A Rare, Can’t-Miss Reuinon of Phantasmagorical 80s Legends Kamikaze Ground Crew This Thursday at Roulette

This coming Thursday, Sept 29 at 8 PM there’s a rare reunion of legendary, carnivalesque 80s band Kamikaze Ground Crew at Roulette. Advance tix are $20 and worth it. Before World Inferno, or for that matter, Beat Circus were even conceived, there was this band. Kamikaze Ground Crew were just as phantasmagorical – because they were a real circus band. Fans of the dark and surreal would be crazy to miss this early kickoff to Halloween month.

Since the horn-driven supergroup – whose members over the years included saxophonist Peter Apfelbaum, trumpeter Steven Bernstein and drummer Kenny Wollesen, among others – disbanded, co-founder Gina Leishman has pursued a similarly eclectic solo career, spanning from elegant, Britfolk-inflected chamber pop, to more theatrical material. The highlight of her most recent show at Barbes was a long, understatedly chilling, dystopic “bardic ballad,” as she put it, in the same vein as Dylan’s Lily, Rosemary & the Jack of Hearts, going on for more than ten verses. She played that one on piano, as she did on about half the set, switching to mandola on the rest of the songs, much of the material from a forthcoming album.

Austere strings from violinist Dana Lyn and cellist Hank Roberts lowlit a brooding, rainy-day art-song, Leishman’s calm, steady, nuanced vocals channeling wistful melancholy and saturnine angst. Multi-reedman Doug Wieselman (another Kamikaze alum) added sepulchral sax atmospherics, fluttering over Leishman’s piano as a rather coy, trickly rhythmic number built momentum, like a jazzier Robin Aigner (whose most recent couple of Barbes shows have also been pretty rapturous).

Then Leishman went into sunnier territory with a lush, balmy baroque-pop waltz, stately cello contrasting with soaring, spiraling clarinet. The lilting chamber-folk number after that blended catchy Sandy Denny purism with Chelsea Girl instrumentation, followed by a bossa-inflected tune. Leishman’s solo material is a lot quieter than Kamikaze Ground Crew typically was, so you can expect her and the rest of the crew to pick up the pace for what should be a killer night Thursday at Roulette.

 

The Irrepressibly Fun Bombay Rickey Return to Barbes This Saturday Night

Bombay Rickey are one of the funnest and most individualistic bands in New York. They mash up surf rock, psychedelic cumbias and Bollywood into a constantly shapeshifting, danceable sound. They’re playing this Saturday night, Sept 24 at 8 PM at Barbes. Then they’re at Brooklyn Conservatory of Music the following night, Sept 25 at 7.

They played a couple of Barbes shows over the past couple of months At the first one, frontwoman/accordionist Kamala Sankaram was battling a cold, although she still hit every note in her four-and-a-half octave range, useful since she and the band did a whole bunch of Yma Sumac covers. It was a dress rehearsal, more or less, for an upcoming London show, and since Barbes doesn’t have a dressing room, she word several outfits on top of another. One by one, they came off, but by the time she was down to the final shiny dress – you know how hot it gets onstage at Barbes in the summer – she was drenched.

At the second show, last month, she’d won the battle and was back to her usual exuberant, charismatic self. The group opened with a brisk, ominously bouncing surf tune, Sankaram hitting an arioso high note and squeezing every ounce of drama out of it, saxophonist Jeff Hudgins adding a moody, modally-charged solo that disintegrated into hardbop. Sankaram scatted takadimi drum language as the song shifted shape behind her, hit another operatic surf interlude with a Drew Fleming guitar solo that could have charmed a snake, Hudgins taking it further up and outside over Gil Smuskowitz’s blippy bassline.

