LJ Murphy Brings His Fearlessly Relevant New York Noir Narratives to the East Village Saturday Night

The big news about LJ Murphy is that he went electric last year. Which is to say that although he’s been the leader of a careening electric band since the zeros, he typically played acoustic guitar to balance out the textures. But not lately. And surprisingly, the change has added as much subtlety as it has energy to Murphy’s blues-infused, suspensefully dynamic noir rock narratives. He’s going slumming this weekend at 8 PM Saturday night at Sidewalk on a good twinbill, followed by the similarly energetic, even more haphazardly careening, Pogues-ish folk noir of Mac McCarty & the Kidd Twist Band.

Murphy’s most recent show was also a doubleheader with McCarty. Rocking his usual black suit and porkpie hat, shiny black tie against a violet shirt, Murphy was all business as he swung his backing unit the Accomplices into the surreal Weimar cabaret strut of the title track to his cult classic album Mad Within Reason. Lead guitarist Tommy Hoscheid’s eerily reverberating eight-note runs offered a chilly nod to Otis Rush as Murphy barked a sinister portrait of our times:

….Crosses and pistols are slung ar our hips
I cried for my supper and then spat on the plate
While everyone tried to become what they hate
The industry captain, a smile on his face
So proud of the changes he’s made to this place

Although the song dates as far back as the 90s, if anything it’s more relevant now, with the spectre of a Trump Presidency looming on the horizon.

“I write songs about two things. Gentrification and sex,” Murphy smirked. And there’s plenty of truth to that, in that it’s hard to imagine a more withering critique of the mentality fueling the wholesale destruction of working-class and artistic communities in this city. And as a psychopathologist, Murphy rates with Elvis Costello.

The high-voltage Stax/Volt style shuffle Happy Hour painted an ugly picture of how those employed in the “wicked industries that are so celebrated now” blow off steam after work. Drummer Jacob Cavell gave the songs a caffeinated drive, sometimes riding a cymbal bell to ramp up the suspense. Bassist Nils Sorensen – also of well-liked Danish Americana rockers Brothers Moving – served essentially as a third lead guitarist with his sinewy, sometimes sardonically percolating lines. Otherwise, the two electric guitars out in front of the rhythm section really transformed the songs. The wickedly catchy, shuffling Imperfect Strangers and the similarly pulsing cautionary anthem Sleeping Mind took on extra growl and clang. The best song of the night was Panic City, another shuffle, eerily referencing both 9/11 and 3/11:

Can you hide in the darkness
Til the enemy’s gone
Can you remember the password
When the pressure is on?
When your hair is onfire
And your eyes are insane
Can you cover up the damage
From the poisonous rain?
From Panic City to your hometown…

Murphy’s likely to bust these out, and a whole lot more, this Saturday night.

A Mesmerizing Michael Gordon World Premiere at the Miller Theatre

Isn’t it cool when you see a piece of music that’s so much fun that it wouldn’t be fair to spoil the ending? The world premiere of Michael Gordon‘s Material, a work for percussion quartet performed by Yarn/Wire last night at the Miller Theatre, actually ended pretty much where it started, on an vividly uneasy note. The trick ending about ten minutes before that was the highlight – and is too good to spoil.

In between, it was hypnotic to the point of being hallucinatory, and also troubling, and grew far louder than you would expect a single concert grand piano could possibly be without amplification. Is this roughly hourlong suite a cruelly sardonic commentary about how citizens of a city can be lulled into complacency? A bitter critique of the blight of gentrification that’s destroyed so many New York communities? Or just a playful exploration of all the cool sounds you can get out of a piano if you hit it in places where it usually doesn’t get hit? Maybe all of the above? What’s unquestionable is how mesmerizingly fun it is. Last night’s program was sold out, although there were a couple of no-shows. The group are reprising last night’s indoor fireworks with not one but two marathon performances, at 7 and 9 PM tonight, May 12, which are also sold out. But those with the energy to head up to the box office at 116th and Broadway in hope of earning some cred for being there – or just the sheer fun of it – might get lucky.

