A Long, Strange, Psychedelic New York Week, Part Two

In two parts – part one is here

After seeing Cameroonian singer Blick Bassy‘s unexpectedly psychedelic New York debut at Lincoln Center Thursday night, it was fun to wind up the evening at Barbes with a whole set by cinematic Venezuelan-American psychedelic instrumental trio Los Crema Paraiso. After taking their time loading their loop pedals, they played most of their newest album, De Pelicula to projections of segments from 1970s Venezuelan films: a road movie, a comedy and maybe a documentary or two.

When they do their all-instrumental version of Pink Floyd’s Shine on You Crazy Diamond, they usually play the whole monstrosity – this time the crowd got just the short version. Bittersweetly summery highway themes, frenetic volleys of tremolo-picking from guitarist José Luis Pardo, slinky and emphatic basslines from Bam Bam Rodriguez and the shapeshifting rhythms of drummer Neil Ochoa were mostly live, although both Pardo and Rodriguez’s pedals kicked in with some simple harmony lines or hazy textures from time to time, as their bouncy chamame rock themes unwound. At the end, they played their cover of Tears for Fears’ Everybody Wants to Rule the World, and finally, after having sufffered through that atrocity more than once before, it made sense – as theme music for a montage of banana republic dictators and their crimes. In this band’s hands, it became a horrible song about horrible people.

Saturday afternoon, it was even more annoying to miss almost all of psychedelic latin soul stars Chicano Batman’s set at Central Park Summerstage. The same thing happened with Roy Ayers’ set on Sunday  too. Both acts ended up going on an hour ahead of schedule, and a lot of people who showed up were disappointed. Five minutes of Bardo Martinez’s magic-carpet organ textures against Carlos Arévalo’s similarly kaleidoscopic guitar were tantalizing to the point of being painful.

And while it’s impossible to hate on Los Pericos – the Argentine ska-reggae crew has been around for thirty years and sound better now than their records from the 80s – it was also impossible to get out of sulk mode for them. Their tunes are catchy, their choruses go to more interesting places than most current roots reggae acts do, and just when it seemed they were about to get bogged down in a vampy, simplistic rut, they finally hit a grey-sky, Steel Pulse-ish minor-key groove. But all that was no substitute for the group originally schedued to headline this bill.

Back at home base Barbes on Saturday night, singer Chi-Chi Glass provided solace in the form of an unselfconsciously psychedelic solo set that she opened with a segment from an Albeniz piano suite. From there she built a synth-and-cajon suite of her own based on a Peruvian folk theme, sang a revolutionary folk tune in Quecha and finally encored with a haunting setting of a Maya Angelou poem, part noir cha-cha, part classical tone poem, part eerie art-rock.

A Long, Strange, Psychedelic New York Week

In two parts

It’s been a psychedelic week. Any week can be psychedelic if you’re in the right frame of mind, it’s just that this one had music to match the surrealism of the dream state that’s been a daily reality for Americans since the election. Over the past several days, the former’s made it a lot easier to get through the latter.

Blick Bassy’s latest album is spare and pensive, offering no hint of how trippy and magnetic his live show would be. Introducing the Cameroonian singer in his New York debut at Lincoln Center Thursday evening, impresario Jordana Phokompe was clearly stoked to have finally booked him here after seeing him play at Womex a couple of years ago. It was worth the wait.

Colorfully and loosely garbed, red goggle shades perched on his head (he never put them on), he was a much more forceful and magnetic presence than his rather gentle and austere recent work would indicate. And the performance was infinitely more psychedelic. That Bassy would sing in his native vernacular – one of more than 250 languages, many of them endangered, spoken in his country – added to the enigmatic ambience. Yet emotional content, at least at opposite ends of the emotional spectrum, were distinct, especially in a wrenching lament, and the long mini-suite of love songs that ended the show, his cat-ate-the-canary croon a dead giveaway.