A coy mambo gave Sankaram a rare chance to show off her low register – as it turns out, she’s just as strong there as she is way up in the stratosphere. She might just well be the best singer in all of New York in any style of music (unsurprisingly, she also sings opera and jazz). Then the band took a turn into spaghetti western territory,Fleming spiraling while drummer Sam Merrick supplied a boomy drive on his toms in unexpected 6/8 time

Sankaram chose her spots for goosebump-inducing vocalese on the next number, a wickedly catchy blend of Bollywood dramatics and surfy bounce. They followed with a slinky, ominously Ethiopian-flavored tune over a clave groove, sax prowling uneasily over the guitar’s reverb-drenched resonance. Then they took a long, even more unexpected detour into vintage JB’s style funk.

Sankaram then broke out her sitar for what sounded like a 60s Vegas psychedelic pop number on Vicodin, until a purposeful, stately sax solo that echoed Coltrane’s Giant Steps. After a similar one from Fleming, the band took a long climb upward. They brought some funk to a version of Dum Maro Dum, the famous Bollywood weedhead anthem, and finally broke out the chicha for an undulating Yma Sumac hit, Fleming’s spiky solo skirting skronk and postbop. Then they went back to surfy Bollywood. Couples were dancing; so can you, this Saturday night at Barbes.

Rachael Kilgour’s Soaring Lyrical Brilliance Holds a Lincoln Center Crowd Rapt

“This is satire,” Rachael Kilgour grinned as she launched into He’ll Save Me, the spot-on, searingly funny centerpiece of her most recent ep, Whistleblower’s Manifesto: Songs for a New Revolution, at her headline debut earlier this month at Lincoln Center .She explained that there have been instances where booking agents heard snippets of her music and passed on her, thinking that she was a Christian songwriter. Testament to the power of that satire.

“Mothers on welfare? Healthcare? Don’t you think I know better than to hand out rewards to sinners?” she sang as laughter broke out everywhere. And the punchline,“I know I’ll get my way, when it comes to Judgment Day,” was as subtly sinister as Kilgour possibly could have made it. Considering that she was following a brief performance by a generic folkie from Philadelphia whose own brand of corporate Prosperity Christianity that song lampoons, it made even more of an impact. It’s hard to think of a more deliciously subversive moment on any midtown Manhattan stage in 2016.

.While there are echoes of both Tift Merritt and Loretta Lynn in Kilgour’s resonant, nuanced mezzo-soprano, the closest comparison is Roy Orbison: Kilgour soars upward into the same kind of otherworldly, angst-ridden melismas. And she has the material to match that transcendent voice. The ache and anguish as she hit the chorus of Round and Round – which she sang a-cappella at the end, to drive it home – held the crowd rapt. Likewise, I Pray, a tender wish song for a lost soul, gave Kilgour a platform to swoop up into her most Orbisonesque chorus. Later she went back to simmeringly savage mode for a number that was ostensibly about forgiveness but turned out to be more of a kiss-off anthem. And In America, another satirical one where she finally dropped the smiley-faced Republican ingenue act for reality, drew the night’s most applause.

The two most heartwrenching numbers were dedicated to her stepdaughter. Kilgour herself teared up during the first one, and by the time she was done, there probably wasn’t a dry eye in the crowd. Kilgour explained that she’d gone through a divorce a couple of years ago, “And that sucked!” She related how her earlier material has a populist, global focus, and that writing herself through the pain was a new experience, one that she’s still getting used to. Kilgour wants to break down the barriers between performer and audience, which harks back to a hallowed folk music tradition, where pretty much everybody in the village was in the band. Ultimately, that leads to the kind of community-building Kilgour has focused on thus far in her relatively young career.

In context, the gallows humor of the catchy, swaying Will You Marry Me took on new and unintentionally ironic resonance. The rest of the set mixed low-key, simmering ballads with the kind of anthemic acoustic rock Kilgour does so well, many of the numbers drawn from her brand-new album Rabbit in the Road.

These free Lincoln Center Atrium shows, as the space’s program director, Jordana Phokompe explained beforehand, are designed to offer something for everyone. And she’s right – they do. Tonight’s performance at 7:30 PM features ecstatically fun Colombian-American psychedelic cumbia band MAKU Soundsystem. Considering how well their previous Lincoln Center performances have drawn, you should get to the space on Broadway between 62nd and 63rd early if you’re going.