Was Gordon’s almost imperceptibly whispery intro a wry French-language pun on the name of the Tribeca street the composer calls home, where the incessant thud of a luxury developer’s piledriver inspired him to write it? Were the long, rapidfire, pointillistic passage – beaten out with metronomic, motorik timing via the mallets of Ian Antonio and Russell Greenberg – a challenge to electronic composers to do it the old-fashioned way with real instruments, because that’s so much more interesting? Reduced to lowest terms, this roughly hourlong piece is a follow-up to Gordon’s rumbling, similarly hypnotic 2014 epic Timber, which is performed on a massive installation of amplified wooden sawhorses. But this is considerably different, packed with subtle rhythmic shifts, soothing lulls and contrastingly disturbing crescendos. Pianists Laura Barger and Ning Yu joined the pings and rings and eventual rumble, beating steadily and using the entirety 0f the piano’s sonic spectrum, the strings muted in places with tape and what appeared to be tile grout.

The piano wasn’t the only object that got hit. Tubular bells suspended from the ceiling of the intimate, sixty-seat space custom-built right on the Miller stage provided gentle harbor buoy bell tones during a brief starry-night interlude. Other percussion instruments were also brought into the picture, an effect that’s also too funny to give away here. Let’s just say that if someone in the ensemble gets into your space, it helps to smile.

The Alan Ferber Nonet Bring Their Dynamic, Intense Large Ensemble Sound to the Flatiron District

Considering how time-consuming it is just to keep a big band together and playing, it’s amazing how the likes of Arturo O’Farrill and Maria Schneider manage to do that and keep coming up with fresh and interesting material for their large ensembles, year after year. Count trombonist/composer Alan Ferber among that dedicated elite. His latest album, Roots & Transitions is a suite for an only slightly smaller ensemble, his long-running Nonet with trumpeters Scott Wendholt and Shane Endsley, alto saxophonist Jon Gordon, tenor saxophonist John Ellis, bass clarinetist Charles Pillow, guitarist Nate Radley, pianist Bryn Roberts, bassist Matt Clohesy and drummer Mark Ferber. The album hasn’t hit the web yet, but there are a trio of tracks up at Sunnyside Records’ site. The band also have a weekend stand coming up this Friday and Saturday night, May 13 and 14 at the Jazz Gallery, with sets at 7:30 and 9:30 PM. Cover is $22.

The composer bases the suite on a series of variations on a cleverly rhythmic cell-like theme. Ferber’s music tends toward the lustrous and enveloping, and this is no exception. It’s no surprise that his charts give the material might and majesty that seems like it’s being played by a considerably larger group. Ferber’s moody solo trombone opens the first track, Quiet Confidence, a slowly swaying ballad that Roberts’ methodical, slowly spiraling solo takes into brighter territory over a cymbal-fueled scan of the perimeter, setting up the bandleader to take it up on an ebullient upward climb before bringing it full circle. The low, lustrous shifting low brass sheets of the miniature Hourglass segue into the misterioso trombone/guitar intro of Clocks, an alterered fanfare over a tense pulse building to a powerfully dark modal crescendo, Gordon’s nimbly bluesy phrasing throwing some light into the shadows, which Radley then shreds and scatters. It’s the most noirish piece here.

Wayfarer is an amiably buoyant tune, part retro, part Jim McNeely newschool swing with a judiciously low-key Ellis solo at the center. That tricky three-on-four feel really makes itself present throughout Flow, reflecting the tuneful, nonchalant drive of the suite’s opening cut, the bandleader’s imposing trombone contrasting with Radley’s blithe upward flights. And then its Morricone-esque ending brings back the shadowy intensity.

