By Don Allred
Features, mostly from beginning and end, sandwich a whole lot of show preview columns, all from Columbus UWeekly, before relaunch or whatever lightened their archive. From the most recent, except for belatedly found, which could happen again, hopefully, back to the beginning, in 2006.
By Don Allred
Columbus combo Bird And Flower began as Eve Searls' one-woman band. "I like the anonymity of a band name," Searls explained. "So it was a matter of finding one that I didn't completely hate, and I was really into the Bird and Flower style of Japanese ink painting."
As in her visual inspirations, Searls' sonic shading unifies sweet and sharp contrasts: High, blue, clear vocal tones, plus rough-and ready stringed instruments, connect with eerie, catchy keyboards. In the studio version of "Hot Boots," lively beats just naturally dance all over a deadbeat lover: "Now I'm all alone, don' tyou feel clever/But with my hot boots, honey, I got friends forever." Personal struggles continue, but we can always tune in "Radio Song," where a tide of melody could get whole roomfuls of people swaying, sincerely serenading (and advising) each other, "I wouldn't trust you/I wouldn't trust anybody.".
Bird And Flower's visions of alone-together sociability evidently got the speculative Americana group Black Swans' Jerry DeCicca to seek out Searls, who had so far tucked away a few tracks on MySpace. She found herself agreeing to open a 2007 Black Swans show, her first concert performance. Soon, Searls was playing keyboards for lovelorn post-punks PolyAtomic,while contributing mercurially compatible songs, vocals, and instrumental versatility to equally wry folk-pop tribe Super Desserts. The big Super Desserts also made her "feel safe," said the often uprooted former military dependent. Yet DeCicca also found or encouraged this conditioned nomad to be ready once again for ventures, via the co-produced, judiciously bewitching 2009 Bird And Flower debut album, Here We Cease Our Motion.
Bird And Flower's live vibe still startles as well. In case the target of "Hot Boots" is having too much fun with its studio groove, BaF's Boston podcast version springs a cross-cut strut, courtesy of Tyler Evans' banjo and Searls' ukulele. Friday's show also includes vocalist-accordionist Amber Jacks, multi-instrumentalist Bobby Miller, and versatile string man Erik Kang (just back from touring with Margot And The Nuclear So-And-So's), appearing here on lap steel. Searls promises "at least a couple new songs," adding that she'll be sporting a vintage omnichord. "You can even strum the keypad like a harp. It's pretty Tron." (For more on that 1982 cinemasterpiece: Tron )
Bird and Flower will play Jan. 6 and 28 @ The Basement. For more information, please visit https://promowestlive.com/our-venues/the-basement or call
(614) 461-5483
By Don Allred
(As first heard by this reporter on C-90s in the mid-90s, Mountain Goats tracks were rough-and-ready dispatches from a traveler always in the middle of something, memories and scenes happening now, unfazed by complicated landscapes, sometimes banging an acoustic guitar in what sounded like a park, with recruits chirping on cue, or even coming over the mountains on a flying picnic blanket with his latest finds, if you found yourself leaning out far enough to hear him that way, which could happen more than once.)
Mountain Goats leader John Darnielle is a frequently bespectacled, folk-rocking poet of song, and also a decidedly non-ironic death metal gourmet. Confirming his rep for real talk, the sociable Mr D. helpfully points out that if you don’t crave death metal’s “Cookie Monster” vocals (not like his, but the ones that sound like the results of bong hits from a vacuum cleaner), well, then you---just may not be so metal after all.
As for Darnielle, he still savors the moment he encountered the term “occult blood” in his nursing manual. “ ‘Occult’ just means ‘hidden’ or ‘not immediately obvious’ in medical terminology. I thought it was the greatest thing I’d ever heard.” Becoming a death-metal-loving psychiatric nurse may have inspired some of Darnielle’s songs, but they don’t seem exploitative. His nameless first- person narrator, eternally strumming and spinning through everyday purgatory and paradise, is both a penitent and rebel, beyond contradiction. The robust, combustible emotional range of spring-heeled Mountain Goats melodies never leaves much room for error, but the new All Eternals Deck takes an especially risky turn through what could easily settle into morbid clichés, or lectures about them.