The Grasping Straws Bring Their Feral Intensity to Bushwick Friday Night

With her dynamic, sometimes feral wail that often recalls Grace Slick or Ann Wilson, guitarist Mallory Feuer fronts the Grasping Straws, one of the most riveting bands in New York right now. Last month at Mercury Lounge, they headlined one of this year’s best shows, a mighty triplebill with Gold and A Deer A Horse opening with equally captivating sets. This Friday night, Sept 23 at 10 PM, Feuer is bringing her fiery four-piece, two-guitar group to Gold Sounds in Bushwick; cover is $10.

The Grasping Straws have been through some lineup changes, but they’ve really solidified their uneasily catchy sound with the addition of lead guitarist Marcus Kitchen (who also plays in the similarly dark if slightly less ferocious trio Mischief Night, wihere Feuer switches to drums). At the Mercury show, they opened with what could have been the great missing track from Patti Smith’s Radio Ethiopia, the tense clang of the two guitars over Sam Goldfine’s catchy bass hook on the turnaround. The band’s first detour into lingering, rhythmically tricky, enigmatic rainy-day Britpop suddenly took a savage leap into the post-grunge era on the chorus, and then back, on the wings of Jim Bloom’s elegantly shuffling drumss

The big crowd-pleaser Sad State of Affairs came across as a messy yet wickedly tight post-Silver Rocket SY hit. Rolling toms propelled the more brooding. rainswept number after that, rising toward resolution on the chorus as Feuer’s voice dipped and slashed – then they took it toward sludgy metal terrain as the frontwoman’s wail rose over the thump

A pointillistic pulse anchored by Goldfine’s bass incisions kicked off an anthemic, period-perfect 1982-style new wave-flavored song with echoes of dub reggae, the Slits, and a sunbaked guitar solo. After that, the band made a returm to overcast midtempo janglepop punctuated by anotther rise into fury, then a ridiculously catchy, midtempo anthem where Feuer rose to another all-too-brief, blues-infused wail on the chorus

Lulls juxtaposed with jangly peaks at the end of a phrase throughout a skittish downstroke rocker, followed by a slithery mashup of Hendrixian pastoral psychedelia and doublespeed intensity. They encored with a lickety-split new one, stampeding Murder City proto-punk taken into the 21st century. There will be a lot of this kind of s moldering fire at the Bushwick show Friday night.

And the opening acts were fantastic as well. With just bass, drums and vocals, the all-female quintet Gold sound like no other band on the planet. And while you might not think that the sound would hold up alongside a couple of loud rock bands, it did, due to the women’s three-part harmonies and the catchiness of the bassist’s punchy, trebly lines. While their sound has the same kind of outside-the-box creativity of the early punk movement, it’s also in the here and now. And A Deer A Horse adrenalized the crowd with their theatrical, intense mashup of catchy, anthemic postpunk, glamrock and the occasional triumphant descent into stomping, doomy metal. They’re at Elvis Guesthouse on October 8 at around 8 for a ridiculously cheap $5.

The Attacca Quartet Make a Strong Segue with Visionary Art-Rocker Jeff Lynne’s ELO at Radio City

No less august a figure than ELO’s Jeff Lynne had asked the Attacca Quartet to open his sold-out weekend stand at Radio City this past weekend. The string quartet responded with an ecstatic, robust performance that, while tantalizingly brief, threatened to upstage the headliners. It was as much a testament to the group’s ability to connect with an audience most likely unfamiliar with their repertoire as it was Lynne’s confidence in his thirteen-piece band’s ability to pull off a similarly electric set of ambitious, iconic chamber pop and art-rock hits.