Perspective offers a warmly melodic take on lustrous teens pastoral jazz, a simple, gently modal piano riff underpinning its amiably rustic, syncopated stroll, Ellis adding his usual melodicism when his turn comes up. Echo Calling brings back the distant ominous feel: listen closely and you’ll discover a disquiting fugue underneath. The album winds up with the chatteringly cheerful barnburner Cycles and its gritty, pinpoint-precise staccato phrasing. Much as it’s got one of Ferber’s usual imaginative charts and plenty of high-voltage playing from everybody, it seems tacked on as as way to close this otherwise often gorgeously uneasy collection on an upbeat note. Maybe when the Ferber box set comes out sometime around 2030 (by then, box sets will probably be all vinyl, or who knows, organic vinyl), he can use it as an opening cut.

An Auspicious, Surrealistically Intense Performance of Denise Mei Yan Hofmann Chamber Works at Mannes College of Music

Up-and-coming composers on the conservatory track face the daunting challenge of having to assimilate an overwhelming amount of material, all the while being expected to establish an individual voice. Too often, that puts a young composer in the position of having to regurgitate whatever stylistic tropes happen to be in vogue at a particular institution. Sometimes that makes sense: you like ambient music? IRCAM’s your place. Just as obsessed with improvisation as composition? New England Conservatory might be where you want to be. Is melody your thing? Try Mannes. That’s where Denise Mei Yan Hofmann is finishing her Master’s in music. Sunday night’s standing-room-only performance of an almost impossibly diverse mix of her recent chamber and choral works revealed how popular she is there. And she ought to be. Her music has a richly sardonic wit and also an acutely relevant angst: she is most definitely in the here and now. Somewhere there’s a dark comedy, a Coen Brothers film or its more modestly budgeted equivalent, screaming out for her to write its score.

The trombone quartet of Aden Brooks, Jacob Elkin, Nathan Wood and Daniel Dunford opened the concert auspiciously with Les Dents du Midi. Awash in uneasy close harmonies, tricky counterrythms and subtle, wry trainwhistle effects, this imposing Alpine tableau was a triumph of ambered low-midrange sonics perfectly suited to the instrumentation. Its dark majesty brought to mind John Zorn’s work for brass.

Backed by pianist Dimitry Glivinskiy, mezzo-s0prano Caitlin Cassidy gave a dynamic, expressive reading to The Ink Dark Moon, a suite of miniatures based on based on disconsolate tenth-century Japanese love poems by Izumi Shikibu, Hofmann’s scampering neoromanticism juxtaposed with lingering balladry and jaunty hints of cabaret.

The a-cappella quartet of Rachel Rosenberg, Virginia Weant, Gardner Fletke and Robert Frost sang There Is No Rose, conducted by Glivinskiy. Based on a fourteenth-century carol, it was more straightforwardly rhythmic and insistent, fueled by an imploring, rising, looping cadenza.

Hofmann’s sense of humor came front and center with Morning Thoughts, for vocal quartet and large ensemble. Originally written as a piece for vocal and percussion, it subsequently took on a life of its own, complete with crowdsourced lyrics based on sunrise and predawn musings, obsessions and terrors. Hofmann deadpanned that this was an experiment she was not likely to revisit, although she’d found the project to be as much fun as it was ambitious. From all sorts of suggestions, ranging from ultra-silly to ultra-serious, she culled some pretty harrowing themes: addiction, existential angst, struggles with faith and body image included. Deep heartbeat percussion immediately established a Dark Side of the Moon milieu, with droll and tongue-in-cheek flourishes interspersed amid the uneasily shifting, surrealistically disquieting narrative. Recitatives of antidepressant warning labels twitched alongside petulant choral passages; echoey vibraphone was punctuated by nagging trombone; repeated food references started out as comic relief and then became troubling in themselves. The piece’s declamatory phrasing and constantly shifting rhythmic center sometimes reminded of Ted Hearne at his most acerbic. As obvious as the ending turned out to be, it was also cruelly funny.