Instead, Darnielle confidentially confesses the costly allure of---call it superstition, religion, underground political activities, science fiction, forbidden facts---in the secret living history of this age, or any other, without waiting for the Web to catch up. Dynamic chamber rock is a night nurse for the album’s charged atmospheres and spooked vitality. Certain truths about yourself and others might well be too much (and/or too little) information, though Darnielle’s characters can and will take it. As he (currently) reads their kind’s fortune (commenting on 1979 near-future prophet-driven teen gang movie The Warriors), “The sun’s coming up and they’re safe, but you know the scars are permanent now.”
Though certainty certainly can get old---so, for this tour, perennial bassist Peter Hughes issues an advisory: the MGs have thrown away the setlist of material they relied on for years. Instead, we’ll get many “ ...new songs, old songs that haven't been performed in years and never with a full band, old songs that have never been performed, period.” The “full band” now includes ace guitarist-keyboard player Yuval Semo, also the arranger of All Eternal Deck ’s eerie, silky strings. Nevertheless, adds Hughes, “Most of these songs, we'd really only had a chance to run through a handful of times.”
Furthering the adventurous potential of this evening, veteran Mountain Goats (and Superchunk) drummer Jon Wurster, also of the radio satire/prankster unit Scharpling & Wurster, will materialize at the Wexner Center Store from 7:30-9:00 p.m., to sign his comedy CDs and bond with the public. Brace yourselves.
The Mountain Goats will be performing with supporting band Megafaun at theWexner Center Performance Space on Monday, April 11. The show starts at 9 p.m. $16 all audiences. For more information, please visit www.mountain-goats.com or www.wexarts.org.
By Don Allred
(In 2010, this reporter reported for a Four Of A Kind:
Veteran Columbus OH teen Lydia Loveless sometimes includes the
Replacements' intensely frustrated "Answering Machine" and Def
Leppard's dynamically mesmerized "Hysteria" with her punky tonk combo
deliveries, unstoppabley tumbling up, down and onto life's thrilling,
killing, chilling and flat moments. Loretta Lynn's points of departure
are extended and twisted through Loveless' s compactly epic,
self-written debut, The Only Man, as desperately wired sexual power
struggles zap the void in passing: "Girls suck/They suck and suck and
never get enough," wails one contender, but it's time to ricochet off
another incisive epitaph.)
The living legend of Lydia Loveless began with the 2004 birth of her punk-inflected family new wave band, Carson Drew. Which is also the name of intrepid tween-lit girl detective Nancy Drew's invaluable lawyer-father. So, the band's name could be considered a salute to the then-14-year-old LL's and her sisters' drummer-dad, Parker Chandler. But, as their blog proclaimed, they were all "Carson Drew, Attorneys At Large"---ready to rock the halls of justice. Soon after the 2006 release of Under The Table, Carson Drew disbanded, and the country-bred Loveless reached for her heretofore-spurned roots. She wrote her first songs, busting the male malefactors of Columbus Babylon.
A still-available "Local Pop Radio Hour" podcast finds Loveless's rhythm guitar and Chandler's drums nailing a whirlwind of unanswered questions to a no-frills, every-night waltz. "Miller High Life" cross-examines the narrator, her man, her God, and even the "champagne of beers," with a relentlessly spare clarity. This makes LL's more typically cascading up-tempo testimonials seem like blessedly tempestuous vacation fare. Her characters were born to struggle, and they thrive on the noise-meets-poise of her 2010 solo debut, The Only Man. Its independent producers excluded Chandler's drums, among several other biz-decisions, but they were true venture capitalists, committed to finding new focus for gawkers in the Loveless jukebox inferno. Columbus-based Peloton Records man Steve McGann released the results, then teamed Loveless and Chandler with the tried 'n' true duo of lead guitarist Todd May and bassist Ben Lamb. McGann's direction led them to Bloodshot, Chicago's sonic stockyard of volatile Americana.
Loveless, now 20, is producing her first Bloodshot album, Indestructible Machine----an appropriate title, judging by advance tracks. In writing them, she said, "I generally come up with a line that won't let me be. If a song wants to be written, it will get written." The song's gestation can take months, as Loveless tosses a songlet and other things to her band and audience, checking their responses. Then again, Loveless wrote several songs the night before her new album's sessions began. "It was nerve-wracking but fun," she reported. Another creation suddenly materialized at a Rock Potluck jam. "I wanted to be good that day, and my fear made a song come out of me. I'm pretty proud of it."
