

Gentile was playing her birthday show, and the place was packed. The way Berlin – the lowlit basement space under 2A – is set up, you have to position yourself right where the bar, the stage and the tables past the sound booth intersect if you want a good view of the stage. But Gentile made all the jostling worthwhile. Playing a shortscale Gibson hollowbody model, she and her tight quartet opened with an indelibly shadowy downtown New York tableau held in check by drummer Colin Brooks’ backbeat and stormclouds of cymbals. The most sardonically funny song of the night was Boyfriend, a stomping, bitttersweetly Bowie-esque anthem. The most propulsive was Motorcycle, a brisk, understatedly desperate escape number. The most crushingly sad was Wasted Word, a requiem for the departed in every sense. Lead guitarist Jason Victor (of Steve Wynn’s band, the newly reformed Dream Syndicate and wildly fun noiserockers the Skull Practitioners), whose massive, menacingly reverberating clusters of chords ramped up the menace, smoldered and then eventually careened into brushfire terrain on Gentile’s anguished, closing cover of Bowie’s apocalyptic epic Five Years. She’s at Bowery Electric on June 12 at around 9 on a great triplebill with Americana rock songwriter Ana Egge and this era’s most spellbinding voice in newschool retro C&W, Laura Cantrell.

Rose and her band built a shadowy black-and-white Twilight Zone ambience right off the bat and set the bar impossibly high for the rest of the evening. The former Morricone Youth frontwoman opened with Silver Bucket, a surrealistic mashup of Smokestack Lightning sway and Gun Club gutter blues. Rose sang her misty, slinky film noir narrative Time Well Spent – a metaphorical time bomb of a song for any overworked New York artist on the brink of losing their grip – with a smolderingly low, ruthless edge. Then she foreshadowed where Gentile would go with Drive, an alluring new wave number. The best song of the night was Battery Park, a marauding desert rock anthem with a long, chainsaw Dylan Charles guitar solo to wind it up. A close listen revealed Rose making the connection between the pathology of Easton Ellis serial killers and the narcissism of high finance. Even with her gentlest number, the hypnotically Velvets-inspired Living End, she wouldn’t let up on the menace. It was absurd that this band, who capture both the angst and the guarded triumph of artists in a city under siege better than any other current New York act, didn’t get more time onstage.

Satoko Fujii Debuts Her Harrowingly Relevant Fukushima Suite in Brooklyn Last Night

Last night in Gowanus, I-Beam was packed to the point where it was impossible to get in the door for the debut performance of Satoko Fujii’s harrowing Fukushima suite. The iconic Japanese-born pianist/conductor explained beforehand that she wrote it not as a historical narrative but as an evocation of her own reactions to the March 11, 2011 nuclear catastrophe – and that it had taken her five years to process. After the show, she added that it was also an indictment of greed. Were all the recurring, chattering saxes and trombones of her Orchestra New York an evocation of conspiratorial Tepco boardroom conversations? Possibly. Fujii and her large ensemble – one of the most distinctive and memorable New York big band jazz units of the past couple decades – are recording this haggardly wrenching, angry, aggressively haunting four-part work today. Considering how much improvisation is Fujii’s stock in trade, even in a big band setting, it will be fascinating to compare the album with last night’s white-knuckle intensity.

The group opened not with a bang but with a whisper. A mist of white noise through reeds and valves becamed labored, suddenly anguished, then back again. up to a long, shrieking, terrified crescendo. As discernable melodies emerged, a handful of themes – a faux fanfare of sorts, a wistful Japanese folk tune and a couple of rather sardonic marches – recurred with variations, in between solo passages and a handful of artful pairings of instruments a la Darcy James Argue. Individual spots from saxes, trumpets and trombones were often tormented, sometimes frantic, juxtaposed with intermittent flashes of warmth and calm – and a couple of macabre Japanese heavy metal interludes fueled by Stomu Takeishi’s looming bass and Nels Cline’s savagely graceful, kinetically looped guitar riffage. In a couple of early moments, Ches Smith’s tersely slinking groove gave way to light electroacoustic percussive touches that seemed as sarcastic as they were comic relief.

The plaintive clarinet melody at the end seemed to offer closure, and a degree of hope. Asked afterward if this was meant to portray relief at seeing that the initial phase of the crisis, with its nightmarish plumes of smoke, was over, Fujii’s eyes widened. “Over?” she asked incredulously. “It’s NOT over!” Like the rest of the Japanese intelligentsia, she’s kept a close watch on what reliable information has leaked out about Fukushima – and she’s since relocated to Berlin. The official line about Fukushima is that the disaster is over and the lethal by-products have been more or less contained. The reality is that the containment vessel in reactor three – the most toxic, plutonium-fueled one – continues to leak cooling water and what’s left of the reactor core into the Pacific. The same may be true of the others, but either way, there’s been no definitive answer forthcoming, something that might be expected when a nuclear disaster is privatized.

