Another Withering Lyrical Rock Masterpiece by Ward White

It’s time we put Ward White up there in the pantheon with Elvis Costello, Richard Thompson, Rachelle Garniez, Steve Wynn, Ray Davies and any other first-ballot hall of famer you can think of. Over the last fifteen years or so, the now LA-based White been on a creative tear to rival any one of those songwriting icons. Bowie’s work in the 70s is a good comparison, although where the Thin White Duke would reinvent himself just about every year, White has crystallized a classic three-minute janglerock sound, often veering off to the psychedelic side. 

Lyrically speaking, nobody writes more compelling, allusively macabre narratives. The devil is always in the details: in this case, the crack in the porcelain, the kind of soap in the bathroom, the objects on either side of where the dead bird has fallen out of the sky. White’s 2013 release Bob got the pick for best album of the year here, but that might just as easily be said for anything he’s put out since, including his latest one, Diminish, streaming at Bandcamp. As usual, White keeps his songs short, everything less than five minutes, some less than three. White plays all the guitars, elegantly and tersely, joined by keyboardist Tyler Chester and the low-key rhythm section of bassist John Spiker and drummer Mark Stepro.

It opens with Titans, its plotline as inscrutable as its melody is straightforward and hard-hitting. Twin guitar leads roar up to a menacing, chromatic chorus: it’s one of White’s louder numbers. An infant’s death and a possible terrorist attack may be related, or just parallel events. “This is no time for dreams,” is the mantra: welcome to the end of the teens, USA.

Noise on 21, a punchy backbeat anthem with blippy organ, is a classic White urban tableau, the yuppies upstairs staying up late just to seal another sordid deal while the narrator reaches breaking point: “Some things that you should never see are happy in the shadows, now it’s time to go home.”

Back to the End, with its cruelly Beatlesque chorus-box guitar, is a throwback to White’s late 60s psych-pop period a few years ago, a characteristically allusive, twisted scenario tracing the ugly logic of a S&M scenario: “Cannibals don’t waste their time with darkening the roux.”

Canopy, a brief, catchy number with uneasily warpy 80s synth, is one of the more unselfconsciously poetic songs in White’s catalog, contemplating endings from contrasting viewpoints

Awash in jangle and starry synth orchestration, Flood paints a grim picture of dysfunction on a Hollywood film set, with a shout to Baudelaire:

Send a dozen roses up to Noah’s favorite failures
Don’t believe the rumors of a plague upon this town
This bar never closes and it’s filled with drunken sailors
For every one, an albatross who should have let him drown

Watch the Hands is the great lost track from Elvis Costello’s Armed Forces: “Your best laid plans will never bite you in the ass unless your turn your back and leave them starving,” the child killer taunts.

With White’s lingering, detfly textured guitar multitracks, Cowboy could be the most gorgeous, bittersweetly surreal number here. It’s White’s La Chute:

Tell Bob I’m not busy being born, or dying, just alive
Some flights leave too early out of Kennedy
And some pricks play the Castro card for years

White puts a fresh spin on an old myth in Sodom, bristling with Syd Barrett-ish changes, sardonic backing vocals and glammy guitars.

Some call us sacrilegious
The chafed and the chosen few
You polish your barnyard idol
I’ll tarnish the ewe

Alternately balmy and burning, Every Night I Have This Dream is another of the murder ballads White is unsurpassed at – it’s not clear whether this is really a dream or not:

Double nickels all the way
I can’t afford to lose the day
They pop that trunk trunk and we are done, and I’m not going out that way

White puts a sinister edge on a mashup of blithe Bacharach 60s bossa-pop and watery, artsy Beatlesque jangle in Uncle Bob (Akron), the album’s most corrosively cynical number. That’s hardly a surprise, considering it’s a tale from the campaign trail told by the manager of a candidate who turns out to be something less than ideal

The album’s final cut is The Living End, a somber, mostly acoustic portrait of defeat as harrowingly detailed as Richard Thompson’s Withered and Died:

Buried with your artifacts
Pharaoh’s favorite son
Too late to think of what you’ll do with what you’ve done

You’ll see this in a few days on the best albums of 2018 page.