This show will feature "mostly new songs," according to her latest update; also a few covers, probably including Goldfinger's "Without Me" and CCR's "Someday Never Comes." Steve McGann also reminded us, "She almost always does 'Miller High Life' live."
Lydia Loveless will be performing with supporting acts JKutchma and Joe Fletcher & The Wrong Reasons at the Rumba Cafe on Thursday, April 21.The doors open at 9 p.m. $6 all audiences. For more information, please visit www.pelotonrecords.com or www.columbusrumbacafe.com.
By Don Allred
Soon after the 21st Century began, former jazz guitarist Steph Paynes reports, “I woke up one morning with the overwhelming desire to put on a white satin dragon suit.” Which is just what she did, in the spirit of Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page. Lez Zeppelin began to ascend.
In a literal sense, each of Lez Zep’s previous and present lead singers, Sarah McLellan and Shannon Conley, tends to sound more like Heart’s Ann Wilson than (the often androgynous-sounding Led-era) Robert Plant. But all of Paynes’ merry women live their 60s-inspired, Led-to-Lez dream, as fyrebyrds flying through sound barriers ov genre and gender. On Lez Zeppelin’s self-titled debut, Paynes and her 2007 cohorts ricochet through selections from Led Zeppelin’s first six albums, plus two originals: swift, sweet “On the Rocks” and beguilingly unplugged “Winter Sun.” Both fit perfectly. On 2010’s Lez Zeppelin I, the current crew completely cover Led Zeppelin’s own self-titled debut, with mixed results. As Paynes points out, “The first record demands of those brave enough to tread its waters, an immersion into Led’s roots: blues, Celtic folk, rockabilly, and psychedelic rock. It’s probably the most challenging of all of Led’s records to try and emulate.”
Lez Zeppelin most consistently meet Led Zeppelin’s crossroads challenge in concert, as often demonstrated on YouTube. Mixing Led Zep’s North African influences with the previously mentioned elements, Paynes and company raise atmospherics and raw precision into improbably good timing. By combining instantly engaging, roughneck volume with a sudden drop into exotic sonic shadows, and then coming back strong, Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” remains the same tricky song, but Paynes’ hand gestures control the eerie, electronic choir of her vintage theremin, and the magic echo of her violin bow, when that last isn’t luring her guitar through “Dazed and Confused.” Vocalist Conley’s acting career doesn’t hurt either, as her ritualized focus gets compressed into little leaps of logic. Multi-instrumentalist Megan Thomas and drummer Leeza Harrington-Squyers also compatibly deliver the vibes and dynamics, in classic crowd-pleasers and astutely chosen surprises as well, with an acoustic oasis between sparky little thrillers and electric epics. As Paynes testifies, “The synergy between a band and its willing audience can be a lot like sex.”
Lez Zeppelin will be performing with Red Line Chemistry, Danko Jones, and Steel Panther, for Rock On The Range's Special 5th Anniversary Party, at Crew Stadium, on Friday, May 20. The show starts at 7 p.m. Tickets for this show are included with the ROTR Weekend Package. $99.50 General Stadium Admission. For more information, please visit www.lezzeppelin.com or www.rockontherange.com.
By Don Allred
On their 2004 debut album, Who Will Walk In The Darkness With You?, the Columbus-based Black Swans' usual slow, post-Americana sway leads the way through what could be just another haunted house. But the parlor crooner wishes too hard for life in one still moment of memory, and his antique easy chair begins to rock. Some subsequent tracks, like "Black Swan Blues," even brush fresh, beautiful bruises across his suddenly sharpened senses. Lesson learned---so, while the Swans' sweetly spooked and screwed, brave and inspired 2006 Sex Brain is a leap, it takes no stretch (except in a go-o-o-d way).
2007's Change! raises a juicy moonlight harvest of homegrown surrealism for a hungry community, then (and always) still forming. Co-founding Swan Jerry DiCicca also found his way to some seemingly unlikely production clients, secretly ready to be drawn out. Columbus attorney Eve Searls, of the solo-project-to-band Bird And Flower, was one such born traveler. Ditto elusive Georgia country singer Larry Jon Wilson, who showed up sounding right at home, while "runnin' on a long chain."