This challenging, kaleidoscopic concert version of the suite’s first movement (yup – there’s more!) was ably conducted by Robert Kahn, leading Rosenberg alongside mezzo-soprano Chelsea Kluga, tenor Mark Nimar and bass Enrico Lagasca, with Robby Bowen, Karen Hida and Jessica Tsang on percussion; Michael Tropepe on violin; Minjee Kim on flute; Wood on trombone and Margaret Kim on piano.

Haskell Small Takes a Harrowing Journey Inward with His Latest Raptly Mystical Suite

Pianist Haskell Small‘s work is a prime example of the rewards of finding a muse and following that inspiration to the deepest reaches possible. He’s carved himself out a niche as a composer and champion of quiet, mystical, often viscerally haunting sounds. His 2014 album The Rothko Room: Journeys in Silence is a masterpiece of spare, lingering, often chilling inwardly-directed themes. He’s also one of the world’s foremost advocates for the otherworldly, bell-like music of Federico Mompou. Last night at St. Malachy’s Chapel in midtown, the pianist played an unselfconsciously transcendent solo program comprising both his own suite A Journey in Silence: Reflections on the Book of Hours, along with the New York premiere of John Tavener’s Pratirupa. Small is reprising the program tonight, May 10 at 8 PM at the Crypt at the Church of the Intercession. 550 W 155th St. If there’s ever been music written for the spacious sonics of a sacred space, this is it. The concert is sold out, but if you’re in the neighborhood, it would be worth checking to see if there are any no-shows.

Introducing the program, Small – father to another individualistic, intense composer, Sarah Small – explained that as he saw it, silence doesn’t equate to the absence of sound. Rather, it’s an invitation to look inward, a proces that can be pretty scary. The new suite, due out later this year, follows the moods of a monastic day’s routine. It’s replete with moments of lingering woundedness, quiet torment and even despair, yet offers a surprising counterbalance to all that trouble. Small began it with one of his signature, poignant, plaintive belltone themes: Satie, and Messiaen, and Debussy in gamelanesque mode echoed vividly in the distance.. The music peaked with incisive cascades of eerie tritones. then receded back into uneasy, resolutely unresolved territory.

Small very cleverly cached a couple of catchy, unexpectedly upbeat motives – a muted fanfare of sorts that wouldn’t have been out of place in a Cesar Franck epic, along with a brief cathedral chime – within its architecture, and then deftly inserted variations on each throughout the suite. This made room for an unexpected optimism throughout an often harrowing journey. Shostakovich does this, sometimes Rachmanininoff too. It’s a hard trick to pull off, but as Small finally reached an almost reluctantly heroic crescendo, the payoff was not explosive but mighty all the same. And then he descended toward stillness again, gracefully, until a few final, increasingly spacious, weightily suspenseful chords that ended with sn almost imperceptibly whisper.

The Tavener turned out to be considerably different. On one hand, there was a clear connection to the first part of the program, considering ite bell motives and stately, strolling, sometimes folksy hymnal passages. On the other, it was as if Small was reminding that he can also play fiercely when he wants. And was he ever required to here! But he gamely tackled its thorny thickets of chiseling, Louis Andriessen-ish righthand riffs over an exhaust cloud of lefthand rumble, each of those interludes kicking off with an almost droll upward glissando. That was when he wasn’t mining the composer’s pensive, Chopinesque prelude segments for as much rapture and wonder as he could conjure. But ultimately, it wasn’t up to the level of Small’s own magic. He encored with a Bach invention, a well-chosen benediction. After journeying so far inward with the rest of the program, the experience was akin hearing it for the first time, a richly gentle offering of comfort and joy.

Rev. Billy Brings His Infectious Environmentalist Punk Gospel to an Old Haunt

For the past several years, Billy Talen has been a thorn in the side of the robber barons, the banksters and their schemes to transfer income up from working people to the one-tenth-of-one-percent…as well as speaking truth to power as far as how global chains are destroying the individual fabric of communities worldwide. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Talen became an even more committed environmentalist. Since then, he’s given the bozack to rapacious mountaintop clearcutters, agribusiness and their frankenseeds and frankenfood. He’s got a new book out, The Earth Wants YOU, and an album of the same title with his mighty punk gospel group. Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir‘s new record is streaming at Bandcamp; they’re playing the album release show at a familiar haunt, Joe’s Pub tomorrow night, May 10 at 9:30 PM. Cover is $12, or $10 with code “Earthalujah.”

