A Wryly Trippy, Picturesque New Album and an Owl Release Show by Curtis Hasselbring

Curtis Hasselbring has been a mainstay at the adventurous edge of the New York jazz scene since the late 80s. Best known as a trombonist and composer of cinematic themes with a sardonic sense of humor, he’s also a very distinctive guitarist and keyboardist. His new solo album, Curha II is streaming at his music page. It’s a lot more techy than his usual work, and probably the most psychedelic thing he’s ever done. Here, he plays all the instruments. He’s playing the album release show on April 20 at 9:30 PM at the Owl, leading a very cool quintet with Alec Spiegelman and Peter Hess on bass clarinets, Ari Folman-Cohen on bass and John Bollinger on drums.

The album opens on a slashing note with Scissors, a gamelanesque, pointillistic stroll through a Javanese funhouse mirror. Then Hasselbring completely flips the script with Egon, a woozy, blippy synth-and-drum-machine acid jazz number.

A squirrelly new wave-influenced shuffle, Respect the Pedestrian comes across as an early 80s video game theme as XTC might have done it – with a not-so-subtle message for an era in New York where a driver can blast through an intersection, take out a couple of toddlers, and get away with it.

Mystery Guest mashes up Eno-esque rainy-day ambience and a warpy trip-hop groove. The Beatles catch up with Gary Numan in the catchy Sir Fish; then Hasselbring goes further into psych-folk mode with ’68, its wah-wah guitars and catchy acoustic garage riffage.

Party Platter People is prime Hasselbring: a staggered motorik drive, cascading Tangerine Dream synths against King Crimson guitar flares…and dreamy Hawaiian swing when you least expect it. The dubby Fish Coda is sort of King Tubby meets sleng teng uptown. The album ends with the stomping Ana-lo, which sounds like a Joy Division instrumental b-side. There’s also the surreal trombone-and-electronics shuffle Alpaca Lunch and Madgit, an interminable, robotic techno parody – maybe. Tune in, turn on, bug out. 

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Laura Cortese & the Dance Cards Bring Their Fearlessly Imaginative, Psychedelic Americana to the Rockwood

Violinist Laura Cortese & the Dance Cards stand out in a crowded Americana field for their fearlessness and originality. They aren’t the first to play retro acoustic roots music for string ensemble – a lot of classical types have a secret or not-so-secret fondness for folk music. Sadly, much as some of that crew are completely sincere, they don’t swing and they can’t really improvise. That’s where Cortese really shines. She and the band are playing the downstairs third stage at the Rockwood tomorrow night, April 14 at 11:30 PM; cover is $15.

Their latest album California Calling – streaming at Spotfy – isn’t particularly oldtimey, either. In fact, there’s only one tradtional tune on it. What Hem were to the zeros, Cortese and band are in the here and now. Case in point: the hypnotic opening track, The Low Hum, awash in hazy washes of strings, second violinist Jenna Moynihan anchoring the song on banjo, multi-instrumentalist Sam Kassirer adding woozy Dr. Dre synth. That it works as seamlessly as it does validates Cortese’s outside-the-box arrangement.

Cortese;s vocals infuse the album’s title track with warmth and intimacy amid a swirl of backing vocals, swelling strings and bouncy pizzicato: it’s not clear whether that spiky lead line is Cortese, Moynihan or cellist Valerie Thompson.

The women in the band – which also includes bassist Natalie Bohrn – join voices and then instruments in the lush, Celtic-tinged Three Little Words. If Irish chamber folk psychedelia didn’t exist before now, this band just invented it. There’s a fetching, Kasey Chanbers-ish break in Cortese’s voice in the bittersweetly swaying ballad Skipping Stone, with more spiky/atmospheric contrast.

The psychedelic Hold On, with its gospel allusions and trip-hop beat, brings to mind cult favorite New York Americana songstress Barbara Brousal – who’s since absconded to Boston. The band reinvent Swing & Turn (Jubilee), the album’s lone traditional tune, in much the same fashion, Cortese’s vocals soaring to the top of her register before the band finally cut loose with a jaunty reel.