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Purist, Potently Lyrical Janglerock, Americana, Powerpop and Soul From the Bastards of Fine Arts

For the past several months, the Bastards of Fine Arts have been working up a formidable body of catchy, anthemic, purist rock songs via a mostly-monthly residency at 11th Street Bar. The project took shape as a challenge of sorts, songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Matt Keating and his lead guitarist co-conspirator Steve Mayone hell-bent on writing a new song every week. Their project caught on with social media and went viral. Fast forward to 2018, they’ve got a full band now (Jason Mercer on bass and Greg Wieczorek on drums) and a catalog as vast as a band who’ve been around for five times as long. Which means they can mine it for the real gems.

Playing as a duo at the American Folk Art Museum in May of last year, they were at the point where they were working every style they knew (and they know a lot!). Sam Cooke ballad? Check. Lou Reed (a guy Keating is unsurpassed at imitating)? Doublecheck. Honkytonk anthem, Wallflowers janglerock, wistful Americana waltz? Triplecheck.

A year later at an early 11th Street gig, they’d pulled the band together and had built up a set that transcended its origins. They opened with their catchiest number, the gorgeously bittersweet I’ll Take the Fall, Keating both self-effacing and witheringly cynical at the same time. Another even more vindictive number traced the story of an ex that the song’s narrator spies out on a date with some dude. On the way out of the bar, she drops her coat; the dude picks it up for her. Keating’s narrator would have left it there.

Because part of the project is “what style CAN’T we do,” there are plenty of jokes to go around, some more inside than others. Switching to piano, Keating turned a Mayone ballad into a gospel tune; Mayone added some sardonic metal licks to a Keating soul number. They worked a bossa groove, Mercer spiraling all over the fretboard during a more recent number, Walk in the Park, a rare instance of a song of theirs which doesn’t seem to have a cynical undercurrent.

In a very subtle Elvis Costello vein, they vamped along on a bouncy soul-blues tune for a good three minutes, at least, without changing chords once. At the end of the set, they brought up Keating’s daughter Greta, who flashed some incisive chops on Strat as well as a similarly edgy lyricism and soaring vocals. Most children of great musicians don’t go into music for obvious reasons; Greta Keating, like Amy Allison and Jakob Dylan, is every bit as formidable as her dad was when he was in his early twenties. Here’s hoping she sticks with it. The Bastards of Fine Arts are back at 11th Street Bar on Dec 18 at 9 PM.

Single of the Day 11/10/18 – Full Frontal Ferocity

Arguably the loudest band ever to play the sedate Rockwood Music Hall, Hannah vs. the Many are New York’s best power trio. They’re at the Way Station at 10 tonight, a place where they actually could drown out the crowd of yuppie puppies at the bar. Check out their latest rad, theatrical single, Face Front (via youtube) frontwoman Hannah Fairchild’s lyrical torch job on an ex she ran into when least expected/desired. Don’t ever mess with a songwriter – this could happen to you.

Rock n Roll Suicides of 2018, Live

The Man in the Long Black Coat is lost.

He’s never been on this Crown Heights block before. Then again, before the days of the Long Black Coat, there was no reason for anyone who didn’t live or work, or have friends or family on this block, to be here.

The address he’s looking for seems to be in an unmarked former commercial storefront on an otherwise mostly residential brownstone street. He moseys a couple of doors down to a gentrifier bar and peers in: no sign of anything out of the ordinary. Turning back, he spots a couple making their way into a darkened doorway. The Man in the Long Black Coat follows them: he’s psyched. He likes mysteries.

Another mystery immediately presents itsef when the friendly girl at the door greets him. See, if you’ve been following this oft-interrupted story here, you’ll remember that the Man in the Long Black Coat is having a problem with invisibility. People have been bumping into him, and he’s had several near-misses with Ubers blasting through intersections. It’s not that the Ubers are even running the light like they always do: it’s that they clearly don’t see him.