The group are sort of the gospel version of the Clash. Depending on where they’re playing – bank headquarters, ATMs and Starbucks are where Talen and his activist crew typically get cuffed by the cops – they often number more than forty people. The core of the band comprises pianist/musical director Nehemiah Luckett, bassist Nathan Stevens and drummer Eric Johnson. As befits a democracy, singers from throughout the choir get plenty of chance to show off their chops. Soprano Laura Newman is more or less the main soloist, and contributes many of the songs as well: if Rev. Billy is the group’s Joe Strummer, she’s their Mick Jones.

The album opens with Flying, its 70s latin soul groove anchored by an understatedy ominous eco-disaster theme and “circle around” vocal riff. Newman’s powerful soprano fuels the swinging, antique-flavored gospel anthem Fabulous Bad Weather: when global warming really gets out of control, “What will you do?” Newman  calls to the choir for an answer.

Revolution is a ferociously relevant mashup of latin soul and hip-hop, referencing Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood while making the connection between the prison-industrial complex, eco-disaster and the destruction of individual cultures around the world. Another edgy latin soul groove, Monsanto Is the Devil calls bullshit on the dangers of GMO seeds: “The devil must be slain,” the choir roars.

Talen makes his first appearance out in front of the group in The Human Blues, fervently pondering how so many of us got lost and switched out community for apathy. The Man Down offers swaying, towering encouragement to “get home safe,” commemorating the murder of innocent victims from Trayvon Martin all the way back to Emmett Till.

Climate Change Blues and Gratitude, both oldschool gospel tunes, take a more personal view of activist commitment. Newman immortalizes the Declaration of Occupy Wall Street in the massive epic We Are The 99%. The brief Cops & Bankers reminds that cops on the beat and people who work in banks are 99-percenters just like us…and that we ought not to jump to conclusions about them.  The album winds up with the snarky, satirical Shopocalypse, a throwback to the irresistibly fun, funny anti-consumerist anthems of the band’s early years. A towering triumph for the entire crew, including but not limited to singers Lillian Ball, Jess Beck, Gusti Bogok, Mayfield Brooks, John Carlin, Sierra Carrere, Molly Chanoff, Katie Degentesh, Dragonfly, Ben Dubin-Thaler, Gina Figueroa, Christopher Beck, Donald Gallagher, Yvonne Gougelet, Amber Gray, Gaylen Hamilton,  Pat Hornak, Monica Hunken, Lizzie Hurst, Sarah East Johnson, Denice Kondick, Barbara Robin Lee, E. Katrina Lewis, Chantel Cherisse Lucier,  Laurie Mitttleman, Shilpa Narayan, Onome, Sylver Pondolfino, Susannah Pryce, John Quilty, Shuhei Shimizu, Ashlie Lauren Smith, Dawn Stewart-Lookkin, Catherine Talese, Theodros Tamirat, Travis Tench, Chideo Tsemunhu, Danny Valdes and David Yap.

Erica Smith Brings Her Poignant, Spectacular Voice and Eclectically Shattering Songs to the East Village

Erica Smith is one of New York’s most distinctive and often harrowing voices in folk noir and Americana. But even in this city, Smith’s ability to shift effortlessly from style to style is pretty spectacular. In addition to performing her own music, she’s currently a member of both the Richard Thompson cover group the Shootout Band – in which she puts her own stamp on Linda Thompson’s vocals – and also the explosive gospel-rock band Lizzie and the Sinners. Smith can belt a blues ballad or deliver a plaintive Appalachian narrative with anyone. And she’s also a versatile jazz stylist. Her latest album, a jazz recording with her band the 99 Cent Dreams, is One for My Baby, streaming at Spotify. She’s got a gig coming up on an excellent twinbill at Hifi Bar on May 10 at 7:30 PM; similarly lyrical and somewhat sunnier Americana singer Rebecca Turner follows at around 8:30 PM.