Meanwhile, across the ocean, San Diego County in California is now getting its drinking water supply from desalinated Pacific seawater – which, in turns, goes back into the continental US water table. Suddenly Americans and Japanese alike face an identical, deadly nuclear contamination crisis. Can anybody other than the courageous Satoko Fujii say “global extinction event?”

Debo Band Bring Their Darkly Bristling Update on Classic Ethiopian Dancefloor Sounds to Williamsburg

What do you associate Ethiopian music with? Those slinky triplet grooves? Stark, ancient, otherworldly bluesy modes? Shivery, melismatic vocals and fiddle? Debo Band take all those tropes and rock them out with both blazing brass and strings over an undulating pulse. Their new album Ere Gobez is streaming at Storyamp, and they’re opening a killer twinbill at Brooklyn Bowl tonight at around 8, with similarly minor-key fixated original first-wave Afrobeat dancefloor groovemeisters Antibalas headlining afterward. Hopefully you have $15 advance tix; it’s more at the door.

On the album’s opening track, Endris Hassen’s hypnotically circling, oscillating massenqo fiddle riff underpins the blaze of horns, and then guitarist Brendon Wood fires off a succinct solo. The second number, a Somalian tune, is similar, but with a trickier, syncopated beat. Track three – in purist Ethiopian fashion, most of the song titles are in frontman Bruck Tesfaye’s native Amharic – sets a joyous mix of upper-register violins and saxes mingling with Marie Abe’s accordion over bassist PJ Goodwin and drummer Adam Clark’s dancing, waltzlike beat.

Track four, Yachat, is a hard-rocking detour toward psychedelic 60s garage rock – it’s their Psychotic Reaction, Wood’s rampaging, bluesy lines front and center. Blue Awaze makes more or less straight-up hard funk out of an uneasily modal, proto Middle Eastern riff, Danny Mekonnen’s judiciously smoky baritone sax solo leading up to a swirly, string-fueled psychedelic breakdown where everything goes haywire, then finally back. From there the band segues into Goraw, a defiant Amharic-language Ethiopian-pride anthem which sounds like the ancient roots of Isaac Hayes at his most psychedelic – or what Hayes might have done had he collaborated with Mulatu Astatke.

The band builds Sak ominously over a brooding bati vamp, like a thunderstorm on the horizon, counterintuitively growing more spare as Mekonnen launches into a growling baritone solo. The album’s most epic number, Oromo swings along on a mighty minor-key blues groove, following a long, triumphantly majestic upward climb punctuated by a thoughtful massenqo break. The band follow the joyously circling, lushly orchestrated Hiyamikachi Bushi with the slinky, bitingly latin-tinged Yalanchi and close the album on a searingly trad note with the hauntingly propulsive Eyew Demamu, arguably its strongest track and a lauching pad for Tesfaye’s intense, expressive vocals.

Since Ethiopia is where it all started, at least as far as the human species is concerned, it’s not an overstatement to say that music from this part of the world resonates on a deep level, quite possibly in our collective DNA. This is the rare album that will hit the spot with people who like energetic, upbeat music as much as with those who gravitate toward the dark and mysterious.

Conspiracy of Venus Bring Their Artful Polyphonic Fun to Three NYC Shows

The thirty women of Conspiracy of Venus comprise one of the world’s most original and captivating choral groups. They’re sister to mighty all-male Leonard Cohen chorale A Conspiracy of Beards, specializing in ethereal, labyrinthine-voiced versions of rock and Americana songs. Their richly imaginative, innovative debut album – streaming at Bandcamp – is wryly titled Muse Ecology (say it fast if you don’t get it the first time around). They’re the centerpiece of the one of the year’s best triplebills, on May 21 at around 10 at the Jalopy. Two of the most unpredictably fun singers in newschool oldtime Americana, resonator guitarist/songwriter Mamie Minch and Brain Cloud frontwoman Tamar Korn open the night at 9, then fiery and often devastatingly funny klezmer punk band Golem – who are sort of the Jewish Gogol Bordello – headline at around 11. Cover is $10. In case you can’t make it to the magical Jalopy, Conspiracy of Venus are also at the big room at the Rockwood on May 20 at 7 for $10, then on the 22nd they’re at Highline Ballroom at noon for $12 in advance.