The women’s four-part harmonies offer comfort in icy times in Rhododendron, which segues into Someday, sort of a more bluegrass-oriented take on Andrew Bird at his most bucolic. Stockholm, an allusive cautionary tale – “You’ve got to find a place to call home” – is another unlikely successful mashup of bluegrass and echoey psychedelia.

Bohrn’s starkly dancing bassline propels Pace Myself, a bluesy trip-hop number, edging from echoey Soft Cell new wave pop toward neo-soul. The album closes with If You Can Hear Me, a Taylor Ashton cover that doesn’t measure up to the strength of Cortese’s songwriting despite an interesting arrangement. It’s impossible to imagine anyone releasing more original album than this lately.

Another Brilliantly Allusive, Eclectic Album From Haunting Singer/Multi-Instrumentalist Elisa Flynn

For over ten years, Elisa Flynn has been one of the most spellbinding and distinctive voices in New York music. Her songs are rich with history. They sparkle with images and tackle some heavy questions. Her melodies range from moody Radiohead complexity, to scruffy indie vignettes, to stark detours toward noir cabaret and 19th century art-song. Flybn’s vocals – full, meticulously modulated, often soaring, sometimes wrenchingly plaintive – are the shiraz that fuels the narratives on her latest album The World Has Ever Been on Fire, streaming at Bandcamp. She’s playing Picasso Machinery, 43 Broadway at Wythe in South Williamsburg on April 27, time TBA. 

On the new record, Flynn is a one-woman orchestra, playing all the: guitars, banjo and drums. The Ballad of Richie and Margot rocks pretty hard, with a dreampop edge: spare, emphatic verse, big enveloping vintage Sonic Youth chorus, bitingly crescendoing stadium-rock guitar solo in the middle. She builds hypnotically ringing, pulsing grey-sky ambience with variations on a catchy, simple guitar hook in Before He Went Down – its doomed storyline ends suddenly, yet in the exact place where it makes sense.

Flynn picks out a spiky, distantly Middle Eastern-tinged vamp as Lost in the Woods shuffles along. “Maybe I’ll be addicted to those sleeping pills as well,”she muses in Syd, a catchy, darkly watery anthem. Paula Carino comes to mind: “I can only write these words in a kind of a trance…I can only feel like a girl when my lips are far too red.”

With its iush bed of multitracked, clanging guitars, the distantly tango-inflected escape anthem Wolves echoes the gloomy, anthemic intensity of Timber, the standout track on Flynn’s 2008 album Songs About Birds and Ghosts. The slowly swaying 6/8 ballad Prison Ship Martyr’s Monument – inspired by the Fort Greene memorial to the legions of US Revolutionary War soldiers who died in British captivity – is the album’s majestic centerpiece, a grim conflagration scenario. “Would you lend e your hand to climb out of the hold?” Flynn asks: the answer is all the more shattering for being left unsaid. It might be the single best song of 2018.

Veronica rises from a spare, rustic, allusively blue-infused one-chord banjo tune to a big, echoey, crashing full-band crescendo. The chiming, echoing No Diamond is even more hypnotic, an allusively wintry tableau capped off by an unexpectedly roaring guitar outro.

Sugar has a stomping, vamping mid-80s Throwing Muses vibe. The album winds up with Caution, a guarded love song that begins as a solo banjo number and then morphs into swirling, pouncing trip-hop. The contrast between sharp, translucent tunesmithing, Flynn’s enigmatic images and her strong, forceful vocals make this one of the best rock albums of 2018.

Fun fact: Flynn was a founding member of cult favorite kitchen-sink noiserockers Bunny Brains!

Jazz Guitar Mastermind Mary Halvorson Embraces Lush, Uneasily Rapturous Improvisational Art-Rock

Mary Halvorson may be known as one of the world’s most brilliantly individualistic jazz guitarists, but some of her work skirts the edges where experimental rock and postrock spill over into jazz. She’s also a rare example of a world-class fret-burner who’s also an excellent singer. And she’s also an intriguing lyricist. For whatever reason, the words to the genre-defying songs on her new album Code Girl – streaming at Bandcamp – aren’t imbued with as much of the sardonic humor and stiletto wit that runs through her instrumental work. Amirtha Kidambi sings them with dynamics, drama and passion. The album title is ironic in the genuine sense of the word: it has absolutely nothing to do with tech worship. March tempos are everywhere here: a political reference, maybe? Halvorson and her quartet are playing the album release show tomorrow night, April 3 with sets at 7:30 and 9:30 PM at the Jazz Standard; cover is $25.

