A Rare Loud Rock Show Coming Up at the Lincoln Center Atrium

Has a heavy psychedelic rock band ever played Lincoln Center? Believe it or not, a few punk acts have played there over the years. There was a rare concert by a reconfigured version of legendary 70s Detroit band Death there in 2010, Six years later, Hoba Hoba Spirit – the Moroccan Clash – raised the roof at the atrium space on Broadway south of 63rd St. That’s where heavy spacerock trio King Buffalo are playing on March 30 at 7:30 PM. It’s a free show; you might want to get there early.

Their new album Regenerator is streaming at Bandcamp. Whether motoring along at a fast autobahn clip or with a slow, heavier sway, they like hanging on a single chord to build hypnotic ambience that can go on for minutes on end. They open the record with the title epic, a galloping mashup of shiny 80s chorus-box spacerock, krautrock and maybe Budos Band. You don’t realize it’s a one-chord jam until frontman/guitarist Sean McVay kicks off his wah pedal and brings in the fuzz.

Bassist Dan Reynolds and drummer Scott Donaldson fuel a hypnotic, circling forward drive in the second track, Mercury, a heavier take on mid-80s Talking Heads until McVay blasts in with the distortion. The trio go back to stomping spacerock with track three, Hours, a throwback to 90s Brian Jonestown Massacre until a wry portamento synth-and-bass interlude midway through.

They nick a famous Beatles theme for the drony, raga-like intro to Mammoth, a slow, swaying, echoey ba-bump groove that they suddenly take halfspeed to a gritty roar and a big majestic outro. They follow a slow, bouncy, Muse-ish sway for Avalon – a starry, drifting, unexpectedly crescendoing original, not the Roxy Music classic.

They wind up the record with Firmament, slowly rising from a circling, chiming loop to layers of distortion, wah and Donaldson’s oscillating, insectile synth.

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The Elgin Marbles Bring Their Wickedly Catchy, Psychedelic Jangle and Clang to Bushwick

What is up with this week? Suddenly it’s 2019 again. There are more great multiple-band bills around New York than there have been in, um, years. Wonder why that is?

The best of the bunch is at Gold Sounds on March 18 and starts anticlimactically at 8 with psychedelic janglerock guitar goddess Barbara Endes’ band Girls on Grass, followed by cult supergroup the Elgin Marbles, who play the wickedly catchy, serpentine songs of bandleader/guitarist Dann Baker’s previous outfit, Love Camp 7. Up next are Canadian country crew the Pickups and then Cementhead, who enjoyed a good run (and a revolving door of band members) as one of the few memorable indie bands in New York in the late 90s and zeros. Cover is $12, dirt cheap for a lineup of this caliber.

This blog was in the house for one of the Elgin Marbles’ first shows, at Troost in Greenpoint in August of 2019. It was a psychedelic janglefest. Bassist Dave Mandl did his usual swoop-and-dive routine where Love Camp 7’s late, great Bruce Hathaway would have punched in with his judicious, melodic lines (Hathaway was also a first-rate composer of new classical music: let’s hope his orchestral scores will someday resurface somewhere).

Drummer Heather Wagner had the hardest job of all. Negotiating the late, great Dave Campbell’s labyrinthine lines with any similar kind of flair would have been a steep learning curve under any circumstances, but she was up to the challenge and was relentless about it. The addition of Greek/Cypriot surf band the Byzan-tones‘ guitarist and bandleader George Sempepos added to the intricate, starry lattice of sound. Baker balanced his erudite jangle and chime with the occasional, unexpectedly buzzy blast of noise to keep the crowd on their toes, when they weren’t hanging on his winkingly sly lit-rock lyrics and cat-ate-the-canary vocals. There seems to be only one video from the show that’s made it to the web, but it’s a good one, Sempepos’ jagged, spiky slide guitar over Baker’s slinky sway.

Howling Giant Headline a Killer Heavy Psych Triplebill in Queens Next Week

One of the best metal and heavy psychedelic triplebills of the year is happening this March 15 starting sometime after 7 at TV Eye in Ridgewood, where Stoogoid stoner boogie band Sun Voyager open the night, followed by the more eclectically noisy and considerably heavier Restless Spirit, and then shapeshifting heavy psych band Howling Giant. Cover is $15

Sun Voyager are natives and used to play around here a fair amount, at least before the lockdown, but the other two bands have been conspicuously absent until recently. One good record to spin for the show is Howling Giant’s 2019 vinyl release The Space Between Worlds, streaming at Bandcamp. Why this album and not their most recent ep? Because the central narrative is about a huntress who has to fight off a mythical dream eater. As Tessa Lena has chronicled, what better metaphor for the last three years of hell?