There’s a tragic backstory here: as it turned out, this was the final recording by the great New York drummer Dave Campbell. Perhaps best known for his serpentine, turn-on-a-dime work with psychedelic rock band Love Camp 7, Campbell was also a terrific swing jazz player with a flair for Brazilian grooves, which comes across vividly on the more upbeat tunes here. This is a collection of counterintuitive versions of standards recorded with rock band instrumentation – electric guitar, bass, drums and Leif Arntzen’s soulful muted trumpet on two numbers – along with an obscure treasure by one of this era’s great lit-rock songwriters. It opens with The Very Thought of You, where Smith distinguishes her version from the famous Billie Holliday take with her inscrutable delivery, growing more playfully optimistic as she goes along. Guitarist Dann Baker (also of Love Camp 7) mashes up Barney Kessel and Wes Montgomery as he follows Smith’s emotional trajectory.

Interestingly, there are a couple of songs commonly associated with Sinatra here. Smith does I Could Write a Book as ebullient, optimistic swing: the song feels like it’s about jump out of its shoes, but Smith holds it in check over a slightly ahead-of-the-beat bassline And she does the title track a tad faster than the Ol’ Blue Eyes original, echoing the bartender’s desire to call it a night as much as the wee-hours angst of the lyrics, Baker with her every step of the way through an alternately woozy and vividly brooding interpretation.

She does Rodgers and Hart’s It Never Entered My Mind as lingering, noir-tinged torch jazz, Baker’s gracefully stately chordal ballet in tandem with Campbell’s tersely slinky 6/8 groove. Smith’s careful, minutely jeweled, woundedly expressive vocals mine every ounce of ironic, biting subtext in the lyrics. Ain’t Misbehavin’ gets a hushed low-key swing treatment that builds to coyly nonchalant optimism, Arntzen’s trumpet following suit.

Campbell’s artfully acrobatic tumble opens Everything I’ve Got as an altered bossa before the band swings it by the tail, Smith leading the group on a long upward trajectory that far outpaces the Blossom Dearie original. The album’s most shattering track is a desolate, rainswept take of Cry Me a River, Baker shifting Kessel’s lingering lines further into the shadows over Campbell’s low-key, sepulchrally minimalistic brushwork. The band does the first recorded version of Livia Hoffman’s Valentine as a slow swing tune: “What are childhood crushes for? For crushing all your dreams forevermore,” Smith intones in a knowing, wounded mezzo-soprano. The album winds up with a wryly good-naturedly suspenseful, rainforest-swing solo take of Campbell’s drums on Everything I’ve Got: just wait til the hip-hop nation finds out that this exists. Throughout the record, Smith’s disarmingly direct, imaginative, emotionally vivid phrasing breathes new life into songs that other singers sometimes phone in, reason alone to give this a spin if classic jazz is your thing.

Gill Landry Makes a Night Out Among the Tourists Actually Worthwhile

When’s the last time a song absolutely ripped your face off? Gill Landry‘s Waiting for Your Love will do that to you. It’s a kiss-off anthem, but it’s also a requiem for a relationship gone irreparably wrong. Via a travelogue worthy of Kerouac, the Old Crow Medicine Show guitarist recounts a long downward spiral, with an ending that will give you chills. Not to spoil anything, but this time around, only death brings closure.

The rest of Landry’s solo album – streaming at Spotify – isn’t quite up to that level of haunting, but it’s excellent all the same. He’ll be playing plenty of this material tonight, May 7 at 7 PM at the big room at the Rockwood. Cover is $15; if the idea of spending a Saturday night dodging crowds of beer pong types seems dubious, consider that Landry’s solo stuff is more likely to draw a listening crowd rather than those people That’s not to say that Old Crow play beer pong music, just that some of those types gravitate to it. As a bonus, Landry is followd eventually at around 11 by the mighty gospel-rock orchestra Jesus on the Mainline, co-fronted by one of the most spectacular voices in town, Mel Flannery.