And it’s not that being invisible, for sometimes hours at a time, doesn’t have its benefits. The man has discovered that he can walk into any gentrifier boite in town, check out the band and not have to worry about dropping a double sawbuck on a glass of fancy beer or a tiny, garlic-deprived crostini. He just needs to stay out of the way of the kids staggering around the joint.

Unfortunately, invisibility isn’t something that the man can switch on or off. The bank, the jewelry store, the lumber yard, the supermarket: it never occurs at any of those places. He’s tried all of them, only to be disappointed every time.

But here, it’s a welcome change to be at least marginally perceptible. Because of who he is, the Man in the Long Black Coat’s favorite holiday is Halloween: invisible or not, this is the one time of the year that’s really his.

The long, rectangular groundfloor space is obviously somebody’s home – with a big stage in the back. The hosts are throwing a Halloween kegger, and there are bands. The crowd is demographically diverse, a few in costume but mostly not. Nobody’s taking selfies, and people are talking directly to one another rather than texting. The man is reminded of downtown Manhattan theatre crowds in the days before the Long Black Coat. These people are sharp, and energetic: they all look like they’d love a turn onstage.

As it turns out, many of them end up doing exactly that. One of the drummers opens the night with a few stagy Rocky Horror-style bits. Is one of those ghoul-camp numbers actually from the Rocky Horror soundtrack? It’s been so long since the Man in the Long Black Coat heard the album that he can’t remember. Being ensconsed behind a couch, close to the keg, doesn’t help the memory factor.

Toot Sweet are the first band onstage. Accordionist Mary Spencer Knapp, rocking a leopard-print bodysuit, wields her axe like a guitar. Her vocals are fierce, intense, sometimes channeling righteous rage, like a young Rachelle Garniez. The songs mash up noir cabaret and Brecht/Weill, punk and new wave, with a distant latin influence. The new wave aspect is heightened by the  second keyboard, a synthesizer, taking the occasional keening solo over a nimble rhythm section. The crowd sings along: they want more than they get.

Dressed as a superhero, Haley Bowery – leader of the Manimals – makes her way through the crowd, handing out jello shots. The Man in the Long Black Coat takes one. It’s a scary toothpaste blue, but it tastes fruity and it has a kick. The man doesn’t need it. A welcome if unexpected shift into invisible mode just a couple of hours earlier gave him a chance to crash a shi-shi Alphabet City party and pound one glass of bourbon after another like a college kid. He’s never been able to drink himself visible – usually it seems to work the other way – but the way things are going here, he reasons that this might be the night.

The Manimals take the stage: Bowery on the mic, guitarists Michael Jayne and Chris Norwood trading licks on their flashy Les Pauls, melodic bassist Jack Breslin pushing the songs alongside drummer Matt O’Koren. The Man in the Long Black Coat thinks to himself that this is what it must have been like to see Bowie around the time of the Aladdin Sane album – but with a woman out front. Back when the band were known as Haley Bowery and the Manimals, they had a bit of a glam thing going, but they sound a lot more British and a whole lot more eclectic now. Verses don’t necessarily resolve into choruses and vice versa, and there’s a lot more angst – and depth – to the songs.

And just like Bowie, there’s an alienatedly reassuring ‘you’re not alone” theme to several of the songs. So this is where all the Rock n Roll Suicides of 2018 have gone, The Man in the Long Black Coat muses. Haley was a decent singer back in 2012 – when he saw her at Webster Hall on a twinbill with the amazingly lyrical noir cabaret-punk band Hannah vs. the Many – but she is fantastic now, with a highwire wail that she cuts loose when she really wants to drive a chorus through the roof.

With her piercing blue eyes, boxcutter cheekbones and lithe stage presence, she also looks a lot bigger onstage than she really is. One superhero outfit eventually falls to the side for another superhero look, a unitard this time. Hannah Fairchild from Hannah vs. the Many takes a cameo on harmony vocals and adds her own rocket-fuel wail to the mix. At the end of the show, Haley pulls out an old song, Halloween. “Fuck the rest of them, let’s paaaarty,” is the chorus. The crowd seem to know all the words. The Man in the Long Black Coat gives the band a devils-horns salute: maybe someday we won’t need to shlep all the way to Crown Heights to see a show like this.