For most of the set, he played banjo, fingerpicking it judiciously rather than frailing the strings bluegrass-style. Toward the end, he picked up what looked like a child’s model Telecaster  and fingerpicked intricate, rippling, kora-like upper-register phrases in a spiny, open tuning

That his trio would have such unorthodox instrumentation, let alone that trombonist Johan Blanc and cellist Clément Petit would put on such a wall-bending display of extended technique, raised the surrealism factor several notches. Blanc was in charge of atmospherics with his low, looming phrases, often playing through a loop pedal or switching to a mini-keyboard and mixer. At one point, he ran Bassy’s vocals through the keyboard and built a harmony line with them as he sang. Of course, Blanc could simply have sung that harmony part himself, but the strange effect would have been lost

Petit is Bassy’s not-so-secret weapon. There were a few places where he held down somber, ambered sustained notes, or threw off a jaunty glissando or two, but mostly he plucked out basslines. As intricate as they grew, Petit never got too busy, often fattening the sound via an octave pedal which sent his cello down low into a rabbit hole where cellos usually can’t go. And he didn’t limit his lines to blues or rock. Like the bandleader, he spiraled through some kora-like phrases, and for a second even evoked the otherworldly bounce of Moroccan gnawa trance music.

Bassy is a diehard fan of plaintive, intense American blues iconoclast Skip James, so it was no surprise that the highlight of the show turned out to be after some amusing stage shtick, where Bassy looped a couple of bars from an old James record and then played variations that took the song straight back to its African roots.

The next show at the atrium space at Lincoln Center is this Thursday, July 20 at 7:30 PM with a relevance much closer to home: Brooklyn-based, Gil Scott-Heron influenced Brooklyn hip-hop duo Quincy Vidal. The show is free, so getting to the space on time is crucial. 

After the Blick Bassy show, it was great fun to catch a whole set by cinematic psychedelic trio Los Crema Paraiso across the river. You can find out what happened in part two, here. 

Charming Disaster Bring Their Richly Detailed, Creepy Art-Rock to Joe’s Pub

Singer and ukulele player Ellia Bisker fronts uneasy existentialist soul band Sweet Soubrette – known for their delicious retro 60s horn charts – and also leads careening careening Balkan punk street group Funkrust Brass Band. She also harmonizes menacingly with guitarist Jeff Morris in Kotorino, who mash up latin noir and phantasmagorical circus rock. Lately, Morris and Bisker have been busiest in their duo project Charming Disaster, New York’s noir supergroup. As you would expect from a crew who specialize in murder ballads, suspense pervades their uneasily tuneful, richly arranged art-rock and parlor pop narratives. Sometimes they can be playful, other times downright macabre. Their latest album, the aptly titled Cautionary Tales, is streaming at Bandcamp; they’re playing Joe’s Pub on July 20 at 8 PM. Cover is $15.

While Charming Disaster typically tour as a duo, the album features some familiar faces from the Kotorino talent base, including bassist/drummer Don Godwin (better known as the world’s funkiest tuba player, from Raya Brass Band) and a brilliant string section of violinist Marandi Hostetter and cellist Noah Hoffeld. ]

The opening track, Sympathetic Magic, rises out of a stately web of guitar, uke and clever vocal counterpoint, a carefully detailed S&M scenario between two unlikely participants. No spoilers here.

Snake Bit is a concert favorite and one of their loudest songs, a snarling garage-psych anthem with a little latin and late Beatles flavor. Some of Charming Disaster’s charm is how Morris and Bisker trade off playing the villlain and victim roles, and this is a prime example.

With its blend of spiky Britfolk and prime 70s Bowie glam, Selene & Endymion is just as guitarishly ferocious, proof that dating a goddess isn’t all it’s made out to be. “When you’re asleep, sleep with one eye open,” the two harmonize at the end. They go back to mythology a little later on and further north with the grisly, apocalyptic Ragnarok. part Byrds, part Cheap Trick at their punkest.

Phosphorescent Lilies is a primo Bisker soul number, a swaying, allusive, blackly funny tale of medieval sacrifice. The Dylanesque folk-rock waltz Little Black Bird follows a surrealistic Brothers Grimm-style tangent. Days Are Numbered, an irresistibly funny mashup of Black Sabbath and lush chamber pop, is a spy story, at least on the surface, an apt tale for a surveillance state in the age of big data.