It’s also a good capsule of what the band bring, live: stoner sludge with frequently tricky post-Mars Volta rhythmic shifts and terse guitar solos. Drummer Zach Wheeler hits a couple of martial flurries, then launches into an impressive lithe forward drive for such heavy music as guitarist/frontman Tom Polzine builds a dense wall of chords and bassist Sebastian Baltes holds down the gritty lows in the album’s first track, Comet Rider. Organist Drew Harakal adds swirl; Polzine hits his pedalboard and fires off a couple of tantalizingly brief solos.

The band slow down for Nomad, Polzine’s chiming loops over a murky drift through deep space. Again, he could have taken ten times as long with that first wah-wah solo and nobody would be complaining.

Ghosts in the Well is a surprising and rewarding detour into slow, mythical acoustic folk, followed by The River Guide, a mini-epic as Sleep might have done it thirty years ago, with an unexpected dream-nebula interlude.

Ice Castle begins with fuzz, tasty doublebass drum volleys and then the band pick up steam with more of a doomy, vengeful atmosphere and smoky organ. “They’re building a machine hiding in the wasteland,” Polzine announces, “The lab is overrun,” as he and the band launch into Cybermancer and the Doomsday Express, a thrashier, more 60s flavored dash through the gloom.

Harakal adds glimmering electric piano textures to the album’s most hypnotically swaying, drifting track, Everlight. The band pick it up, then descend to a lull with Wheeler’s shamanic beats before rising to a hammering attack where the bass finally cuts loose.

They slowly sway their way to a pummeling battle scene and then some venomous tremolo-picking from Polzine in The Orb. Does this space odyssey end well? It would seem so from the final cut, Stone Giant, but at the twin solos hover over the torrents of organ and the relentless, ornate drums, the message is “watch your back.”

The Best Twin Peaks Cover Band in New York Slinks Into Bushwick

Of all the extreme niche cover bands in the world, one of the best are Fuck You Tammy. The bandname is a reference to the most recent iteration of Twin Peaks. The group – a spinoff of the similarly cinematic but more techy Scam Avenue – dedicate themselves to playing music from every incarnation of David Lynch’s iconic film noir franchise: the first two network tv seasons, the brief cable comeback series and the Twin Peaks movie.

They released their lone single so far, a lush but hauntingly intimate and psychedelic version of True Love’s Flame, in February 2020, barely a month before the lockdown. The good news is that they’re back, and have a relatively rare hometown show coming up on March 15 at 8 PM at Alphaville. The venue is one of many in (increasingly less) trendy Brooklyn neighborhoods who’ve fallen for the goofy dollars-and-cents online ticketing fad (which may be a condition of taking Trump plandemic loans). What that means for customers, assuming that whoever’s working the door isn’t making change, is that it will probably set you back an even $14 cash.

This blog was at Long Island City Bar in February of 2018, where the band drifted through a lustrous, lusciously lurid set. Unfortunately, that show didn’t make it to the web, but a shorter show from the Bell House from a couple of weeks later did and is up at youtube. And it’s every bit as good: the Queens gig was more instrumentals, while this one focuses more on vocal numbers.

What’s best about this band is that they add subtle original touches, when they’re not doing a stunning job recreating these cult classics note for note. They open the show with a vigorous punk jazz-tinged take of The Pink Room, the creepy Black Lodge stripper theme from the movie, propelled with a stalking pulse by bassist Julie Rozansky and drummer Nate Smith as saxophonist Anthony Cekay fires off jagged, smoky accents. Then frontwoman Devery Doleman – who has much more powerful pipes than Julee Cruise – takes over in front of the band and turns in a similarly pouncing cover of Floating

Keyboardist Bill Ferullo and guitarist David Andreana open Falling with the Twin Peaks title theme: just as at the Queens gig, the effect is a lot more stark and sinister than the plush, saturnine studio sound of the original score. Then Doleman shimmies in her red dress and goes way up into Cruise-ing highs for Rocking Back Inside My Heart, the wistful pop ballad from the comeback season.

Rozansky, who has a softer voice, takes over the mic and keeps the sad 50s vibe going in Just You, Andreana firing off spot-on reverbtoned jangle and whipcrack behind her. Then the band bring the menace back with a brisk take of Into the Night, eerie echoey electric piano against spare guitar jangle and an unscripted, smoky Cekay sax solo. It’s the high point of the show.