Happy Halloween, everybody.

The Manimals play Hank’s on Nov 9 at around 9. Hannah vs. the Many are at the Way Station on Nov 10 at 10.

Barclay James Harvest at Lincoln Center!?!

It was great to finally get to see Barclay James Harvest at Lincoln Center Out of Doors this past evening. Now THAT’S one for the bucket list.

Barclay James Harvest got their start in the 70s as an uptight, tunefully deficient jamband, sort of a prototype for My Morning Jacket. Then they morphed into a competent artsy pop band best known for recycling other peoples’ ideas. The music media at the time called them on it; their snarky response was the song Poor Man’s Moody Blues, whose title perfectly captures their appeal. Their cult classic is Suicide, an actually very poignant ballad with a surprise ending. The rest of their material was not up to that level. Random song title: Galadriel. Genuine hobbit-rock!

OK, it wasn’t Barclay James Harvest who headlined last night. It was Jonathan Wilson. He’s a superstar lead guitarist, the best player to hold down that chair in Roger Waters’ band since Jeff Beck’s brief tenure in the group. He also writes artsy pop songs that recycle other peoples’ ideas. His influences are unimpeachable. The Beatles, and John Lennon especially…Pink Floyd, of course…Elliott Smith, all over the place…the Grateful Dead…Hendrix…Crowded House! Big Star! The Move! The Jayhawks, Marty Willson-Piper and Matt Keating, maybe. And also Neil Young and the Allman Brothers.

Wilson is a competent, unpretentious singer, doubles on piano and writes the occasional withering, cynical turn of phrase. His latest album threatens to descend to the level of James Blunt but doesn’t sink quite that far. Onstage, Wilson was a completely different animal, even though he tantalized the crowd by treating them to a grand total of four guitar solos. Each was scintillating; his long, achingly intense, Gilmouresque interlude midway through the set, over the changes to Pink Floyd’s Breathe, was the high point of the night.

His Telecaster player was just as good when he got the chance to cut loose, with a slide or with some stinging Chicago blues (props to Wilson for having the confidence to include a guy with similarly sizzling, eclectic chops in his band). The bassist doubled strangely on synth bass (why not just use a volume pedal?). The keyboardist used seemingly every patch ever invented, from squiggly vintage 70s Moog sounds, to vast washes of string synth, majestic organ and austere electric piano.

They opened with the fuzztone Carnaby Street psych-pop tune Trafalgar Square, elevated above Oasis level with an unexpected, spacy interlude. Over the Midnight came across as the Verve played by good musicians. Likewise, There’s a Light was a more glam Elliott Smith (or Oasis with a better singer covering Elliott Smith). They ended the show auspiciously with a long, vamping art-rock epic featuring one of two cameos by special guest Laaraji on zither and backing vocals.

One song they didn’t play was a sneering waltz from the new album, with its most relevant lyric:

We’ll be sucking, we’ll be fucking
While the other ones are posting
These kids will never rock again
A sign of the times

The opening act drew a few gaggles of awkward New Jersey high school girls, a few of whom had brought along their similarly unsure-looking pretend boyfriends. Years ago, there was a big market for indifferent, vaguely melancholy upper middle class white women who set their diary entries to music. In the years since, the corporate record labels, by their own admission, have lost 90% of their influence. Back in the day, Natalie Merchant used to play Madison Square Garden. The best this girl can do is open a show at Bowery Ballroom. Is that more a function of the death of the record industry, or the decline of the middle class?

Lincoln Center Out of Doors continues out back in Damrosch Park on Aug 2 at 7:30 PM with a high-voltage set by the Nigerian “Queen of Afrobeat” Yemi Alade. Get there early if you want a seat.