With its waltzing horror-movie music-box piano and danse macabre strings, Infernal Soiree is the closest thing to Orphan Jane grand guignol here. Awash in distant reverb, the starkly elegaic What Remains is the album’s best track, the shadow image of the frantic couple cleaning up the evidence in an earlier Charming Disaster gem, Deep in the High, from the duo’s debut album Love, Crime & Other Trouble. The final cut here is the grimly metaphorical, ineluctably waltzing String Break Song, Is this 2017’s best album? it’s one of them.

Good news on the Kotorino front, too – they’ve got a new album pretty much in the can, and an expected 2018 release date.

The Spellbinding Rachelle Garniez Tops the Bill at This Year’s Bryant Park Accordion Festival

What’s the likelihood of being able to get what amounts to an intimate, personal show from the world’s greatest English-language songwriter? A handful of New Yorkers got to experience that at last night’s edition of the ongoing Bryant Park Accordion Festival, following Rachelle Garniez across the park to various stations for tantalizingly brief fifteen-minute mini-sets.

Even though there were two dozen other accordionists playing in the park’s four corners and next to the fountain on the Sixth Avenue side, it was impossible to resist taking in two sets from Garniez. What was most fascinating was to watch her mash up elements of latin, klezmer, zydeco, classical, punk rock and even a bit of opera, banging out one song after another without the hilariously surreal, politically-charged stream-of-consciousness intros and jams that have made her legendary among New York performers.

The best song of the night was Tourmaline, a bittersweet waltz that works on innumerable levels: ultimately, it’s about rugged individuality triumphing against all odds. Without any more fanfare, Garniez let the rest of her songs speak for themselves.

The funniest moment was during Jean-Claude Van Damme, a tongue-in-cheek shout-out to a pitchman for antidepressants. She got everybody laughing when she reached the part about certain personality traits that have to be brought under control – then hammered that word again, and again, until everybody within earshot got the message. The faux-operatic outro, where she took a flying leap to the very top of her formidable four-octave vocal range, was pretty funny too.

She also played the jaunty, cabaret-infused Just Because You Can (Doesn’t Mean You Should), whose corollary is “just because you should doesn’t mean you can,” along with the slyly strutting, seductive Medicine Man, packed with all kinds of coy double entendres. She’s emceeing the festival’s closing night a week from today on June 21 at 6 PM, which might be the single best concert of the year, a bill that includes the Bil Afrah Project, who recreate iconic Lebanese composer Ziad Rahbani’s legendary 1975 Bil Afrah album; pyrotechnic Romany accordionist Peter Stan’s new band Zlatni Balkan Zvuk, Brazilian accordionist Felipe Hostins’ new forro group Osnelda; and cumbia accordionist/crooner Gregorio Uribe leading his slinky big band in celebration of Colombian Independence Day.

The festival’s only drawback is that it’s such a feast that there isn’t time to see everybody on the bill. It was awfully cool last night to watch accordionist Simon Moushabeck make his way through Arabic modes with all sorts of enigmatic passing tones, in two abbreviated duo sets with oudist Brian Prunka, mixing up steady, serpentine originals with a Fairouz cover or two.

Further to the west, Sadys Rodrigo Espitia played equally slinky, catchy cumbia and vallenato numbers. When he forgot the words to the hit Cumbia Del Oriente, a woman in the crowd sauntered over to the mic: and sang them with serious Colombian pride.

It was also cool to get to watch popular busker and Thee Shambels accordionist Melissa Elledge jam out cinematic themes and a Johnny Cash classic, then make noir blues out of Beethoven. Late one night a couple of years ago in the Second Avenue F train station, after a Bowery Ballroom show, Elledge played what had to be the most heartwrenchingly gorgeous version of Erik Satie’s Gymnopedie No. 1 ever. So it was refreshing to be able to just chill on the grass and hear her think outside the box without the usual subway stresses. Garniez may be the world’s most brilliantly eclectic songwriter, but as an instrumentalist, Elledge is on the same page.