As usual, Halvorson’s compositions here go far beyond stereotypical verse/chorus/bridge architecture. The intro to the opening track, My Mind I Find in Time sounds like Bill Frisell playing calypso; then Halvorson shifts to a steady, pulsing drive with hints of Vegas noir. Drummer Tomas Fujiwara’s cymbals ice the backdrop, trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire contributes wary resonance and then grit. Kidambi’s soul-infused mantra, “Reconstruction is required in time” has unexpected drama. Bassist Michael Formanek’s final flourishes close it deviously.

Fluttery arioso vocals contrast with the dark lyrical undercurrent of Possibility of Lightning, which morphs into a growling march capped off by some mean tremolo-picking, spins through a vortex of improvisation with Akinmusire anchoring the bandleader’s savagery, then the two themes merge.

The epic Storm Cloud begins as a spare, ominously tremoloing Lynchian set piece, then the whole band march it into moody pastoral terrain. Halvorson hits her pedal for Dave Fiuczynski microtonal warp and Akinmusire wafts as Fujiwara pushes the anthem’s methodical metric shifts:

The clearing of the storm
Finds extra ordinary lives
Pulsing behind the blood

Halvorson and Akinmusire work coy counterpoint over a steady backbeat in Pretty Mountain. The bandleader’s steady, twisted folk arpeggios hold the center; scatting vocals signal an implosion before this wistful travel reminiscence’s punchline kicks in.

Moving between staggered jangle and another march groove, Off the Record has unexpectedly tropical flavor.Formanek artfully hands off the broodingly terse melody to Halvorson as In the Second Before gets underway,Akinmusire and Fujiwara shifting gears from droll to stern. Halvorson builds a roaring crescendo from there, part doom metal, part frantic squall: it’s the album’s high point.

The bandleader has a lot of fun toying with the Orbison noir ballad melody of Accurate Hit, a twistedly spare nocturne for guitar and vocals. Her tantalizing latin noir allusions fuel The Beast, the album’s most picturesque song: is this a seduction or a murder in progress? That song foreshadows the album’s haunting centerpiece, The Unexpected Natural Phenomenon, shifting between atmospheric dark, bossa-tinged folk and a spare sway. Then the group give it a long, thorough, rather wry wringing-out:

Why
In the water
Does laughing make you sink

Rustling counterpoint over yet another march beat give way to a pensive Akinmusire solo and desolate, reverbtoned tremolo-picking from Halvorson in Thunderhead, the closest thing to Frisell she’s ever written.

Halvorson’s muted pulses and enigmatically lingering lines contrast with Kidambi’s majestic delivery and Akinmusire’s uneasy airiness in the simply titled And; the unexpected turn toward New Orleans and then Indian drollery is irresistibly fun. Unsettled yet steady, Deepest Similar is a bittersweet love song, guardedly weighing hope for the future while letting go of the past: perhaps instructively, Kidambi’s angst-fueled vocals rise to their most tortured point here.

The album winds up with an amusing miniature, Armory Beams and then Drop the Needle, where Halvorson manages to orchestrate a shift from tongue-in-cheek and techy to slowly shuffling, moody resonance punctuated by Akinmusire’s pensively sailing lines and Formanek’s steady, bluesy melismas. Much as Halvorson has always been on the cutting edge, this is her most ambitious album to date – and there’s irony in that, considering how catchy most of these tunes are.

Dark Beasts: Brooklyn’s Most Riveting, Relevant Young Band

The cold gaze of a black python greeted the crowd on their way up the stairs at the Gatehouse concert series in Fort Greene last night, where Dark Beasts played a tantalizingly short set of catchy, surreal, unflinchingly relevant songs that defy categorization. The band name suits the trio perfectly: their songs are dark, and they are definitely beasts.

Lead singer Lillian Schrag was responsible for that menacing creature and its removable green scales, in addition to the lowlit stage design and her band’s painted bestial faces. Their first song, The Python’s Lament, was more distantly sinister, Schrag’s torrents of lyrics over Trixie Madell’s enigmatically anthemic psych-folk guitar chords, violinist Violet Paris-Hillmer running an icy, creepy loop over and over.