The foursome – violinists Amy Schroeder and Keiko Tokunaga, violist Nathan Schram and cellist Andrew Yee – spiced their set with codas by Haydn and Beethoven, practically jumping out of their shoes to be playing to such a vast audience. Beyond that, they impressed with their choice of material, opening with John Adams’ acerbically percussive miniature Toot Nipple, then a bit later slinking up his Alligator Escalator with its steady, apprehensive drive out of a rondo of sepulchral high harmonics. It was arguably the high point of the night. While the group could have taken the easy route with standard Romantic repertoire, or the ostentatious one with, say, Bartok, they cemented their cred by showcasing material from their pals, emerging composers Paul Wiancko and Michael Ippolito. Stark low-midrange washes and enigmatically lively exchanges held the crowd’s focus before the headliners hit the stage.

Opening with a low, ominously swirling vortex of sound – one of several recurrent tropes this evening – Lynne and company launched into the stark, misterioso intro to Tightrope, the uneasily dynamic, Dvorak-influenced first cut on the group’s platinum-selling 1976 New World Record. The only remaining member from the band’s several chart-topping 70s lineups is keyboardist Richard Tandy; the rest of Lynne’s merry band is on the young side, and they were stoked to the nines to be able to share the stage with one of the greatest rock tunesmiths of alltime.

They didn’t play Do Ya – the cult favorite by Lynne’s previous band the Move that ELO reprised much more ornately for an American audience – but they also didn’t segue into it like they used to do back in the day, when they’d cut off the galumphing, phantasmagorical outro to 10538 Overture, the alienation anthem that opens the band’s 1972 debut album. This time out they played that all the way through. Other than that and Tightrope, the night’s only other deep cut – an epically pulsing take of Secret Messages, title track to the band’s 1983 album – also rose out of a stygian reflecting pool.

The crowd saved their most heartfelt ovation for a particularly gorgeous, majestic take of the 1974 ballad Can’t Get It Out of My Head, lit up with terse Tandy keyboard flourishes that held very closely to the kind of fun the band would have with it onstage forty years ago. Otherwise, the band’s two additional keyboardists, as many as four guitarists at once and a couple of backup singers over a hard-hitting but swinging rock rhythm section brought new energy to Lynne’s already hefty studio arrangements.

The one new song in the set, from the late 2015 release Alone in the Universe, was the Lennonesque, autobiographical piano ballad When I Was a Boy. Otherwise, this was a clapalong show. The band followed an inspired version of the bluesy, minor-key 1976 kiss-off hit Evil Woman with a similarly terse performance of their 1973 British hit, Showdown. Their late-70s disco era was represented by the bouncy Shine a Little Love and All Over the World as well as a hypnotically spiraling run through Turn to Stone, from the 1977 double album Out of the Blue.

The rest of the set drew on fun, imaginatively orchestrated arrangements of radio hits including Livin’ Thing, with its spiraling violin solo; a boisterously strummed Sweet Talking Woman; and the stately, angst-drenched ballad Telephone Line, shimmering with surreallistic, melancholy keyboard textures. They closed with the crescendoing pastorale Wild West Hero and then a full-length version of Mr. Blue Sky – a nod to a well-known jazz standard – and encored with an expansive cover of Chuck Berry’s Roll Over Beethoven, a popular FM radio staple from 1972. Throughout the set, Lynne sang strongly, from the bottom of his formidable baritone, to the falsetto he used with such frequency in the late 70s. It would have been a treat to hear Eldorado, or Kuiama, or similar early material voicing his visionary; dystopic worldview. Guess we’ll have to wait til next tour for that.

The Attacca Quartet’s’ next New York performance is on October 21 at 8 PM at Holy Trinity Church, 3 W 65th St. where they’ll be performing works by Beethoven and Caroline Shaw. General admission is $20.