Before the big blowout on the 21st, there’s another night of mini-sets from another amazing cast of accordionists at Bryant Park on July 19 starting at 6 PM, with a lineup including avant garde and klezzmer player Shoko Nagai, pan-Mediterranean wizard Ismail Butera, jazz luminary Will Holshouser and Ed Goldberg & the Odessa Klezmer Band.

Chicano Batman, the Hottest Thing in Latin and Psychedelic Soul, Hit Central Park This Weekend

Chicano Batman are the hottest thing in psychedelic soul right now – or maybe in all of soul music, for that matter. Over the course of their eclectic career, they’ve done everything from noir psychedelia to  LA lowrider grooves as well as  more tropical sounds. Their latest album Freedom Is Free – streaming at Bandcamp – is their most traditionally 60s soul-oriented, yet with the psychedelic touches they’re best known for. They’re the highlight of a triplebill this Satutday,  July 15 at around 5 PM at Central Park Summerstage. A generically dancey band open the afternoon at 3ish; popular 80s Argentine janglerockers Los Pericos headline atfterward if you feel like sticking around for your nostalgia fix .Get there on time if you’re going

The album opens with Passed You By, a gorgeous oldschool soul ballad  that sounds like the Zombies covering the Stylistics, with Binky Griptite in elegant mode on lead guitar. The reverb on frontman Bardo Martinez’s organ, backing vocals and echoey guitar fragments add subtle psychedelic touches to the point where the whole is a lot bigger than the sum of its parts – this band is very good at doing that.

Martinez  turns up his organ’s roto all the way over drummer Gabriel Villa’s scrambling shuffle groove, like the Soul Brothers with hints of James Brown, in Friendship (Is a Small Boat in a Storm). Angel Child is a real trip: strutting bass, woozy wah guitar, lysergically pulsing Sergeant Pepper textures and a little in-the-pocket James Brown all mashed up together.

Bassist Eduardo Arenas’ snappy drive fuels the album’s sunny title track, while guitarist Carlos Arévalo shows off his elegant Hendrixian chosp on the spiky, psychedleic intro to the understatedly plaintive, Os Mutantes-tinged La Jura, a feast of vintage organ and vintage analog synth textures. All the trick endings raise the surrealism level several notches.

The band balances rapidfire precision – check out Arévalo’s wry wah-wah guitar solo – with a lingering red-sunset atmosphere in Flecha Al Sol. Jealousy is not the creepy Ninth House dirge but an artfully assembled, crescendoing  original – is that a weird low-register synth patch, or Arenas’ bass running through a fuzztone pedal? It’s anybody’s guess.

The band follows the delicious jangles and ripples of the bouncy latin funk intro Right Off the Back with Run, a swaying, shapeshifting mini-epic sparkling with blippy organ, flitting congas, mosquito guitar, soaringly orchestrated choruses featuring New York’s own all-female Mariachi Flor de Toloache and a couple of unexpectedly balmy organ interludes.

The album’s longest and best track, The Taker Story, is an anti-imperialist broadside, part Isaac Hayes hot butter, part Gil Scott-Heron, with a hazy latin tint. Over a leaping, trickily polyrhythmic groove, Martinez traces many thousand years of colonization and relentless exploitation. “You can’t believe that native people are still around,” Martinez intones with withering sarcasm. The album winds up with the uneasily rippling psych-folk theme Area C. This is going to be the summer jam for an awful lot of people in 2017.

A NYC Debut This Week by a Killer Spanish Psychedelic Rock Project

Weinf, a.k.a. Spanish multi-instrumentalist/crooner Dani Ruiz is the great psychedelic rock songwriter you’ve never heard off. His music compares with this era’s greatest American psych bands: the Allah-Las and Mystic Braves, to name just two.  British cult heroes the Frank Flight Band are also a good comparison, as are obvious influences the Doors and Nick Cave. Weinf’s latest album Purple Bird and Other Strange Stories is just out and streaming at Bandcamp, and he’s got a trio of New York shows coming up. This week, he’s at Sidewalk on July 4 at 9:30 PM and then back there on the sixth at 10 PM. Then he plays a Manhattan house concert on July 7 at 8 PM, email for location/info.