Tamara Hey Brings Her Wickedly Funny, Smart Story-Songs to the Rockwood

Tamara Hey’s soaring voice has charmed and captivated audiences here in her native New York for over a decade. She writes meticulously detailed, magically crystallized three-minute pop songs which, just like her vocals, are disarmingly deep. She’s also one of the great wits in music: an edgy sense of humor infuses everything she writes, even in the gloomiest moments. And her punchlines have O. Henry irony and Amy Rigby bittersweetness.

Yet even in Hey’s most optimistic scenarios, there are always dark clouds somewhere in the distance. She also happens to  be the rare conservatory-trained musician who doesn’t waste notes or let her chops get in the way of saying something as directly as possible, musically or lyrically. She’s playing the small room at the Rockwood on July 1 at 6 PM as part of an intriguing lineup. You know how it is at that place: run ‘em in, run ‘em, off without any regard for what the segues might be like, but in this case the 5 PM act, lyrical parlor pop band Paper Citizen make a good opener. And the 10 PM and midnight acts – southern gothic keyboardist/singer Sam Reider and guitarslinger Mallory Feuer’s fiery power trio the Grasping Straws – are also worth seeing, if you can hold out that long on a work night.

Hey played her most recent Rockwood gig to a packed house back in March. “Thanks for choosing me over Stormy Daniels,” she grinned, appreciating that everybody wasn’t pulling up CNN on their phones instead. Hey’s hilarious opening number, Your Mother Hates Me set the stage. Anybody who’s been in a relationship long enough to meet the ‘rents can relate. The resentment simmering just beneath Hey’s steady fingerpicking was visceral, and the jokes – especially the one about guys’ moms assuming that the girlfriend is a slut – were too good to give away.

She took her time working her way into Miserably Happy, the title of her 2008 album, drawing a few chuckles along the way as she picked up steam – it was like Blondie’s Dreaming, but wide awake, and with a stronger singer out front. Hey went back into stingingly funny mode after that with another new one, Rainy Rainy Cloud, a drivingly anthemic, snarky, spot-on portrait of a jealous frenemy.

She followed We Lean on Cars – a bittersweetly vivid portrait of North Bronx adolescent anomie – with Umbrella, a similarly imagistic, mutedly jazzy rainy-day tableau. Round Peg, a subtly slashing commentary on women’s body image and ridiculous societal pressures, was next and drew rousing applause.

Hey dedicated a stripped-down take of the powerpop gem Somebody’s Girl to fellow songsmith Lorraine Leckie, who was in the house and had dedicated her song Nobody’s Girl to Hey at a recent Mercury Lounge gig.

Isabelle, a plaintive folk-rock ballad with an evil twist, pondered the potential of a newlywed friend getting subsumed in her new marriage. Then Hey picked up the pace again with Drive and its understated escape subtext. 

After Girl Talk, which rose from a goth-tinged bassline to a powerpop insistence, Hey closed with David #3 – an absurdly funny tale about guys women really should stay away from – and encored with the gentle Thanks a Lot, New York, NY, a shout-out from an artist who doesn’t take her hometown for granted. Something like this could keep you enchanted on the first of the month down on Allen Street.

Catchy, Edgy, Smart Classic Punk and CBGB-Era Sounds From the Carvels NYC

The Carvels NYC bring a CBGB of the mind to the Rockaways this Saturday afternoon starting at 1 PM at the Riis Park Beach Bazaar, 157 Rockaway Beach Blvd east of Fort Tilden. The five-piece band have a fearless, sarcastic punk sense of humor and an endless supply of catchy hooks that begin with the Rolling Stones, burn through the Dolls and end up somewhere in the mid-80s. Their latest album Everything With You Is a Travesty is streaming at Bandcamp.

The title cut sets the stage, a mashup of the Ramones and the Dickies, David Spinley’s sax honking along with the twin-guitar assault of frontwoman Lynne Von Pang and Brian Morgan, Steven Fallon holding down the low end over drummer Steve Pang’s four-on-the-floor Tommy Ramone drive.