More Delicious Retro 60s Psychedelia From the Allah-Las

The Allah-Las  – frontman/guitarist Miles Michaud, lead guitarist Pedrum Siadatian, bassist Spencer Dunham and drummer Matthew Correia – are one of the most tuneful and best-appreciated bands in a crowded field of psychedelic retroists including the Mystic Braves, Mystery Lights, Night Beats and a whole lot of other reverbtoned janglers and clangers. The California quartet’s latest album Calico Review is due out momentarily, meaning that it ought to be streaming at Bandcamp in a week or so. Testament to their popularity, their two-night stand this weekend at Baby’s All Right is sold out; fans in other cities on their current tour should take that into consideration in the case where advance tickets are available.

As usual, most of the songs on the new record clock in at around the three-minute mark. The lyrics channel a persistent unease, but ultimately this band is more about wicked hooks than words. This is their most overtly retro, Beatlesque release to date. It opens with the enigmatically sunny Strange Heat, driven by Siadatian’s spare, flickering mosquito leads over a muted backdrop: it’s the most Odessey and Oracle the band’s done so far in their career. They follow that with Satisfied, a very clever, rhythmically dizzying update on Taxman-era Beatles with a deliciously icy vintage chorus-box solo midway through. Then the band takes the energy up a notch with the late Velvets ringer Could Be You.

The band keeps the Velvets vibe going, but in a more delicate folk-rock vein, with High and Dry: the blend of acoustic and electric six- and twelve-string textures beats anything Lou Reed came up with in 1969. Tricky tempos and lingering twelve-string lines return in Mausoleum, which wouldn’t be out of place on a Church album from the mid-80s. Then Roadside Memorial mashes up early Yardbirds/Blues Magoos riff-rock with hints of vintage funk

The shapeshifting Autumn Dawn kicks off with a wry allusions to the most famous acid-pop riff ever, then struts along with echoes of mid-60s Pretty Things. Plaintive strings and misty mellotron add gravitas to the wryly acerbic, Magical Mystery Tour-tinged Famous Phone Figure: “What’s she got but a pretty face in real estate?” Michaud wants to know.

200 South La Brea – site of a casting agency – has a similarly sardonic feel, a return to What Goes On Velvets. The intro to Warmed Kippers hints that the song will go in a warped, noisy indie direction, then straightens out, straight back to the Fab Four. The group springboards off an iconic Dave Brubeck riff for the southwestern gothic of Terra Ignota; the album winds up with the sunny, summery, swinging Place in the Sun. The only thing about this album that’s not retro is the mention of a cellphone, a touch of funny surrealism amidst the period-perfect Vox-amped 1967 sonics.

Amanda Shires Brings Her Thoughtful, Vivid Nocturnes to SoHo

Amanda Shires was already an established presence on the Americana circuit before she met Jason Isbell. No doubt that connection has given her career an extra boost, but she’s been a first-rate fiddler and a distinctive songwriter since the early zeros. Her latest album, My Piece of Land – streamng at NPR– is Shires’ shout-out to her Texas roots and the red dirt music that she grew up with. The songs are sparse, most of them on the slow and pensive side, building a dusky, mysterious ambience with lingering electric and acoustic guitars, washes of steel, acoustic bass and brushed drums. The production is similarly purist and organic, with just enough natural reverb to max out the saturnine backdrop behind Shires’ gently articulated vocals. She’s playing the album release show tomorrow night, Sept 13 at 9 PM at City Winery. The venue doesn’t sell tickets: your best deal is to tell the door person that you’re going to the bar, which will set you back $18. And there’s plenty of space to stand if you don’t want to drink. Otherwise, you can take a table for more money.

The album opens with the spare, brisk shuffle The Way It Dimmed, Shires’ voice cautious and pensive:

Closer was never close enough
Closing time we watched the lights and sun come up
You begged me to stay and I slipped away
I remember the the fire and the way it dimmed
As a fire will sometimes do

The uneasily swaying Slippin’ looks back to early 70s Laurel Canyon Americana pop, with a similarly brooding, nocturnal ambience, Shires’ narrator considering how long it’s going to be for her honkytonking man to be seduced by “the curve of her shoulder, the length of the bar.”