The album’s harrowing subtext is that it was recorded while Ruiz was undergoing intensive chemotherapy, no doubt adding to the gloomy ambience. It opens with a smash with The Sunset Cave, Pol Mata’s Ray Manzarek-ish organ swirling evilly over the bandleader’s punchy, incisive guitar chords. It’s sort of a mashup of doomy Doors psychedelia and allusively chromatic Radio Birdman garage-punk fire with a Nick Cave soundalike out in front.

A similarly ominous, slightly more low-key atmosphere permeates The Priest and the Thief, which wouldn’t be out of place as a midtempo ballad on the Doors’ Strange Days. Júlia Martín’e pouncing groove anchors the title cut, with its vampy, trippy Light My Fire vibe.

The Absence of a God Has Made Me Free veers between grey-cloud ambience and crashing Arthur Lee-style dark garage rock. The Finest Woman I Have Ever Met is a dead ringer for mid-period, epically-inclined Stranglers, with  less antagonistic vocals.

A starry swirl of guitar, keys and cymbals kicks off Fishes Swimming in the Sand, a surreal blend of Nick Cave balladry and slide guitar-driven pastoral psychedelia, vibraphone tinkling overhead. The album’s best track is Kafka on the Shore, Mata’s UV-ray electric piano flickering amidst Ruiz’s reverb-drenched jangle and clang.

Dana Colley’s nocturnal sax interlude opens the album’s most upbeat track, The Basement, an altered latin soul strut with LA Woman overtones. The album winds up with Carefulness and Other Bad Advice, a diptych that turns on a dime from poppy late 60s blue-eyed soul to darkly vamping Frank Flight gloom. Ruiz’s English lyrics are trippy, aptly metaphorical and aphoristic..and sometimes hard to understand. Happily, the words to all the songs can be found at his Bandcamp page. It’s hard to think of a more distinctive yet purist and consistently excellent psychedelic rock record released so far this year,

An Awesome New Album and an East Village Release Show by Ethio-Jazz Songstress Meklit

Multi-instrumentalist singer Meklit is one of brightest lights in Ethiopian jazz  But that’s just the starting point for the ex-Brooklynite songwriter, who springboards off that  into a high-voltage mix that also draws on classic soul, funk, rock and ancient Ethiopian folk music. Her Lincoln Center show back in April was off the hook. Now she’s got a new album, When the People Move, the Music Moves Too, soon to be streaming at Bandcamp, and a release show tomorrow night, June 21 at 8 PM at the old Nublu at 62 Ave. C.. Cover is $22.

Since she absconded for the west coast, she’s assembled a killer band. Their not-so-secret weapon is tenor saxophonist Howard Wiley. The rest of the vast cast on the album also comprises but is hardly limited to drummer Colin Douglas, percussionist Marco Peris Coppola and bassist Sam Bevan. The rest of the crew spans from Ethiopian masenko fiddler Endris Hassen to the Preservation Hall Horns.

The triumphantly bouncing, swaying opening track, This Was Made Here, celebrates a DIY esthetic, but there’s also a lot of defiance in the bandleader’s “I’m not gonna wait, no more!” as Tassew Wondem’s Ethiopian wood flute leaps and bounds overhead. The brightly circlingI Want to Sing For Them All also has a defiant undercurrent – on the surface, it sends shouts out to Meklit’s influences, from Prince to a litany of Ethio-jazz stars, but it’s also a reminder that pigeonholing is a big mistake. As Hannah Arendt liked to say, stereotyping is the worst thing in the world. Andrew Bird’s violin pairs with the masenko as the dance rises to fever pitch.