The second track, Questioningly is a surreal, growling, low-key country ballad in punk disguise, Blondie as Lisa Lost would have done it in her late, great early zeros band DollHouse.

The band pick up the pace and bring back the Dickies/Ramones mix with You Make Me Wanna Be Alone, Morgan adding some neat Chuck Berry-via-Cheetah Chrome lead guitar.  

Speaking of the Dead Boys, It Wasn’t My Idea (To Break Your Heart) brings to mind the last sludgy stuff that iconic outfit were doing at the very end of their career – it’s amazing how much mileage a good band can still get out of a simple 1-4-5 progression. The ep’s final cut is I Don’t Know How You Do What You Do, which blends the Dickies – again – with the Dolls. When Steve gets his dancing Frankenstein toms going behind Spinley’s no-nonsense soul sax solo, it’s just one example of the kind of simple genius moves this band of genuine oldschool NYC veterans have up their sleeves.

Poignant, Pensive Brilliance on Jessie Kilguss’ Allusive, Eclectic, Wickedly Tuneful New Album

You’d think that someone who’d taken a star turn in stage productions with Daniel Day Lewis and Marianne Faithfull would stick with a successful theatrical career. But Jessie Kilguss was drawn to music – and that’s our victory and the theatre world’s loss. Over the past decade, she’s become one of the most haunting singers in any style of music. Her delivery is intimate, like she’s letting you in on a secret – whether that might be a sly joke, an innuendo or something far more sinister. While she’s best known as a purveyor of folk noir, her back catalog spans from witchy art-rock to anthemic janglerock to Richard and Linda Thompson-esque, Britfolk-influenced stylings.

Her new album The Fastness – streaming at Spotify – is not about velocity. It’s about refuge. The title is a North Sea term for a secluded hideaway: a place to hold fast. That sheltering theme resonates mightily through a mix of imagistic, often poignant songs blending elements of 60s soul, 80s goth, new wave and art-rock. And Kilguss’ voice has never soared more mightily or murmured more mordantly than here on this album. She and her first-class band are playing the album release show this Thursday, June 28 at 8:30 PM at the downstairs third stage at the Rockwood; cover is $10.

With Kirk Schoenherr’s contrasting layers of guitar – icy and Siouxsie-esque in the left channel, watery and organ-timbred in the right – the album’s opening track The Master is an elegaic masterpiece. In usual Kilguss fashion, it’s enigmatic to the extreme. “Who will be the oracle when he is gone?” is the final refrain. A Bernie Sanders parable, maybe, or a more ancient, mythological reference? 

Kilguss follows that with Spain, a guardedly optimistic if understatedly brooding update on 60s soul balladry, spiced with guitar grit over the calmly swaying pulse of John Kengla’s bass and Rob Heath’s drums. Strangers comes across as a wistful mashup of Guided By Voices and Blondie, while Dark Corners of Your Mind follows a hypnotically vamping, psychedelic path, akin to the Frank Flight Band with a woman out front. Kengla’s bass dances amid the sheets of rainy-day guitars as Kilguss ponders the danger of being subsumed by the demands of a relationship.

New Start is a surreal, unlikely mashup of classic 60s C&W and echoey new wave, but Kilguss manages to make it work, all the way through one of the album’s catchiest choruses, awash in the waves from her harmonium. Hell Creek – a co-write with Kengla – is one of the murder ballads she writes so well. With its lingering atmospherics, Kilguss references current-day atomization and how its ramifications can do far more damage than just playing tricks with your mind.

Likewise, Rainy Night in Copenhagen has aptly echoey, Cure-like ambience. Bridge the Divide is the monster anthem here, an eerily propulsive Laurel Canyon psychedelic verse giving way to soaring new wave on the chorus.

What Is It You Want From Me is the closest thing here to Kilguss’ purist pop masterpiece Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, from her 2014 album Devastate Me. She winds up this cycle with with the metaphorically-loaded Edge of Something, an easy place to fall off one way or another. Another triumph for one of the most unselfconsciously brilliant tunesmiths to emerge from this city in recent years and a strong contender for best rock record of 2018.