Shires channels Amy Allison cleverness and Tift Merritt tenderness in Harmless, a disarmingly gentle cheater’s tale:

There’s some I can’t remember
A talented bartender
Way out in the cheap seats
The stars stare unblinking
The ones that know anything
Won’t be revealing

Shires finally rosins up her bow for Pale Fire, a spacious, deep-sky nod to the Vladimir Nabokov novel. The playfully twinkling Nursery Rhyme follows a loping western swing groove. Then Shires opens the eerie blues My Love (The Storm) with a couple of creepy scrapes on her fingerboard: her all-too-brief solo over burning electric guitar and organ midway through is the high point of the album.

The big rocker here, When You’re Gone is an improbably successful mashup of Abbey Road Beatles and late 90s Sheryl Crow at her most intense. Mineral Wells is a pensive look back to the scenery of Shires’ childhood:” “The only tree with leaves in Lubbock, with roots in Mineral Wells.” She takes a detour into moody, echoey, Fender Rhodes-driven southern soul with I Know What It’s Like: “With everyone standing around, I buckled and hit the ground,” Shires recalls. She closes the album with another brooding 6/8 ballad, You Are My Home, rising to a brushfire crescendo of stark fiddle and searing slide guitar. In its purposeful, meticulously assembled way, this is one of the most solidly captivating albums of the year.

The Anniversary’s Josh Berwanger Exorcises Some More Demons

Josh Berwanger of the Anniversary writes catchy powerpop songs like it was the late 70s and his life – as well as the deed to his UK castle, his addiction to rare bordeaux, and his ex-wives’ alimony – depended on it. If this was 1979, he would rule the airwaves. That’s a compliment, not a dis. In 2016 terms, that means that every powerpop blog will go crazy over Berwanger‘s forthcoming album Exorcism Rock, he and the band will make a modest killing on the road, and it’ll get plenty of college radio airplay. An album like this could move ten thousand units if he puts it out on vinyl – a smash hit by this decade’s standards. The Anniversary was a serviceable powerpop band, but in the years since the group’s early zeros heyday, Berwanger has become a brilliant songwriter. Most recently, he’s doing an Anniversary tour (ok, bad pun) that’s hitting the Bell House tonight,  September 11 starting at around 8. It’s a weird bill: the excellent, hazily female-fronted dub reggae band Extra Classic, then a generic singer-songwriter, then the Anniversary. Advance tix are gone, so it’s $25 at the door.

Berwanger’s forthcoming record was ostensibly recorded in a marathon weeklong session fueled by equal parts red wine and tequila. It revolves around a familiar Berwanger theme, the evil that femmes fatales do. A surreal gothic choir kicks off the album’s opening title track, a backbeat numberin the hallowed tradition of Badfinger and Cheap Trick.

I heard you on the radio
They say you’re the new sensation
It’s so easy to fool this nation,

the frontman intones. A rapidfire blast of blues riffage and a brief twin-lead guitar passage between Ricky Salthouse and Berwanger completes the period-perfect 70s picture.

Rats & Cats swayss slowly over Scott Schoenbeck’s snappy bass, a twisted mashup of the Knack and Alladdin Sane-era Bowie “You move like a cat, taste like a cat..blow like the wind…” We get the picture.

Booty Shake is a dead ringer for Chuck Prophet, a Nashville gothic tune disguised as scampering early Tom Petty powerpop. Black Sun, a kiss-off number, is early 80s CBGB style punk-pop tune with a wicked hook and another savagely purposeful Salthouse guitar solo. Guess You Weren’t Wrong blends twelve-string jangle and spare piano over a lush bed of acoustic guitars, like a late Elliott Smith ballad. Then Berwanger flips the script with I Want You Bad, a minute fifty seconds of period-perfect 1979 punk-pop bliss, acidic sheets of guitar over a wickedly catchy tune propelled by drummer Jonny Phillip’s frantic pulse.