Over the past couple of years, Dark Beasts have built a devoted following among their fellow musicians. Many of those fans are three or four times older than the group’s members. Each is a multi-instrumentalist. Schrag, the daughter of Rose Thomas Bannister – one of this era’s greatest songwriters – plays piano and bass, but in this group her main contribution is vocals. She’s also the primary lyricist. Whether on guitar or piano, Madell brings a deep David Bowie influence to the songs. Paris-Hillmer plays percussion in addition to violin, and has a background in classical music as well. Technique-wise, they’re a work in progress – although their proficiency continues to grow in all kinds of  unexpected ways. And their songwriting is astonishing. We give children too little credit for their depth and their insights. 

Madell switched to piano, balancing eerie highs against stygian lows throughout the second number, Soldier’s Song, a terse, brooding, mythologically-influenced antiwar anthem. Paris-Hillmer moved to frame drum for that one, where she’d remain for the rest of the set.

Standing tall – about four feet eight inches – in front of the band, Schrag was a somber, charismatic presence throughout the third song, Stop Polluting or the World’s Going to Die. Madell’s uneasy guitar vamps anchored Schrag’s clever wordplay in Night Animals, a Maurice Sendak-ish catalog of nocturnal wildlife. They closed with The Wolf, a brief, forlorn anthem

Schrag played the encore solo on bass, churning out a pitchblende drone beneath a lyric that seemed at least partly improvised. “If you’re smart enough to fire a gun, you should use your mind,” she cautioned. The crowd responded with a standing ovation. Afterward, the group signed balloons for the audience, then got into the ice cream.

Dark Beasts will probably be on hiatus until school vacation this June. In the meantime, at least one adult Brooklyn band has been playing Dark Beasts material. There are innumerable other children’s bands in Brooklyn, but most of them are cutesy, or at best they struggle to play cover songs. As Margaret Atwood once said – more or less  – compared to other little girls, Dark Beasts are lifesize. Watch this space for upcoming live appearances.

Populist Songwriter Courtney Marie Andrews Reinvents Classic Americana at the Mercury Tonight

Don’t let the hazy faux-70s Polaroid filter on the album cover of Courtney Marie Andrews’ latest album May Your Kindness Remain – streaming at Bandcamp – fool you. It isn’t dadrock. It’s a vivid, sobering collection of narratives set in a bleak, impoverished Trump-era milieu. The instrumentation behind the Americana songstress’ wounded wail is an unlikely blend of churchy organ and resonant, sometimes roaring washes of electric guitar. You might think that this mashup of oldschool soul, vintage C&W and psychedelia would be jarring to the extreme, but it works. Andrews is at the Mercury tonight, March 27 at 8 PM; cover is $12.

Andrews opens the record with the title track, a broodingly vivid 99-percenter ballad, hope against hope in a dingy blue-collar setting where kindness is “not something that can be bought or arranged.”

Lift the Lonely From My Heart is an oldschool country ballad reinvented as lingering psychedelic tone poem:  “Do you still see the good inside me or am I a shell of who I once was?” Andrews asks, dreading the obvious answer. The band – Dillon Warnek on lead guitar, Daniel Walker and Charles Wicklander on keys, Alex Sabel on bass and William Mapp on drums – pick up the pace with Two Cold Nights in Buffalo. “El Nino brought a blizzard…only the cheap motels were open, wrong side of the tracks,” Andrews recounts, ”That American dream dying, I hear the whispers of the ghosts.” As a paint-peeling indictment of real estate bubble era greed and despondency, it ranks with Jack Grace’s Get Out of Brooklyn for relevance and bite.

Andrews goes back to mashing up gospel and psychedelia in Rough Around the Edges: you could drown an entire congregation with the amount of reverb on that slightly out-of-tune piano. Fueled by echoey Fender Rhodes and sunbaked guitar, the southwestern gothic ballad Border salutes the resilience of Mexican immigrants: “You cannot measure a man until you’ve been down the devil’s road.:”

Andrews’ narrator manages to find solace amidst crushing poverty in Took You Up, another slow, enveloping psych-soul number. She keeps that ambience going with This House – hey, it’s a dump, but it’s home – and then lets the embers blaze through the wickedly catchy, embittered Kindness of Strangers. “How do you dive deeper in a shallow riverbed, when the current pulls your further?” Andrews wants to know.