Little Jimmy Scott’s version of Sycamore Trees is impossible to beat, so the band reinvent it with more of a cliffhanger guitar noir edge. They go back to slow, distantly pensive 6/8 retro ballad territory with The World Spins as Rozansky punches in with her treble up behind Doleman’s angst-fueled vocals, and then max out the mystery as they wind it out with a dead calm. The two frontwoman sing disconsolate harmonies in the closer, a meticulous recreation of The Nightingale. Where Tom Csatari’s Twin Peaks covers focus more on the menace that a band can find outside the lines, Fuck You Tammy max out the red neon inner core.

Psychedelia, Jagged No Wave and Big Stadium Sounds at a Williamsburg Guitar Shop on the 9th

There’s an intriguing triplebill coming up at 8 PM on March 9 at an unexpected out-of-the-way spot, Main Drag Music at 50 W 1st St. at Kent Ave. in Williamsburg, where polymath guitar god Pete Galub opens the night, followed by a couple of anthemic yet acerbic and sometimes abrasive acts, Woodhead and Mustafina

Galub is probably the only artist who’s shared a stage with both Americana icon Amy Allison and art-rock mystic Carol Lipnik. But he’s also a solo artist who’s just as adept at straight-ahead powerpop as he is at psychedelia, a guy who can find the inner James Brown in Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall Pt. 3. It’s been awhile since the last time this blog was in the house for a Galub show. That was a low-key set with multi-instrumentalist Matt Kanelos in the fall of 2017, at a little Williamsburg spot that four years later would throw away its storied past, and will be remembered for its ugly complicity in a divide-and-conquer-and-possibly-murder scheme.

Galub has put out some good records over the years, but he also has a delightful Soundcloud page where he collects his more uncategorizable material. For starters, there’s Artificial Weather, a catchy rainy-day folk-rock ballad with acoustic guitar and and electric piano, an aptly metaphorical theme for the era of chemtrails.

A solo electric version of Brave Words by the Chills is a lot warmer and louder than the originals, with a strange Jerry Garcia-style interlude tacked on. In typical, puckish Galub fashion, his cover of the Feelies’ It’s Only Life is much more terse and low-key. His wryly psychedelic, Dylanesque take of Roxy Music’s A Really Good Time is also pretty classic, if insider rock humor is your thing.

Other rarities include a funny little cartoon of a tune, Have Yourself a Really Crappy Christmas; Raga Against the Machine, a pretty hilarious evocation of a sitar, and the best song on the page, Psycho Seder, a klezmer horror surf instrumental.

Woodhead’s new single is part skronky new wave, part 80s King Crimson and a little stadium rock. The one before that, a “lockdown version” of Walking Uphill has all kinds of tasty layers of ugly noise, evil tritones and frontman/guitarist Vern Woodhead’s declamatory 80s vocals over Dmitry Ishenko’s snappy bassline. The band’s most recent album, El Inmortal, goes back to 2016 and features the same improbably successful blend of noisy abrasion, punchy anthemic choruses and spoken-word vocals.

Mustafina make a good segue: they mix up 70s acid rock, noiserock, guy/girl metal vocals and the same kind of tricky tempos that Woodhead sometimes negotiate. Their Reverbnation page has a small handful of songs: click the big six-minute second track, Good Times and the Scars to Prove It, to see what they can do with a big stadium anthem. This is the kind of lineup you might have seen at the late and badly missed Bar Matchless – where Mustafina used to play.

Ace Bandage Jam Like Nobody Else in Town

Ace Bandage are the best new jamband in New York. When they weren’t playing shows last year, they were improvising in their rehearsal room and putting that stuff up at Bandcamp. They recorded their latest short album, Ace Bandage’s Almost Halloween live at Hart Bar in Bushwick last October. You can hear the originals at the Bandcamp page; the whole concert, including Bowie and Pink Floyd covers, is available at archive.org.

They make their way up from a minor-key reggae groove to a brisk mid-80s Talking Heads pulse in the first of their tunes, Weirding. Guitarist Jake Pepper plays purposeful, bluesy lines over his sparring partner Kent Dunne’s incisive chords,. then they eventually take the song down into the vortex as bassist Zach Koeber and drummer Taylor Harvey back away, then pull everybody back on the rails in a split second.

They segue into Snuff the Torch, Dunne’s chicken-scratch wah-wah in contrast to Pepper’s unhinged slashes, slow-bake-in-the-sun leads and occasional pickslides. It’s like more focused mid-70s Can.