Slutty Skin – Berwanger’s titles leave nothing to the imagination – is Social Distortion as the Star Spangles might have done it, with starry washes from Brian Klein’s synth. Banks of distorted broken chords anchor Forever, bass hovering overhead before kicking in with the drums on the verse. “It won’t last forever,” Berwanger warns. Warm sheets of synth give way to a dual guitar break, Berwanger running the riff as Salthouse plays acidic noise. The girls in the chorus complete the picture at the end, closer to the Jayhawks than ELO. It’s the best song on the album.

Spirit King is a more straightforward, crunchy take on Adam Ant: “We’re lost in the underground,” Berwanger whispers. The acoustic Led Zep interlude, and the fuzztone glam crescendo after that, might seem completely out of place, but Berwanger makes it all work, right up to Salthouse’s long, searing solo out. The final cut is Space & Time, rising from a starry, Lynchian acoustic intro to fuzztone desperation and then back. “I think of you at night when I’m all alone, so I think of you all the time,” Berwanger explains. It all makes sense now. Last time Berwanger led a current project on tour, he and the band played the Mercury; this time, they’re scheduled to hit Cake Shop on November 4.

Sharon Goldman’s Brave New Art-Rock Album Weighs the Richness and Gravitas of Jewish Heritage

Since the early zeros, Sharon Goldman has made a name for herself as one of the world’s great tunesmiths. Although she sometimes gets pigeonholed as a folksinger, and she plays that circuit, her music has always had more of a classic pop sensibility. The Brill Building and the 80s – think, Elvis Costello – are frequent reference points. Until now. Goldman’s new album Kol Isha – A Woman’s Voice (streaming at Spotify) finds her going deeper into art-rock, as well as the musical roots of her Jewish heritage. As a lyricist, Goldman says a lot in very few words, crystallizing her imagery just as she does her anthemic verses and catchy choruses. The new album is a song cycle, and it’s as dark as anything she’s ever written. While the suite explores Goldman’s conflicted roots as a secular – and fearlessly individualistic – Jewish artist raised in the Modern Orthodox tradition, her tale of gentle resistance, and angst, and ultimately transcendence will resonate with anyone raised in any strict, traditional culture.

The core of the band is Goldman on acoustic guitar and piano, Stephen Murphy on guitars, Craig Akin on bass, Cheryl Prashker on percussion and Dan Hickey on drums. Goldman has never sung more strongly or dynamically: this album contains both her sultriest song ever – the lush piano ballad Rose of Sharon – and also one of her most hushed. That number, Three Stars, concludes the album, an uneasy recollection of a childhood Saturday night waiting impatiently for nightfall and the end of the Sabbath.

Is that an oud on Pillar of Salt, the witchy Lot’s Wife ballad that with electric instrumentation would make a killer heavy metal anthem? Yesssss! Brian Prunka adds ominous touches with that instrument there, as he does on the album’s title track

Red Molly’s Abbie Gardner adds a surreal but strikingly effective Americana touch on Lilith (Goldman has a thing for Talmudic hussies), just as Murphy does with his purist, bluesy slide work on Song of Songs, Goldman’s take on innuendo-fueled Old Testament erotica. She and Murphy do the same with their bluesy twin-acoustic work on The Sabbath Queen, a rather grim account of an Orthodox matriarch who’s about to pass out on her feet just at the moment that the celebratory weekly Shabbos meal begins. Middle Eastern blues, who would have thought?

Goldman returns to more straight-up bluesy terrain – through the gauzy prism of Mazzy Star, maybe – with In My Bones, pensively weighing the richness and joys of Jewish culture against  emotional and historical baggage. Similarly, The Bride awaits her impending nuptials not as the first day of a lifelong journey but “the beginning of the end,” awash in Laura Wolfe’s brooding violin and Goldman’s intricate fingerpicking.