The sarcasm in I’ve Hurt Worse is crushing: “Being with you is like being alone,” the woman in this relationship tells her abusive boyfriend. Andrews winds up the album with the swaying, summery, considerably more optimistic slide guitar ballad Long Road Back to You. Andrews’ previous album Honest Life was solid, but this is a quantum leap: fans of acts from Lucinda Williams, to Tift Merritt and Margo Price ought to check out Andrews.

Punjabtronix Put on a Pulsing, Hauntingly Hypnotic Dance Party at the Kennedy Center

UK Punjabi dance band Punjabtronix’s show last night at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC was a hypnotic, undulating, dynamically rich exploration of how far sounds from the rich melting pot around the India-Pakistan border can go. As the concert began, they took their time getting the groove up and running, the keening twin algoza flutes and tumbi lute of multi-instrumentalist Vijay Yamla set to a quasi trip-hop beat from Naresh Kukki’s big dhol bass drum in tandem with the thumps emanating from the mixing desks manned by DJ Swami and his co-engineer. What was live, what was being looped, and what was instrumental karaoke? It was hard to tell. As the textures mingled in the murky mist, that trance-inducing atmosphere set the tone for the rest of the night, John Minton’s shapeshifting projections pulsing in and out behind the band. You can watch most of the show here.

By all accounts, this show was better than the one in Queens the night before. Flushing Town Hall has a reputation for excellent sound, but word on the street was that Punjabtronix didn’t get to experience that (this blog wasn’t in the house for that one). Here, the mix had the clarity this band needs to create the full psychedelic experience. That first number was spiced with uneasy, lingering David Gilmour-esque lead guitar lines. Then sarangi player Dheera Singh took the stage for a take of the popular Punjabi folk song Jugni, Kukki’s hammering dhol polyrhytms veering close to the edge, singer Gurtej Singh energizing the crowd with his passionate, melismatic baritone.

The followed with Chhalla, the band’s frontman alluding that they were going to get this one in to pre-empt the inevitable audience requests. As Singh swayed and pounced, decked out in a regal blue-and-bold traditional suit and headdress, it was easy to see why people would want to hear the big, catchy anthem. They made moody, modal acid jazz out of another popular folk tune, Zindabad, the plinks of the sarangi and Singh’s insistent vocal riffs cutting through the blippy electronic backdrop, Yamla eventually taking a long, droll, warpy upper-register solo on the bugchu, a surreal stringed instrument that looks like a cross between an Ethiopian riti fiddle and a tabla drum.

Yamla switched to the stark tumba fiddle for an intense, rustic call-and-response duet with Pujabi “talking drum,” tuned to play stairstepping melodies much like a tabla. The cinematic epic after that celebrated the 70th anniversary of Indian independence, but also took a sobering look at the devastating effects of the British invaders’ partition of India and Pakistan. The uneasy east/west dichotomy was vivid, the traditional instruments solid and resolute against the techy beats.

Yamla gave the serpentine number after that a deadpan jawharp intro then a broodingly pulsing twin flute solo and rapidfire vocals as the the electronic storm loomed in behind him. The group’s final epic was a celebration of cross-pollination in the global Punjabi diaspora, an enveloping swirl of ancient organic textures mingling with the synthetic.

Punjabtronx’s US tour continues with a couple of stops at South by Southwest. Tomorrow night, March 14 they’re at Barcelona, 209 E 6th St, in Austin at 8 PM, then the next night, March 15 they’re at the Palm Door on Sixth, 508 E 6th St., also at 8.

A Lavish, Ambitious, Politically-Inspired New Album by Banda Magda

Banda Magda frontwoman Magda Giannikou writes fluently and fearlessly in an amazing number of styles from around the world. Accordion is her main axe, but she also plays the lanterna, an ancient, magically rippling Greek instrument. Her band’s debut album T’es La put a cheery Mediterranean spin on vintage French ye-ye pop. The follow-up, 2014’s Yerakina, was far darker, established the band as a major force in latin and Mediterranean psychedelia, and earned them a regular spot in the rotation on the New York outdoor summer concert circuit.