The album’s opening track, Wildwood, by the group’s director Joyce Todd McBride, begins as a stately, almost marching piece backed by bossa-tinged acoustic guitar. It’s probably the most lushly arranged folk-pop song ever recorded, its artful counterpoint expanding as the song goes on. You could call it a choral counterpart to what Sara McDonald is doing with big band jazz arrangements. Backed by minimal vibraphone and percussion, they make gentle but potent antique gospel out of Tom Waits’ Jockey Full of Bourbon. Once again, the counterpoint gets more intricate as the song goes along, low individual voices alternating below the pillowy highs. It’s all the creepier for being so low-key, like the Swingle Singers doing Procol Harum.

Bowie’s Life on Mars gets a lithely pointillistic treatment that follows the lyrics’ surrealistic tangent up to a sweeping peak. Cohen’s Dance Me to the End of Love follows an artful arrangement from a balletesque pulse, to swing, then echoes of country gospel. Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi has bass and drums anchoring a buoyantly sweet, charmingly swinging chart that plays up the lyrics’ crushing sarcasm. Later on they put an enigmatically intense, tropically-infused spin on another Joni number, Black Crow. The album’s most raptly renaissance-tinged track is McBride’s setting of Berthold Brecht’s The Buddha’s Parable of the Burning House.

Another McBride tune, In the Bud reverts to the opening track’s airy bossa-pop. Then the group makes lavish polyphony out of Iris DeMent’s lilting Appalachian-flavored Let the Mystery Be. As you might guess, the most playfully avant garde-flavored number is Bjork’s coy Possibly Maybe, shifting almost imperceptibly into an oldschool soul groove. They go back to the Cohen book for an irresistibly dancing, surreal, fun version of I’m Your Man and then wind it all up with a similarly funny reggae version of Bjork’s Venus As a Boy. What a blissfully entertaining album!

Dori Freeman Offers an Imaginative, Darkly Purist Take on Classic Country and Americana Sounds

Dori Freeman comes from Americana ground zero: Galax, Virginia. She’s still relatively young (early 20s), and she’s bringing her own tasteful, sometimes haunting update on a bunch of venerable American sounds to the big room at the Rockwood at 7 PM on May 19. Cover is $10.

It takes some nerve to open your debut album – streaming at Spotify -with a solo acoustic number, just voice and guitar. But that’s what Freeman does. The track is catchy: it’s easy to imagine fiddle and banjo and a bass pulsing behind her strums as she vacillates between longing and defiance: “I’ll be damned if I need any man to come to my rescue…the wall that you’ve been building, well it’s standing in the sand.”

Where I Stand is a sripped-down take on disconsolately waltzing Orbison Nashville gothic pop: “Once like a vision I haunted your mind, but the haunting I feel is a different kind,” she intones in wounded low register. Her voice is her big drawing card, gently parsing the blue notes with an ambered nuance that often makes her sound older than she is. Likewise, her lyrics can be imagistic and evocative: for example, when a treasured picture of a couple together falls off the wall, it brings relief instead of sadness.

Aloft on the wings of Jon Graboff’s melancholy pedal steel washes, Go On Loving is a vintage honkytonk ballad with spare Erik Deutsch piano and muted electric guitar, over the purist rhythm section of bassist Jeff Hill and drummer Rob Walbourne. Fine Fine Fine is an imaginative blend of jangly Americana, honkytonk and vintage 60s Phil Spector girl-group pop. Freeman offers a nod back to Merle Travis with Ain’t Nobody, a sarcastically fingersnapping, bluesy a-cappella blue-collar lament.

With its elegant Lynchian jazz tinges, the understatedly menacing Lullaby is the strongest song on the album, bringing to mind Eilen Jewell in a pensive moment. A wounded, muted country gospel ambience pervades Song for Paul, another real gem: “Catch me, catch me, catch 22,” Freeman sings to open it. Likewise, the honkytonk waltz Still a Child traces a simmeringly vindictive narrative. There’s also Tell Me, a jaunty electric pop song with blithely melismatic vocals and pizzicato fiddle from Alex Hargreaves, and the gently syncopated Any Wonder, which is the closest thing to corporate singer-songwriter fodder here.

Those of you who already know who Dori Freeman is might be wondering why a blog like this one – typically focused on the shadowy side of the street where all the most interesting things are happening – would cover somebody who’s already been praised to the rafters by the likes of Rolling Stone. The answer is that as vital and important as Rolling Stone’s political coverage has been and continues to be, it’s been thirty years since their music section had any relevance. Compared to what usually gets covered there, Freeman is in a completely different ballpark.