She sings in both Engish and Hebrew in the enigmatic piano ballad Land of Milk and Honey:

The taste of blood and berries on my tongue as I wander ancient streets…
War overlooks fields of wildflowers, pieces buried in dreams…
There’s a soldier sleeping next to me with a gun on his shoulder
As we pass olive trees and barbed wire

Prunka’s opening taqsim on the album’s insistently anthemic title track might be the single most delicious musical moment, among many, here. “A woman’s voice is naked, forbidden, don’t raise that sweet sound in front of men,” Goldman sings with more than a hint of seduction. “It might arouse attention!”

Lest we forget, there are places in the world where a klezmer band with women in it wouldn’t be allowed to perform. Which seems to sum up the dichotomy Goldman is dealing with here: Biblical heroines defy the restrictions on them to do wonderful things, and thousands of years later, the theme repeats itself. While it helps to be a member of “The Tribe,” as Goldman reminds, to appreciate this, her narrative and anthems will resonate across cultures. And maybe generate some controversy, and maybe shift the cultural paradigm as much as she does the musical one, in the process. Goldman’s next New York show is Oct 13 at 6 PM at the Christopher Street Coffeehouse, in the basement of the church at 81 Christopher St. between 7th Ave. South and Bleecker.

Elegant, Serpentine Chamber Pop with the String Orchestra of Brooklyn

It’s hard to imagine that the String Orchestra of Brooklyn is ten years old this year. From the looks of some of the group’s members this past evening at le Poisson Rouge, if they’d been around since day one, they would have been in grade school then. This time out, the irrepressible ensemble backed a series of soloists straddling the worlds of indie classical and rock in a program that was more verdantly fresh and vivid than it was awash in the kind of lushly enveloping, dreamy sonics that strings orchestras are typically known for. A celebration of singles rather than an album of them, the program bookended often unpredictably knotty material around violinist Michi Wiancko‘s warmly minimal, poignant canon of a centerpiece, That Knock Is For Me (her first composition, she said), her cellist brother Paul adding a stark precision as he played standing up, as one would a kamancheh or erhu fiddle.

The New York premiere of William Brittelle‘s labyrinthine, surprise-packed, intricately dynamic mini-suite Canyons Curved Burgundy, was sung with moody resonance by Wye Oak guitarist Jenn Wasner, a frequent Brittelle collaborator. At the end, she went to her knees to elegantly tremolo-pick upper-register chords that were more raindroplets than dreampop washes. Her fellow guitarist Aaron Roche sang falsetto, off mic most of the time, so his harmonies often weren’t very present in the mix. Of his works on the bill, the most memorable was the slowly swaying, pensively 70s Britfolk-tinged Wooden Knife.

Wasner’s Everything Is Happening Today – scheduled for release on Flock of Dimes‘ debut album, due out next month – followed a more vigorous series of tangents, similar to Brittelle’s first piece. The group closed with his new single, Dream Has No Sacrifice, its central mantra within what by now had become an expectedly shapeshifting string arrangement replete with peek-a-boo voicings. Brittelle’s music in general is very translucent, so hearing him explain that the trials of fatherhood had sent him into a tailspin of jumping through some unnecessarily complicated hoops was quite a surprise. This, obviously, was a return to form, and despite its outward simplicity – “My Brightest Diamond on valium,” one wag observed – hardly easy to play.

A quiet, determined triumph for the soloists, who also included Robert Fleitz on electric piano and keyboards and Owen Weaver on syndrums – and the orchestra, whose members this time out also comprised violinists Gina Dyches, Quyen Le, Eric Shieh, Allison Dubinski, Shawn Barnett and Matthew Lau; violists Emily Bookwalter, Joseph Dermody and Brian Thompson; cellists Ken Hashimoto and Aya Terki; and bassists Luiz Bacchi, Valerie Whitney and Morton Cahn

The String Orchestra of Brooklyn’s next performance is at Bargemusic on Sept. 11 at 4 PM as part of a memorial concert, where they’ll be playing Barber’s Adagio for Strings. The concert is free, but early arrival is a must.