The songs on the band’s latest album Tigre –  streaming at Spotify – draw inspiration from freedom fighters in her native Greece battling Eurozone bankster terrorism. The Nicaraguan struggle against corporate-funded death squads became a focal point for punk rock forty years ago. Is this the 2018 counterpart to the Clash’s Sandinista album? It’s more opaque, maybe a wise move considering global circumstances at the moment, but it’s practically just as epic. This is all about the orchestration: sweep and grandeur punctuated by elegant guitar and keys, driven by an eclectic rhythm section. The central theme is stay strong: we’ve really got our work cut out for us.

The first track, Tam Tam, welds a slinky, surfy, Middle Eastern-tinged electic bouzouki line to lush, sweeping new wave: if Chicha Libre had been Greek and had existed in 1982, they might have sounded something like this. Giannikou sings this one in French. She welds those lush strings, lingering guitar and new wave touches to a bouncy samba beat in the chipper, cheery Coração – as the song rises, the orchestration and clickety-clack groove grow more hypnotic.

Ase Me Na opens with a long, sweeping, mournful string introduction, then becomes a swaying Aegean anthem – as with the first track, uneasy, spiky electric bouzouki punctuates the enveloping majesty of the strings. Giannikou saves her most hushed, tender vocal for Muchacha, the orchestra occasionally bubbling over a hypnotically circling tropical acoustic guitar tune.

She blends rapidfire Indian riffage into Brazilian forro in the insistent Vem Moren, rising from stark cello riffage to a brass-fueled dance. Chanson is a lush, starry throwback to the balmy pop of the band’s first album, then the band pick up the pace with the tricky, sauntering metrics of Reine de (Queen of…), which could be early 80s Kate Bush with simmering bouzouki, lithe strings and an ending that goes straight to the Sahara.

The title track is a triptych. Over a cinematic, lavish backdrop, Snarky Puppy’s Michael League narrates Giannikou’s thinly vieied political parable about three girls facing down a thieving tiger .The song itself is a vengeful, indomitably pulsing blend of Romany swing, psychedelic cumbia and qawwali, maybe, up to a mighty, shivery, orchestrated coda.

Starry vibraphone lingers over a brisk, emphatic clave beat in Venin (Venom), Giannikou’s French lyrics commenting on the frustrations of love rather than geopolitics. The album winds up with the swirling, droning spacerock of Thiamandi. Count this among the most wildly ambitious and original albums of the past several months.

Amy Rigby Can Write Anything – Even Psychedelic Rock

On one hand, Amy Rigby might be the last person you’d expect to make a psychedelic rock record. On the other, she’s been fluent in an amazing number of styles – honkytonk, classic Brill Building pop, countrypolitan and garage rock, among others – for so long that her new album The Old Guys shouldn’t come as any surprise. While the presence of her husband Wreckless Eric – a guy who knows a thing or two about psychedelia – probably makes a difference, Rigby doesn’t need outside help. She’s playing the album release show, kicking off her latest American tour at El Cortez, 17 Ingraham St in Bushwick this Saturday night, Feb 24 at around 8. Patti Smith lead guitarist Lenny Kaye opens the night with a relatively rare set of his own acerbic powerpop. Cover is $15; take the L to Morgan Ave.

As the title implies, the album – streaming at Bandcamp – weighs a lot of heavy questions, including but not limited to aging, death and the viability of being what’s charitably known as a “legacy act” out on the road. The opening cut is From philiproth@gmail to rzimmerman@aol.com. It’s Rigby at her slashingly surreal best, a stomping, clanging backbeat anthem and a sardonic look at the ups and downs (some might say the curse) of celebrity.

She keeps the hypnotic ambience going with the more subdued, nostalgic Are We Still There Yet. The title references one of her cult classics, specifically a hellish family drive scenario. Musically, the gently swaying opening chords look back to her ever-more-relevant Summer of My Wasted Youth, a bittersweet snapshot of early 80s pre-gentrification New York. This one has a lush, spacerock feel not unlike the Church at their dreamiest.