The Godfather of Powerpop Headlines an Iconic Brooklyn Dive This Saturday Night

Paul Collins is widely considered the godfather of powerpop. Ray Davies is one of his contemporaries, and a good comparison. Historically, what Collins was doing in the late 60s predates both Badfinger and Cheap Trick. And he’s never stopped touring or recording. This blog was in the house for a couple of twinbills the ageless cult favorite tunesmith played with peerlessly cinematic noir rock stylist Karla Rose several months back at Berlin, the first a full-band show and the second a rare solo electric gig. Collins’ next show is with his band at Hank’s this Saturday night, June 9 at around 11; ferocious, twin guitar-fueled, Radio Birdman-esque psychedelic punks the Electric Mess open the night at 10. Cover is $7.

Collins’ latest release – streaming at Spotify – is a long-awaited, standalone reissue of two rare cassette ep’s, Long Time Gone, from 1983, and To Beat or Not to Beat, from two years later. Both are a delicious blast from the past. It’s Collins at his catchy, anthemic best. What a trip it is to hear him playing with an icy chorus box guitar tone in Broken Hearted, the catchy anthem that opens the collection, building to a classic D-A-G chorus, spiced with a scrambling solo that’s almost bluegrass.

The second cut,  Long Time Gone is a vampy, punchy, distantly Motown-influenced number. Working on a Good Thing sounds like Buddy Holly at halfspeed, while Find Somebody Else brings to mind what the Church were doing at the time, Collins working the spare/lushly jangly contrast for all it’s worth.

Standing in the Rain – an original, not the ELO song – has a slow, majestic groove and tasty acoustic/electric textures. The reissue’s hardest-rocking track, Good Times, could be WIllie Nile, while the big European hit All Over the World – this guy liked to nick Jeff Lynne song titles, huh?  – has snappy bass and organ swooshing distantly behind the jangle and crunch, up to a unexpectedly shreddy guitar solo.

Dance Dance comes across as Nick Lowe covering the Stray Cats; the allusively Beatlesque Making You Mine foreshadows Liza & the WonderWheels, a dozen years before the cult favorite Brooklyn band’s heyday.

Burning Desire is a 19th Nervous Breakdown ripoff. “Have you heard about the Moral Majority, man is that a joke?” Coilins asks in the echoey Give Me the Drugs, unsurprisingly the most acidically psychedelic track here. The final track is the bitttersweet Always Got You on My Mind. If catchy, vampy verses that build to even catchier, singalong choruses are your jam, this is your guy.

A word about the venue, if you haven’t already heard: Hank’s is closing sometime this year, finally making room for that luxury condo building every real Brooklynite in the neighborhood has been dreading for more than a decade. If you’re thinking of paying your last respects to the place that was Brooklyn’s original home for honkytonk, and innumerable good rock shows for pretty much the past seventeen years or so, this is as good a chance as you’ll get before it’s gone forever.

An Iconic, Fearlessly Populist Brooklyn Band Releases Their Most Ambitious Album in Bushwick Saturday Night

If there’s any New York band who’ve earned a song about themselves, it’s Les Sans Culottes. It’s on their latest album, She is Tossed By the Waves But Does Not Sink, streaming at Bandcamp. That’s the Paris city motto, and there’s no small irony in that the same could be said for the band. Since the 90s, they’ve slowly expanded from their origins as the Spinal Tap of late 60s French ye-ye psychedelic pop, to become as eclectic as the New York borough they represent used to be before the blitzkrieg of out-of-state white yuppies and “luxury” condos. No other New York band have spoken out as witheringly or accurately against the blight of gentrification as this shapeshifting crew – in spot-on, slangy French, no less. They’re playing the album release show this Saturday night, June 2 at 10 PM at El Cortez in Bushwick. The show isn’t listed on the venue calendar, but if they charged $20 for Amy Rigby, this should be about half that or less.