Desert Flower’s Menacing Heavy Psychedelic Debut: One of 2016’s Best Albums

Desert Flower are one of the half-dozen best bands in New York right now. The heavy psychedelic quintet spice their wickedly tight, menacingly careening, darkly individualistic sound with punk, stoner blues, 70s boogie and echoes of gothic rock. They’re also notable for being one of the few psychedelic bands out there fronted by a woman, powerful bluesy wailer/keyboardist Bela Zap Art. What Jefferson Airplane were to San Francisco, 1967 or what Siouxsie & the Banshees were to London, 1985, Desert Flower are to New York in 2016. Their debut ep – streaming at Soundcloud – instantly vaults them into contention for putting out the best album of the year. Right now they’re back in the studio – watch this space for future NYC dates.

Much as Zap Art has Ann Wilson power and intensity, the studio setting here gives her a chance to project far more subtlety than she typically gets a chance to do out in front of the marauding twin-guitar attack of Migue Mendez and Paola Luna. Likewise, bassist Seba Fernandez and drummer Alfio Casale get to show off dynamics that sometimes don’t make it into their high-voltage live show.

The first track, Darketa opens with a wash of guitar sitar before Fernandez’s slinky bassline kicks in and the band sways along, Mendez’s lysergic echoes ringing out against Luna’s gritty attack, Zap Art rising from a wounded, guarded intensity, to trippy lows that she runs through a phaser. As the song builds toward a pulsing peak and Fernandez’s catchy bass hook pans the speakers behind Mendez’s searing lead, it suddenly becomes clear that it’s just a one-chord jam!

Longest Way is a brisk mashup of downstroke postpunk and classic Motor City rock: “Let me take you to the secret place, where nobody can see your face,” Zap Art intones enigmatically. The majestic, haunting Sube sways along over an uneasily pouncing 6/8 groove, an orchestra of guitars channeling ornate Nektar-ish art-rock and MBV dreampop, “Going down on the grey skies,” Zap Art belts ominously.

Tango follows a creepily pulsing southwestern gothic trajectory, fueled by Mendez’s slide guitar and Luna’s lingering, brooding lines. The catchiest of the originals here, Warrior stomps along over an incisive, sarcastically faux-martial groove, with tongue-in-cheek trombone and some tasty, purist blues playing from Mendez.

The centerpiece of the record is Traveler, a towering 6/8 anthem by a friend in Buenos Aires. Zap Art plays macabre washes of sound on her organ as Mendez alternates between fat, vibrato-laden lines and a menacing growl, Luna anchoring it with her murky, watery broken chords. Look for this on the best albums of the year page in December if we make it that far.

Jenifer Jackson Brings Her Erudite Texas Americana Charm to the New York Outskirts

The plushly ambiguous cover image of Jenifer Jackson’s latest and tenth album, aptly titled Cloud Ten – streaming at Bandcamp – speaks volumes. Look closely and you’ll see a furry cat! There’s a feline grace, and playfulness, and warmth, and hominess to the cutting-edge Americana songcraft and performances on this charming, irresistibly engaging new collection of songs. As a bonus, Jackson plays not only her usual guitar but also piano, drums and for the first time, ukulele. On her current US tour, she’s bypassing Manhattan for an intimate house concert on May 18 at 7 PM at 11 Bollenbecker Road in Rhinebeck. Westchester dwellers and adventurous city people can get information and rsvp here. She’s also doing house concerts on the 19th and 20th in Ancramdale and New Paltz, respectively.

Curmudgeons beware: she’s going to get you smiling like a big Texas sunrise, and asking yourself in astonishment, “Did they really just play what I think they did?” whether you like it or not. Which isn’t what you might expect from someone with such an extensive back catalog of thoughtfully crafted, often melancholy songs. Her career’s taken her from Beatlesque nuevo bossa nova, to harrowing folk noir, to classic Brill Building style pop, slinky psychedelia, blue-eyed soul, and now the Americana she’s been mining for such rich results over the last few years. Joining the brain drain out of New York City, her move to Austin in 2007 jumpstarted a career that had critics swooning but had reached critical mass in the big city. Cloud Ten reconfirms how fertile the Texas landscape has been for one of the most prolific, irrepressibly fun and unselfconsciously brilliant tunesmiths working today.

The innumerable little touches define this album. You might expect to hear multi-instrumentalist Kullen Fuchs’ good-naturedly purist honkytonk guitar in the vintage C&W sway of Pen to Paper, but probably not his glimmery Mad Men era vibraphone. But you get both! The Texas shuffle groove and Jackson’s own piano mingling with classic Beatles allusions in Love Me Best; hints of Laurel Canyon psychedelia and coy 50s exotica in the bossa-flavored Coriander; a little later, Jackson and Fuchs’ coyly aphoristic duet on the album’s title track makes gently narcotized uke indie-pop out of a classic western swing theme.