“I’ve been running out of time to do the little things I want, too much shit to get through,” she muses in Back From Amarillo over a gentle late 60s Jimmy Webb-style country shuffle backdrop. Somberly and soberly, she contemplates the grim realities facing veteran songwriters: “I hope it’s ok that I still drink.”

Playing Pittsburgh, a shout-out to Rigby’s adolescent stomping ground, has a slinky Chicano Batman psych-soul groove and some wry, satirical tropes pilfered from six decades worth of psychedelic rock. She follows that with Leslie, an echoey, drifty salute to an indomitable scenester with “fringe in your eyes to hide the lines.”

“Had my eyes on the prize when it was time to revise,” Rigby laments in the title cut, sort of a mashup of Cheap Trick and Brian Jonestown Massacre. “Bars are all closed ‘cause nobody goes…I raise a glass to the old guys, had a blast did the old guys.” Who’s playing that deliciously sinewy bass solo?

On the Barricade is classic Merseybeat gone psychedelic, an allusively pissed-off protest anthem that’s over too soon. “I’ve been known to turn the other cheek, but that was in a different place, a simpler time,” Rigby rails in New Sheriff, over a savage, noisy Ticket to Ride swing – it’s a coming-of-age song for any embattled liberal who’s been pushed over the edge.

“Built a city of sandcastles in the time it takes to swim from Malibu,” Rigby intones in Robert Altman, raising a glass through the mist to the late, great American film auteur. Slow Burner, the album’s most enigmatic number, has a starry, hypnotic jangle. Its most elegaic is Bob, a catchy, wistful recollection of the guy who taught her about Lou Reed – in the key of E. The final cut is One Off, an early Who-style stomp and the album’s most directly philosophical track. Nice to see someone with such a formidable back catalog still at the top of her game. If you want to learn how to write a song, this is as a good a place to start as any.

Tasty Psychedelic Tropicalia and a Union Pool Album Release Show by Renata Zeiguer

Renata Zeiguer sings in a balmy, dreamy high soprano and writes tropical psychedelic rock songs that often slink their way toward the noir edges of soul music. Yet as Lynchian as the guitar textures can be, her music isn’t gloomy – if there’s such a thing as happy noir, it’s her sound. And her new album, Old Ghost – streaming at Bandcamp – sounds like she had a great time making it. She’s playing the release show this Feb 23 at 11 PM at Union Pool; cover is $12.

“You’ve got a grip on consolation, a heavenly whip, I know,” Zeiguer intones cajolingly in the album’s opening cut, Wayside, which rises from a simple, catchy bossa-tinged vamp to a catchy, anthemic backbeat sway. Once you get past the jarring out-of-tune guitars and lo-fi synth on the intro to Bug, it morphs into a starry, ELO-ish romp with a gritty undercurrent. That uneasy catchiness pervades Below, from its Ellingtonian intro, to its lemon-ice chorus-box guitar riffs and gently pulsing samba rhythm.

After All comes across as a noisier take on Abby Travis-style orchestral noir – or 90s cult favorites Echobelly at their noisiest and dirtiest. Zeiguer’s coy melismas over the altered retro 60s noir soul backdrop of Dreambone evoke Nicole Atkins at her most darkly surreal – Zeiguer’s fellow Brooklynite Ivy Meissner also comes to mind.

The swaying Follow Me Down, awash in uneasily starry reverb guitars, depicts a lizard “Steadily slithering, steadily, patiently swallowing me whole.” The song’s mix of guitar textures – burning and distorted, keening, and lushly tremoloing – is absolutely luscious.

Neck of the Moon contrasts insistent syncopation and offhandedly noisy, flaring guitar work with Zeiguer’s signature starlit sonics. The dichotomy is similar in They Are Growing, pulsar guitar twinkles and pulses lingering over a brisk new wave shuffle beat. The album winds up with its title track, Gravity (Old Ghost), a steady, bittersweet lament about something that’s “only dissipating over time,” set to a catchy, Motown-inflected groove.

This is a great playlist for hanging out with friends on a smoky evening, adrift in the bubbling, percolating textures of the guitars and keys, Zeiguer’s comfortingly calm yet irrepressibly soaring vocals percolating through the haze. It would make a good soundtrack to that Netflix show about the weed delivery guy – now what’s that called?