DeCicca may have held that thought. The Black Swans set aside their richly promising Don't Blame The Stars in 2008, and started winding up for a left-field 2010 release, Words Are Stupid. It expertly prowls the walls of life, like the twisted balloon critters of DeCicca's kiddie-party-entertaining, income-enhancing alter ego, Dr. Silverfoot. Despite the unexpected death of Noel Sayre, who began performing with DeCicca in 1995, Sayre's newly discovered violin tracks swirl through songs growing around his sound. The album's recording process, which DeCicca regarded as "therapeutic," also preceded points of ongoing artistic departure. "All songs are game now," DeCicca recently reported. "I made a breakthrough with one in Portugal. I thought it was off-limits 'til it happened!"
Thus, the Black Swans found and took the scenic route back to Don't Blame The Stars. Finally out on May 31, its well-populated, mostly live-in-the--garage-studio contemplation surges with the same intimate dynamic as their shows. The song "Joe Tex" celebrates the congenially inventive soul singer of its title, while the narrator also plows gray fields, with no contradiction. And, after all, "There's no way of tellin'/If the world's cryin' or it's yellin'/So raise up your arms and dance with me."
This record release party includes most of the Swans appearing on DBTS, plus their regular drummer Keith Hanlon, who recorded the album while Brian Jones sat in for him. We can also expect songs from "previous and forthcoming releases," DeCicca advised. (They just may have another one out later in 2011.)
The Black Swans will be performing with supporting acts the Alwood Sisters Band and Moviola at the Rumba Cafe, on Friday, June 3. The show starts at 10 p.m. $6 all audiences. For more information, please visit www.theblackswans.com or www.columbusrumba.com. For previous Black Swans show previews, incl. more about albums, see https://mycolone.blogspot.com/2025/07/4play-jan-2010.html also https://mycolone.blogspot.com/2025/07/4play-march-2010.html and https://mycolone.blogspot.com/2025/07/oc4play-oct-2010.html And the next album: https://mikalrow.blogspot.com/2025/08/musical-august-2012.html
By Don Allred
Ohio-launched singer/songwriter Tim Easton’s albums have moved from strong support by the likes of Lucinda Williams and members of Wilco, to less famous, long-time colleagues from Columbus, Nashville, Austin, and Brooklyn. As Easton described the process, “It’s not a ‘coming full circle’ kind of thing, but more the center point of a figure-8, where I am passing back through on my way to many other directions.” This also happens in (and to) many of his songs. A recent YouTube posting finds him once again in Japan, still not speaking much of the language, nevertheless bonding with local volunteers. Together, they deliver a twist of Lennon, an undercurrent of Pink Floyd, and a blast of Midwestern plaid punkiness. The song being performed, “Did Your Mother Teach You That?,” taunts and seriously queries the sources of bloody-minded self-righteousness, now transformed into safe, fun, musical violence.
Easton’s transparent vocals and seamlessly edited, seemingly stream-of-consciousness songs continue to kinetically re-direct familiar stylistic elements and life’s issues, especially on his two new albums. The congenially electric Beat the Band even finds discreet consolation in a sonically sublime vision of anatomy (and/or pickiness) as destiny, via long-lost, sweet home Columbus: “She takes her time/Gettin’ satisfied/And when the time is right/She wants you to take it too/All your desires/weren’t enough, to keep her free/From leavin’ you.” The solo acoustic Since 1966, Volume 1 was recorded in remote areas, way out West, where sunlight and shadows sound equally approachable, and almost equally unavoidable. Several softer tracks set the listener up for the punch of “Why Oh Why,” which could have been forbiddingly grief-stricken. Instead, it trains ears to wait for a certain catchy, yet sparingly applied ingredient, applied by a steady hand, amid unstoppable, unanswerable questions.
During this weekend of shows, Easton’s sporting accompaniment by the Madison Square Gardeners, a sextet including two of his road-tested Columbus-to-Brooklyn co-producers, multi-instrumentalists Aaron Lee Tasjan (former The OSU campus brat) and Mark Stepro. Along with the Gardeners, Easton will back one of his enduring role models, Columbus songwriter/film maker J.P. Olsen. Now that 100 of his own tunes are released and ready for further testing on stage (including solo interludes), Easton also reminds us, “There’s always a new song to drop on folks.”