The last song is Burn. In almost seventeen minutes, the band slinking along on a darkly psychedelic funk pulse. Dunne takes the first couple of solos with a hammering, reverbtoned dark garage attack. When he goes flying over the edge and hands it over to Pepper to go further off the handle, it’s a clinic in spontaneous combustion. And yet, when Koeber goes bubbling up into the high frets, the two guitarists work their way down into a resonant simmer and a little robots-adrift-in-space interlude. The misterioso bass-led jam at the end is the best part, quiet as it is. It’s rare that you find a new band with this kind of chops or telepathy.

Ace Bandage are at Bar Freda on March 9 at 9 PM; cover is $10

Bard’s Flying Vessel Bring Their Imaginative, Catchy Psychedelia to Bushwick

On one hand, rock music in this city was pretty much snuffed out by the 2020 plandemic. But in the past year, there have been signs that we’re about to see a welcome resurgence. Many artists who were locked out of the number-crunching, social media-fixated venues are suddenly getting prime time onstage. And that almost invariably means that the music is good: these artists are writing songs and jamming out instead of spending all their time on the magic rectangle.

One impressively eclectic bill is this March 4 at 8 PM at Alphaville, where brooding folk-rock tunesmith Peter Carlovich, a.k.a. Peter Is Dead opens the night, followed by female-fronted dreampop band Heat Death and then jangly, anthemic newschool psychedelic band Bard’s Flying Vessel. Like so many Brooklyn venues, the space has become enamored of the surveillance-based online ticketing fad, something that may or many not have to do with compliance with state or federal plandemic loans. Whatever the case, if you round up the nickels and dimes, it’ll cost you $14 cash at the door.

Bard’s Flying Vessel have a new limited-edition cassette Nightfall Generator streaming at Bandcamp. It’s got the droniness of Brian Jonestown Massacre and the Black Angels, the jangle and clang of the 13th Floor Elevators and some King Gizzard acidity without the Middle Eastern fixation. These guys really know their psychedelia and draw on plenty of other influences without sounding like a ripoff.

The first track is Barrows, an Elevators stomp beefed up with washes of distorted guitar, swirly organ and insistent piano: vintage Plan 9 comes to mind. Frontman/keyboardist Matt Dwyer’s organ floats over the spare, starry, distantly Doorsy guitars of Aaron Swartz and Joey Dussault in the album’s title track: it could be a mid-80s pop number by the Church with more analog production values, and a deliciously unexpected tempo change.

Bass Devil’s In the Garden is a fondly strutting, gorgeously jangly look back at Forever Changes-era Love, with a lithe pulse from bassist Sarang Joshi and drummer Bosch Akram. Scheming, an opiated, propulsively ultraviolet spacerock jam, is more of a mashup of BJM and early King Gizzard. Then the band add some Beatles touches in Fortune Wheel.

They open the final cut, By the Ridge, with wind chimes and wafting low feedback, then drift along on a slow martial beat behind the lingering guitar resonance and shimmery cymbals. You can get lost in this stuff Saturday night in Bushwick.

Reverend Mother Open a Killer Heavy Psychedelic Triplebill in Greenpoint

For one reason or another, heavy rock was one of the last styles of music to reemerge in the wake of the 2020 lockdowns. Maybe because so much metal and heavy psych deals with dark themes, and those artists saw a scam and said the hell with getting on a real highway to hell? Whatever the case, Lucky 13 Saloon and St. Vitus are open again with some lineups to help us forget about the horrorshow of the last three years. One of the best triplebills of the year is happening in a couple of days on Feb 21 at St. Vitus. And as good as the later acts on the bill are – thorny heavy psych road warriors Bone Church and the more diverse, stoner boogie-oriented El Perro – the openers might be the best act on the bill. Cover is $16,

Reverend Mother, who hit sometime after 7, are a heavy psychedelic power trio with an excellent new vinyl record, Damned Blessing streaming at Bandcamp. Frontwoman/guitarist Jackie Green writes wickedly catchy, purposeful riffs, mixes up her textures from sludgy to sunbaked and sings through a lot of reverb. Bassist Matt Cincotta and drummer Gabe Katz have a nimble attack with a snap and crackle that looks back to the 70s

The opening track, How to Serve Man begins with a slow, lusciously spare chromatic hook then picks it up with more of a classic punk drive. Green winds it out with evil phased leads as the rhythm section rises toward a stampede.

The group introduce the second song with a bit of a radio broadcast, hinting at a Elon Musk satellite attack or the equivalent. Then, in Locomotive, the band rise from enigmatic, sparse intensity to a ba-bump stoner boogie with reverb-heavy vocals: a more raw, stripped-down Ruby the Hatchet, maybe

Track four, the band’s signature song. opens with a snarl but also a maze of polyrhythms before Green straightens it out: if Thalia Zedek had gone into metal, she might have sounded something like this. After that, Road to Lose has honking blues harp from Patton Magee but also some serious crush from Green’s guitar on the chorus.