Some touches are somewhat more traditionally oriented to the various styles she expands on here, but no less apt. The elegantly rippling George Harrison Abbey Road lead guitar amidst her vividly summery fingerpicking in the Britfolk-tinged River Road; Fuchs’ deep floodwaters of accordion throughout Gravity, a lilting lullaby. Longtime Johnny Cash collaborator Earl Poole Ball’s elegant Floyd Cramer slip-key piano mingles with glockenspiel, enhancing the gently crepuscular ambience of Only in Dreams; Jesse Ebaugh’s deep-sky pedal steel on the sharply lyrical Wondering, which looks back to Townes Van Zant outlaw balladry. Perhaps the album’s most striking if shortest track is the wary, austere Birdy’s Lament, Fuchs’ melodica taking the song into surrealistic early 70s folk-rock terrain. Its most period-perfect is Mother Nature, a spot-on evocation of early 60s honkytonk.

Jackson draws on the multicultural fabric of her adopted state with two songs in Spanish: the tender, bolero-tinted Sabor a Mi and the gentle Bahia/Veracruz mashup Como Fue, Fuchs’ trumpet sailing overhead. It’s as heartwarming as it is just plain fun to hear this genuine American treasure continuing to evolve and keep audiences entertained: if there’s any album released this year that makes you reach for the repeat button, this is it.

The Dirty Rollers Pick Up Where Americana Rock Cult Favorites American Ambulance Left Off

American Ambulance seem pretty much finished at this point. But what a ride they had. The New York Americana rockers burned hard for the better part of fifteen years before finally going on hiatus at the end of last year.With a fearlessly populist political sensibility in reaction to the terror of the Bush/Cheney years, they became a lot less country and a lot harder-rocking as the past decade went by.

These days lead guitarist Scott Aldrich is in Rhode Island, and bassist Tim Reedy is plenty busy with his own music. But frontman/guitarist Pete Cenedella and drummer Joe Dessereau are keeping things going as the core of their new band the Dirty Rollers. They’ll be playing a characteristically marathon set starting at 7:30 PM at Hifi Bar on May 18 with plenty of special guests including darkly transcendent singer Erica Smith. Cenedella also promises a number of deviously chosen cover tunes.

Last October at the Treehouse at 2A, American Ambulance played what might have been the band’s final Manhattan show. And it wasn’t sad – it was a pretty wild night. They didn’t waste any time opening with one of the evening’s best numbers, a pouncing blue-flame late-night outlaws-on-the-run scenario, with a long, uneasily minor-key organ solo from guest keyboardist Charly Roth. Cenedella opened the next tune with just vocals and guitar, all tension and expectancy, fueled by Dessereau’s spring-loaded beat,  Aldrich blasting through a couple of terse, vintage Keith Richards-style solos.

Reedy sang the next number, a mashup of classic four-on-the-floor barroom rock and restlessly opaque 90s Wilco: “So many things to forget about,” he intoned sardonically. They shifted gears after that, Roth on piano with the witheringly sarcastic Hey Richard Nixon, the political track that the Stones should have recorded on Exile on Main Street. Memory is a little sketchy on this one – listening back to an audience recording, that similarly smoldering backing vocal section sounds like Smith and her friend in belting soul intensity, Lizzie Edwards.

Down in the Basement, a fond look back at a 70s adolescence spent raising hell back when Brooklyn was a lot grittier, was slower than the band usually did it, Roth’s river of organ adding an extra tinge of pensiveness and soul. He did the same with the number after that after that, a towering, Stonesy soul ballad, Shimmering Rain, fueled by the explosive, gospel-infused crescendos of the backing choir as they took a turn out front. Cenedella went back on the mic as the band ripped through a blistering take of the Beatles’ She Said She Said; later Reedy led the group through a lickety-split, raging cover of Dylan’s It’s All Over Now Baby Blue.

Aldrich’s unhinged bent-note attack against the lush washes of Roth’s organ drove the big anthem after that, a deliriously fond reminiscence of escaping Long Island suburban anomie for Manhattan revelry, a Yes concert (who knew?) and good weed. With the organ at full throttle, Mary Ann Is Hanging On sounded like the Wallflowers on steroids. Then they went back to the honkytonk-inspired flavor of the band’s early years, Roth adding an oldschool Nashville edge on piano behind Aldrich’s slinky lines: :”Silence is the worst thing of all,” Cenedella railed. It’s a good bet they new band will pull out some of these on Wednesday night.