Along the way, the group have weathered several lineup changes and even a lawsuit by a spinoff of the band. That the Sans Culottes brand would be worth taking to court speaks for itself. This latest edition, fronted by founder Clermont Ferrand, is the most stylistically eclectic ever. While there are a few songs that bring to mind late 60s Serge Gainsbourg or Françoise Hardy, the satire is subtler than ever. Their signature mockery of French would-be rockers stumbling through all sorts of American idioms is still there, but the songs span from lush new wave to Stonesy rock to faux funk, stadium anthems and the noir.

The opening track’s title, Eiffel Tour is a Franglais pun – in French, it’s Le Tour Eiffel. It’s as much a musical as lyrical spoof, a shuffling early 70s style French faux funk tune driven by keyboardist Benoit Bals’ trebly Farbisa over Jacques Strappe’s drums and M. Pomme Frite’s bass. It’s the band’s An American in Paris:

Je prends mon élan
Et parle en verlan
Nous sommes en terrasse

[This is tough to translate, and indicative of how clever this band’s lyrics are. The first couple of lines roughly equate to “I get up the nerve and talk in verlan,” a French counterpart to pig Latin from the late 80s Paris banlieu Arab ghetto. “Nous sommes en terrasse,” meaning literally “We’re on the terrace,” was a meme referring to how resolute the French remained in the wake of the 2015 massacre at the Charlie Hebdo office. In that context, it’s “We’re just chilling.”]

There’s more Bals on this album than any of the band’s previous releases. Case in point: the warbly Wurlitzer electric piano and swirly organ on the more authentically funky second number, which is also more musically than lyrically satirical.

Chuchotements Chinois (Chinese Whispers – a reference to the French obsession with the Cure, maybe?) sets Geddy Liaison’s Rolling Stones guitar and lush vocals from the band’s two women singers, Kit Kat Le Noir and Brigitte Bordeaux, over a coy new wave strut with a sly resemblance to a popular 80s hit by French band Indochine. The phony bossa De Rien is a cluelessly chipper breakup number complete with breathy boudoir vocals and loungey piano.

The glossy, synthy 80s-style Chibeca v. Chewbacca shoots a spitball at sleazy developers trying to rename New York neighborhoods: rebranding gritty, constantly shrinking Chinatown as part of shi-shi Tribeca isn’t quite as moronic as calling the South Bronx the Piano District, but it’s close.

The jaunty doo-wop rock of L’Histoire des Sans Culottes chronicles the band’s triumphs and tribulations:

NOUS AVONS EU DES IMITATEURS,
BANDES D’HOMMAGES, MAUVAIS DOPPELGÄNGERS
En manque évident de savoir faire
Ersatz inferieurs sorry ass loseurs

[We’ve had imitators
Tribute bands, bad doppelgangers
Who obviously couldn’t get things done…]

You don’t really need a translation for that last line, right?

Je Ne Sais Quoi pokes playful fun at French pronouns over a slightly less retro backdrop. Along with their Cure obsession, the French also have a rabid Stooges cult, which the band salute in Detroit Rock Cite – which actually sounds more like AC/DC with keys. Mismatched styles are also the joke in A La Mode, an ersatz Stones-flavored shout out to Prince. The band follow that with La Ballade de Johnny X, poking wistful fun at the femme fatale tradition as personified by noir acts like Juniore. 

The catchy, riff-rocking Je M’en Fous (I Don’t Give a Fuck) opens with the line “Tawdry Adieu ou Audrey Tautou” and stays just as amusing from there, with a snide reference to French misadventures in imperialism. In the Hall of the Ye Ye King (Agathe Bauer) is a mock-rock salute to the power of unlikely one-hit wonder Euro-pop. The album winds up on a surprisingly somber note with the lavish art-rock epic Aller Sans Retour (One Way Ticket). Your appreciation of this album will increase immeasurably if you speak French – check the band’s priceless lyrics page– but it’s not necessary. Look for this on the best albums of 2018 list at the end of the year if Trump doesn’t blow us all up by then.