Over a matter-of-fact inteweave of acoustic flatpicking, the chilling Funeral In My Heart sets up the rest of Landry’s album:

Regret is by your coffin, can’t do anything but cry
The bloodless face of Used to Be is looking cold and grim
As the pallbearers of My True Love sing a silent hymn

Just Like You, like the rest of the songs here, is a gorgeously jangling, bittersweet update on a well-traveled sound, the angst-fueled highway rock of 80s and 90s bands like the BoDeans. Landry’s resonant baritone brings to mind that band’s former frontman Sam Llanas, sonically as well as thematically: Llanas mines a lot of the same existential angst as Landry does here.

The stately waltz Emily mashes up Tex-Mex, indie nebulosity and mid-70s Willie Nelson:

Flashing in foreign tongues to now-dead melodies
I tried to exalt you as you crucified me

Laura Marling adds her elegant voice to the duet Take This Body over a low-key acoustic countrypolitan backdrop. Odessa Jorgensen‘s uneasily soaring fiddle lines spice up the dark border-rock-shuffle Fennario. Over a bed of burning electric guitars, Lost Love evokes the blue-flame intensity of the mid-90s BoDeans, circa Joe Dirt Car, than anything else here. And while the organ-infused soul ballad Lately Right Now – as in, “Lately I need you right now” – at first sounds like an oxymoron, consider how many different directions, wry and otherwise, that phrase could go in.

Landry keeps the organ up in the mix through the ominously swaying, regret-laden Long Road. The final cut is the haunted outlaw country waltz Bad Love: “Hard looks and cold words, they kill by degrees,” Landry intones bitterly, a sobering look at how quickly something good can decay, bringing this hard-hitting, emotionally raw collection of songs full circle with a real wallop.

Holly Miranda Sings Your Soul Back to You at Hell Phone in Bushwick

In a city where even the corporate media has grudgingly admitted that roughly 70% of New Yorkers spend about 70% of their income on rent, it’s hard to think of a more appropriate residency than Holly Miranda‘s ongoing series of Thursday night shows this month at Hell Phone in Bushwick. Miranda’s music isn’t political, but she touches a nerve, in a profound and angst-ridden way. To paraphrase Jarvis Cocker, when you’re this broke, there aren’t many options beyond getting together with your comrades-in-poverty…and when those sort of things fall through, as they seem to inevitably, Miranda will sing your soul back to you. Solo on Telecaster and then piano, her show last night was all about solace, and transcendence.

About two thirds of the way through, she cautioned the crowd not to expect happy songs, which was true, although there was plenty of fun in her roughly hourlong set. She proved herself to be probably the only person in history to cover both Connie Converse and Drake, and find an improbably sad connection between the two. In a duet with opening act Ambrosia Parsley, she slowly made her way through a starkly spacious cover of the BeeGees’ How Can You Mend a Broken Heart. As woundedly intense as all that was, Miranda’s orignals were even more haunting.

She drew deeply from throughout her career, from the jaggedly incisive indie rock of her old band the Jealous Girlfriends, to her most recent, self-titled album as well as some unselfconsciously shattering new material. Out in front of a crowd, Miranda goes with raw vocal power more than the finesse that characterizes her studio work, airing out a soulful wail that sometimes alluded to that brittle post-Billie Holiday intonation that Norah Jones made so popular fifteen years ago – but with a lot more oomph and originality.