Meklit breaks out her krar harp for the album’s catchiest track, Supernova. Powerful low-register brass fuels a vast, pulsingly dramatic backdrop as Wiley goes into wary Ethiopian mode. The mantra is “Where did you come from,” the point being that everything we’re made of came in with a bang: don’t we owe it to ourselves to keep that going?

Likewise, the Preservation Hall Horns supply the bluster behind Kibrome Birhane’s spare, incisive piano in the funky anthem You Are My Luck. Bird brings his violin back to the subtly polyrhythmic, mutedly moody Yerakeh Yeresal. Then the band pucks up the pace with You Got Me: hearing the New Orleans brass sink their teeth into Meklit’s gorgeously biting, emphatic Ethiopian arrangement is a trip, and a revelation.

Yesterday Is a Tizita brings back the grey-sky atmosphere, a lament that rises to the point where the sky clears and Meklit announces that “Our mistakes became the sun” –  her loping triplet melody is one of the album’s most delicious moments.

Wiley’s catchy, ominous baritone sax riffage drives Human Animal, a straight-ahead mix of hard funk and Ethio-jazz, with hints of 80s new wave. Sweet or Salty maintains that balance of 80s British pop and rustic Ethiopian themes, with acidically swirling masenko against lushly enigmatic strings and understatedly jubilant rat-at-tat percussion.

Happy Birthday starts out as a cute attempt at a replacement for an all-too-familiar ditty that could really, REALLY use a replacement, then becomes an intricate thicket of melody, winding up with a jaunty conversation between Wiley’s tenor sax and one of the trombonists. The album closes with Memories of the Future, shifting back and forth between a majestic, distantly uneasy sway and a jubilant, cantering theme fueled by the New Orleans horns. Lots going on here, plenty to sink your ears into over and over again – one of the best albums of 2017, bar none.

An Allusively Intense, Psychedelic New Album by Larkin Grimm

Multi-instrumentalist/songwriter Larkin Grimm gets pigeonholed as freak-folk, probably because her music is mostly acoustic But that’s a box she doesn’t fit into. She can wail to match Yoko at her most assaultive if she wants, but she’s just as likely to soar gently over an artsy, psychedelic backdrop. Her latest album Chasing an Illusion is streaming at Bandcamp. She’s playing Sunnyvale at 8 PM tomorrow night, June 8; cover is $15. Renata Zeiguer’s trippy, creepy Prozac rock project Cantina opens the night at 7. Grimm is also at Planeta, 295 E 8th St. on June 16, time and cover TBA.

Grimm recorded the album with what sounds like a vast cast of performers  – neither her site nor her Bandcamp page lists them – at Martin Bisi’s legendary Gowanus basement space, BC Studios. The natural reverb on the recording – which was done live to max out the sonics – is subtle yet vividly alive. Grimm, who typically wears her cards close to the vest, explains the album as being influenced by Ornette Coleman, and a pivotal moment when she ran into a number of her major influences, Ravi Coltrane and Pharaoh Sanders among them, at Coleman’s funeral.

There’s a distinct Indian influence throughout the album’s eight often epic tracks. The opener, Ah Love is Oceanic Pleasure is a lush, rubato raga-rock soundscape of sorts, awash in austere strings, various plucked instruments and even a sax fluttering in the backdrop, high in the clouds. “You have to choose your freedom,” is the refrain.

Grimm’s harp flickers and ripples over a bittersweetly Lynchian Orbison-pop vamp throughout Beautifully Alone, which rises to a teeth-clenched midtown Manhattan scenario.. “I wanna be alone dangerously alone, beautifully alone,” she asserts.

Another raga-rock piece, Fear Transforms into Love (Journey in Turiya…) tingles with harp glissandos; true to the title, it reaches majestic, triumphant peak. I Don’t Believe You has a similar sweep with echoes of 80s dreampop, like the Cocteau Twins but more organic. “I wish that you would die, so that I could play outside,” Grimm laments. Yikes!