Green adds violin alongside High Priestess Nighthawk’s cello on L.V.B, a slow, sludgy heavy blues instrumental. It makes a good segue with the next track, Shame, the band picking up doublespeed into a tantalizingly brief, gritty bass break.

Green gets both channels burning with distortion and jagged hooks over the chugging forward drive in the album’s big epic. The Masochist Tie. “Break me,” Green taunts, “Will you catch up with me in the end?” And then launches into a slithery guitar interlude that’s over too soon.

The album’s final cut is Toxic, Green multitracking her vocals for an accusatory one-woman chorus over a hypnotic two-chord attack peppered with sniper riffs bursting from every corner of the sonic picture. Let’s hope we get more from this band.

Slow, Slinky Psychedelic Cumbia Grooves From Locobeach in Queens

By ten in the evening, the back room at the Brooklyn bar had filled up with undulating bodies. The swaying groove from the drums and the sinister, spare reverb guitar mingled with the torrential textures, and swoosh and warp and wah-wah from the two little keyboards that Locobeach bandleader Josh Camp bent over patiently, like an alchemist trying to find a sonic secret that had disappeared in Peru around 1983.

Silhouetted in red neon, twisting little knobs to get the optimum psychedelic glimmer or wash, he played as if he had a whole pipe organ at his disposal instead of maybe a couple dozen notes on the mini-synths with the maze of pedals and effects underneath. Meanwhile, everybody kept dancing.

Slowly and suspensefully, the group behind him worked their way up into the familiar minor-key broken chord, and the song that everybody had come out for: Sonico Amazonico, the national anthem of cumbia. As usual, the band took their time with it, mutating from that basic bassline to more enigmatically floating textures that Camp took deeper and deeper into dub territory.

This could have been a Locobeach show in 2017, or for that matter a moment from either of the two years of their semi-regular monthly residency. This blog was in the house for a half dozen of them: after a few years, memories start to blend into each other. One of the group’s more experimental moments was a Monday night in November of 2018 when one or more members were AWOL. One of the guys who pulled a pickup band together asked out loud what they ought to call themselves. “Loco Bitch?”‘

The good news that is that they survived the lockdown and have a gig at 9ish on Feb 24 at at Bar Freda in Ridgewood; cover is $10. They released their more psychedelic and dubwise debut album in 2019, which has some straight-up oldschool disco as well as the kind of cinematic groove-scapes that guitarist José Luis Pardo plays in his other band Los Crema Paraiso.

Locobeach’s latest single is Isabella, a brisk, bouncy tune where singer Cheo Pardo relates a tongue-in-cheek post-gig encounter with a girl who is, um, not what she seems. Camp’s horror-movie intro basically gives it away, but it’s still a good story.

In Memoriam: Tom Verlaine

Television guitarist and co-founder Tom Verlaine, whose distinctive style fused psychedelia, janglerock and in later years ambient music, died suddenly on January 28. He was 73.

Born Tom Miller, Verlaine took the name of one of the French poets whose work he discovered while in his teens. Alongside fellow guitarist Richard Lloyd, bassist Richard Hell and drummer Billy Ficca, Verlaine founded Television in New York in 1975. Although they were not a punk band, they were one of the first groups to have a regular residency at CBGB.

Television’s first two albums, 1977’s Marquee Moon, and Adventure, from a year later, achieved marginal commercial success but were enormously influential on subsequent, jangly guitar bands, from the Soft Boys, to the Larch. Marquee Moon is commonly cited as one of the greatest albums of all time.

In Television, Verlaine’s sinuous, melodic climbs and cascades contrasted with Lloyd’s harder-edged attack, often echoing the Grateful Dead’s two-guitar dichotomy. Where Lloyd would punch in with riffs and chords, Verlaine opted for melodic variations and rarely employed distortion, preferring a clean, ringing Fender guitar sound that drew on surf rock as much as Jerry Garcia and Lou Reed. Many of Television’s songs feature the two guitars exchanging roles and conversational ideas, a common jazz trope that was rare in rock bands of the era.

After the band’s breakup, Verlaine pursued a solo career and focused more on briefer, more pop-oriented songcraft. Verlaine also produced albums for two of the most important, twangy rock bands of the 80s, True West and the Room, as well as two Jeff Buckley cd’s.

Verlaine regrouped Television in 1992, primarily as an instrumental unit, with limited and highly sought-after live performances in the years that followed until he left the band for good in 2007.