“I carry this torch across the ocean for you,” she intoned on the night’s opening number, swinging C&W spun through the fragmented prism of lo-fi 80s college radio rock. She flipped the script on her sassy singalong hit All I Want Is to Be Your Girl. trading out lust for longing. Slowly crescendoing Lynchian balladry gave way to a forceful clang as Miranda’s voice went up to the top of her range, from a muted mournfulness to wrenching heartbreak. She explained that she stole the chords for Hymnal from an actual book of hymns that her parents kept atop the piano in her childhood home, then told a funny story about playing it at the Grand Old Opry…and then sang the living hell out of it. The best song of the night was a somber new Nashville gothic piano tune, the chorus opening with, “So I’ll sing, because my mother can’t,” her voice rising with a bitterly allusive insistence.

And it was great to be able to hear Parsley open the night, trading songs and backed by guitarist Chris Maxwell, Miranda supplying ethereally bracing high harmonies. Together they made their way through a handful of uneasily torchy, slow swing tunes and a plaintively altered bolero, in honor of Cinco de Mayo. Last year, Maxwell put out a simmeringly lyrical album of southern gothic songs, Arkansas Summer, and he treated the crowd to a tantalizing trio of those as well. “I’ve learned to whistle down the wind,” he intoned with a nonchalant but knowing gravitas.

Miranda’s Thursday night residency continues at Hell Phone, 247 Varet St. in Bushwick through May 26, with a series of special guests opening the night a little after 9. Cover is $10, or $15 including a download of Miranda’s forthcoming ep. Take the L to Morgan Ave. and exit at Bogart St. The club is about three blocks away, enter through the phone booth at the back of the Ange Noir Cafe.

Concetta Abbate Records a Lush, Glimmering Album of Chamber Rock Nocturnes at Spectrum

On one hand, the cred you used to get for being in the crowd at a live album recording has lost a little lustre over the years. After all, these days, if you’re up to the job, you can make your own live album most any night and put it up at youtube or archive.org. Still, it was awfully cool to be at Spectrum Saturday night, where elegant violinist/guitarist Concetta Abbate recorded a live album with a string quartet. The experience wasn’t as intense as being at Arlene’s the night that Mary Lee’s Corvette recorded their Blood on the Tracks album (although nobody other than the band knew that would happen), or as dark as when Rasputina recorded A Radical Recital a few years later at B.B. King’s…or exasperating, like when Aimee Mann did alternate take after alternate take for her live DVD at St. Ann’s Warehouse.

This was a warmly enveloping, raptly glimmering night of nocturnes, many of them miniatures: Abbate doesn’t waste notes. What’s even better is that the lucky four dozen or so people who got to witness her quiet magic will get a digital copy of the album, and then presumably it’ll be up at her webpage. Her opening instrumental had subtle rhythmic shifts and a delicate pizzicato/legato dichotomy; afterward, a handful of numbers had light electroacoustic touches, like the second one, its allusions to oldschool soul awash in uneasily lush string textures, like a more polished version of early ELO. Abbate sang while playing, in an expressively airy, carefully modulated soprano.

Disquieting electronic washes gave way to a twinkle balanced by a spare, balletesque string arrangement on the night’s next song, beneath Abbate’s melismatic, Renaissance-tinged vocals. Ambered string washes anchored a trickily syncopated piano riff, no easy task to pull off live. The upbeat, catchy, pulsing number after that sounded like a mashup of the Universal Thump and Linda Draper’s acerbic parlor pop.

From there the ensemble took an ornate waltz arrangement up to a vividly wounded series of crescendos; then Abbate brought the lights down with a playfully psychedelic vignette in 5/4 time. Spare, spacious minimalism gave way to a brooding viola solo over tersely fingerpicked acoustic guitar, then a lively, balletesque tune, then a lushly melancholy art-rock anthem in the same vein as Sarah Kirkland Snider’s recent work. After that, the pretty waltz that sounded like the Left Banke made a striking contrast. It’ll be even more fun to enjoy the nuances of the album and ponder Abbate’s terse lyrical imagery. Abbate’s next New York solo show is on June 12 at 8 PM at Chinatown Soup, 16B Orchard St. just north of Canal.