On the Floor contrasts Grimm’s balmy vocals with a simple, gritty electric guitar and violin arrangement. Tom Van Buskirk’s elegant drums provide a hypnotically symphonic sway for A Perfect World, a lush return to acoustic dreampop. Then Grimm goes in an unexpected 90s trip-hop direction with Keeping You Alive: her blithe understatement belies her…um…grim exasperation. The album winds up with the title track, a rustic blues amped with trumpet sailing over burning distorted guitar. “I feel dead inside,” Grimm rails as it gets underway and finally reaches an anguished peak. For those who wish that Nico had made Chelsea Girl with Arthur Lee instead, this is for you.

The Shelters Steal the Show in Williamsburg

Just when the Shelters really started to get cooking, they had to leave the stage. That’s the trouble with opening acts all too often. The Cali psychedelic pop band had just scampered through their one genuine cover of the night, a high-voltage version of the Yardbirds’ Lost Woman, bassist Jacob Pillot playing that big, rapidfire hook with a pick (rather than fingerpicking like Paul Samwell-Smith did on the original) and not missing a beat. They wound up their tantalizingly brief, stormy jam out with a wry Link Wray quote. And then they were gone. They deserved to headline their twinbill last night at Warsaw with Royal Blood, who were essentially doing karaoke, at least half of what they were “playing” stashed away in the mixing desk or on a laptop or wherever they hide pre-recorded tracks these days.

The Shelters are strong musicians and know their roots. Beatles? Check. Oasis? Doublecheck and triplecheck. Velvets? Sure. Post-Velvets? You bet. “Pretty good cover band,” one cynic in the crowd deadpanned. Frontman Chase Simpson alternated between a Les Paul and a Rickenbacker, proving as adept at Nashville gothic and garage-psych as he is with channeling George Harrison. Josh Jove pushed the tunes along with fiery rhythm guitar, playing a second Rick on a couple of the night’s jangliest numbers in tandem with Pillot and drummer Sebastian Harris. They got the Oasis/Blues Magoos mashups out of the way early, charmed the crowd with a clanging anthem that nicked the changes from Patti Smith’s Dancing Barefoot and then got a little retro Shakin’ All Over action going.

Interestingly, their best song was a hypnotically vamping, spacerock-infused midtempo number that sounded like vintage 90s Brian Jonestown Massacre. Then it was Yardbirds, over and out. Which was too bad. Realistically, there are easily a hundred bands in New York who might not be quite as tight but are infinitely edgier than the Shelters – lyrics are not their thing. On the other hand, it was impossible not to find it heartwarming to see so many kids (this was an all-ages show) among the very diverse, unpretentious crowd who’d come out for a midnight concert billed as an afterparty for a ridiculously overpriced, daylong corporate music festival staged on an island in the Hudson.

The official story is that Tom Petty saw the Shelters in some random bar and liked them so much that he ended up producing their debut album. On the other hand, it’s hardly unreasonable to believe that the record label simply rounded up four goodlooking guys who could really play, could write fluently in the styles of a whole bunch of popular bands from years gone by, and got Petty, a guy who truly appreciates this stuff, to helm the project. Whatever the case, it’s refreshing to see somebody putting some money behind a group with genuine talent and tunesmithing ability. The Shelters’/Royal Blood tour continues; the next stop with affordable tickets which isn’t sold out is on June 10 at 7 PM at Newport Music Hall, 1722 N High St in Columbus, Ohio. Then they’re at Bonnaroo the following day. 

Soul Singer Alice Lee’s Long-Awaited New Album: One of 2017’s Catchiest, Most Lyrically Searing Releases

Back in the mid-zeros, soul singer Alice Lee was one of the most distinctive and individualistic artists in what was a thriving Lower East Side and Brooklyn music scene. She remains one of the most eclectic tunesmiths to emerge from there, blending jazz sophistication, trippy downtempo ambience, and a little slashing punk-funk or downtown guitar skronk into her uneasy, picturesque songs. This blog’s predecessor picked her 2005 release Lovers and Losers as one of the thousand best albums of all time. That one was sort of a mashup of Nina Simone and Fiona Apple.

