The Grasping Straws Bring Their Feral Intensity to Bushwick Friday Night

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Grasping Straws Set the Mercury Lounge on Fire

The Grasping Straws packed the Mercury Lounge for the album release show for their debut full-length cd a couple of nights ago, treating the crowd to a performance that even by their standards was pretty pyrotechnic. Intense singer/guitarist Mallory Feuer’s band, which began as a collective with a rotating cast of characters, has solidified with a tight, dynamically shifting rhythm section of former Beast Make Bomb bassist Sam Goldfine and drummer Jim Bloom. This time out, they had Feuer’s brother Harrison – of Nobody Takes Vegas – snarling and wailing and machinegunning his way through volleys of metallic menace, then descending to a suspenseful jangle that he’d explode out of in a flash for more fireworks. Meanwhile, the bandleader didn’t even play guitar on the first number, wailing and shrieking, twisting and undulating, eyes closed, a shaman either banishing or mind-melding with some mysterious demon, finally ending with a slinky flip of the mic cable behind her back and then back around. It was dangerous in a lot of ways, not the least being that she might have spent all her bullets in the first four minutes of the show. Was she going to be able to keep that up for a whole set?

As it turned out, pretty much. As a singer, Feuer sometimes wields her vibrato like a metal guitarist, shivering and bending through the wall in the least likely places to max out the otherworldly factor. When she does that, she’s the blues valkyrie that Robert Plant always wanted to be. But more often, she just bends the notes a twinge – and then holds them there in a strange purgatory, letting the unresolved, enigmatic ambience linger, ramping up the suspense. The band took their time building to a sunbaked sizzle from rainy-day jangle in Going Going Gone. They followed with another jangly one, On the Line, from their more jazz-oriented early days, then took a volcanic stomp through the wickedly catchy Just a Memory, part minor-key Randi Russo menace, part early Iron Maiden, maybe – with Heart’s Ann Wilson out front, outraged.

From there they stampeded through State of Affairs, a surreal, distantly terrorized Hurricane Sandy tableau, then took a vividly overcast detour into Home, which began as brooding Laurel Canyon psychedelia and then exploded in shards of distortion and reverb on the chorus. Enjoy the Trip and Sunshine balanced bittersweetly nebulous jangle and clang with jaggedly noisy crunch. They closed with Who Do You Think You Are, taking a long climb upward to a blissfully mighty payoff on the chorus.

They also played a cover, an aptly insistent, hard-hitting cover of White Rabbit, Bloom leading the band through some deliciously subtle, tricky syncopation at the end – as one astute longtime LES music maven observed, it wasn’t Elena Zazanis, but it was pretty close. The Grasping Straws kick off their North American tour on July 11; dates are here.