In the years since then, gentrification continued to blight neighborhoods across the city, and Lee was one of the thousands driven out by the luxury-condo blitzkrieg. These days she’s been dividing her time between here and Guatemala, continuing to play her own music as well as tropicalia and jazz throughout Central America. Now, she finally has a new album, The Wheel – streaming at Bandcamp – and a a show coming on on May 25 at 9 PM Pete’s Candy Store, one of the few remaining venues that she played back in the day that’s still open.

Although there’s great elegance and nuance in her voice on these songs, the overall atmosphere is sobering and defiantly angry. Much of the material is awash in regret; the album’s best songs are searing narratives of 99-percenter struggles. She kicks things off with a swinging, lo-fi guitar-and-vocal jazz miniature, These Foolish Things: it’s over in a heartbeat, just like the affair it commemorates. The wickedly anthemic, trip-hop-tinged Where Are You My Love, a longtime concert favorite, captures Lee in the studio circa 2003 on electric piano, with Yuval Gabay on drums and Lee’s longtime producer, Pere Ubu and No Grave Like the Sea mastermind Tony Maimone on bass.David Johnson’s tersely biting Spanish guitar solo midway through matches the bittersweetness and longing in Lee’s voice as it finally rises at the end.

Most of the rest of the songs here feature Mark Schwartz on bass and Alejandro Vega on drums, with Maimone on the four-string on a handful of tracks. The blockbuster cut is the resolutely insistent Your Blues, an anthem for the era of Ferguson and Eric Garner, Lee doubletracking her blippy, distorted electric piano and judiciously resonant electric guitar:

Bend your life, break your back
For a system that bruises you
Twenty lashes in jail
When it fails you, accuses you
Don’t exist in the eyes of the law
They can do with you as they please
You stand up for yourself
And they bring you to your knees
Can’t look me in the eye
As you take your shot
The blood on your hands
Will come out in the wash
How can you stand by
Watch your brother fall and suffer
At the hands of another
How far are we from done
From disconnect and thinking we’re the only ones

Another electric piano groove, Letter to No One revisits the surreal, restless nocturnal vibe of much of Lovers & Losers:

My heart is overwhelmed
By a tide that won’t turn
I stumble forward, wondering how long
Before I wake
The key to happiness,
A secret no one else can crack
Always looking forward and
Never looking back

The album’s loopy, tricky, syncopated title track looks at the desperation of love in a time of wage slavery:

These days were meant for the dogs
You hit the blocks hard but you don’t get the job
Or you get the job but you’re full up in debt
That you spend the rest of your life trying to get ahead
…You don’t get a choice in the matter
Until you get caught

Lee revisits the theme in the briskly swinging, catchy, cynical Too Little Too Late, another big audience hit:

We go forward, two steps back
Hit play, repeat, don’t skip the track…
Watch the broken glass across the gap
Step on the line don’t let me pass the same way twice

Descent, set to an ironic downward chord progression, is Lee at her most harrowing and intense, with a creepy, tremolo-picked dreampop guitar solo:

Repetition is a curse
Save the chorus
Erase the verse
Where were you
When I was down
For the count, but not quite out
Passing ghost with no regrets
Learning to live and forget

The funky First and Sixth, another brooding nocturne, will resonate with anybody who has bittersweetly hazy memories of wee-hours hookups in what was then a (semi) affordable East Village on nights when the trains were all messed up: “Waiting on the L just out of luck, now I’m stuck at 14th St., waiting on my whiskey sour…it’s almost time for breakfast again…make no difference, hand to mouth…I don’t care if I’m the only one to get out of here alive.” This wasn’t such a long time ago, either.

Love Is a Thief, an elegant jazz waltz of sorts, dates from the early zeros and has the feel of early 60s Nina Simone blended with Velvets folk-rock: Lee plays it solo on acoustic guitar and piano. She works a psychedelically sparkling upward trajectory on the kiss-off anthem Left of Mine, brooding guitar jangle set to a funky shuffle beat. The album also includes a couple of remixes, including legendary Greenpoint producer Scotty Hard’s version of First and Sixth. It’s only May, but we may have the best album of 2017 here.