Tim Easton will be performing with the Madison Square Gardeners and J.P. Olsen at the Rumba Cafe, on Friday, June 24, and Saturday, June 25. Both shows start at 10 p.m. $10 all audiences. Easton will also perform on the Comfest Main Stage, in Goodale Park, on Sunday, June 26. The show starts at 1 p.m. Admission is free. For more information, please visit www.timeaston.com or www.columbusrumbacafe.com. More on Porcupine and the Tim show: May 2009
By Don Allred
In 2009, eight years after beginning his first novel, country singer-songwriter Steve Earle decided he really had to finish the thing. He also felt the need to make a new album. Earle had moved from his longtime Nashville home base to Greenwich Village at the age of 50, while remaining blessed by:
1. his improbably durable seventh marriage, this one to chanteuse Allison Moorer,
2. having a baby with her, while
3. still keeping up with world news.
Despite such inspirations, Earle was atypically short of original songs. So he came up with Townes, a tribute to his formidable mentor, the late great Townes Van Zandt.
Earle leads off with Van Zandt’s most famous song, “Pancho and Lefty,” in which incorrigible outlaw Pancho takes his last stand, while his possibly treacherous accomplice, Lefty, slips across the border, to linger in the cold shadows of Cleveland. “Townes was both characters,” Earle declared of the ever-mercurial, standard-setting, substance-abusing Van Zandt. Nevertheless, Van Zandt’s crucial advice went beyond reading and writing: “He told me to always use clean needles, “ Earle said.
Earle, who somehow came out of his own lost years to several bracing albums in the mid-to-late 90s,and his 2001 book of short stories, Doghouse Rose, also drew from experience in writing his first play, Karla, the true life and alleged afterlife story of a Texas drug desperado, born again on Death Row.
In Earle’s finally completed 2011 novel, I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive, Doc Ebersole, based on a nonfictional, even sketchier type who once claimed he could treat Hank Williams’ alcoholism and spinal bifida with drugs, has fled to San Antonio’s backstreets, after the death of Williams. The self-medicating Ebersole is often accosted by the novel’s eerie, jaunty namesake, the last Hank hit released before he died. A decade later, it’s an eternal jukebox favorite of rich men and poor, also sometimes a cue for the ghots of Willams, which can be backed into at any minute, as it pleads for another shot. All of the novel’s characters, while also evoking the songs and struggles of Williams, Earle, and Van Zandt, morph into visions of “how different people come to experience spirituality,” as Earle put it. He defined spirituality as “a one-to-one encounter with God, or whatever word you use.”
Earle’s new album, also titled I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive, cobbled together with the help, for instance, of several songs he wrote for Joan Baez’s Earle-produced 2008 Day After Tomorrow*. distills his own brand of frankly 12-step-based, self-observant spirituality. We’re greeted by some wry celebrations: “Even my money keeps telling me It’s God I need to trust/And I believe in God, but God ain’t us.” (Sure ain’t your Baez usual, but she sang it first.) Meanwhile, Earle’s still “walkin’ on the water, ‘cause I never learned to swim.” He and wife Moorer sound at home while gliding through the discreetly psychedelic aura of T-Bone Burnett’s Americana production, especially as they sing (in a song he first offered to Alison Krauss and Robert Plant for the now-cancelled follow-up to their surprise hit duet debut, Raising Sand) , “I love you baby, but I just can’t tell/This kinda love comes from Heaven or Hell.”
In current shows, Earle and Moorer (who also gets her own mini-set) also swing the spotlight to touring guitarist Chris Masterson and multi-instrumentalist Eleanor Whitmore’s dirt road adventure, “The Other Shoe.” Speaking of good story material, these frontliners are aided and abetted by bass player Kelley Looney, the longest-lasting Duke by far, and drummer Will Rigby, also a good songwriter and still member of jangle-wave pioneers the dBs Nowadays, Earle often brings out his recently deceased (at the hands of writer George Pelecanos, as was The Wire ’s Earle incarnation) Treme character Harley’s battered guitar for the indomitable “This City.” Earle & co. tend to include a song associated with the city they’re playing (recently in Houston, hats off to local boyz ZZ Top‘s “Francine.”). So maybe we could request, say, “Big Balls in Cowtown”? Referring, of course, to the old nickname for Columbus, AKA Austin of Central Ohio.
Steve Earle and the Dukes and Duchesses will perform at the Southern Theatre, on Thursday, July 28. Showtime: 8 p.m. Tickets:$29.50 and $37.50. *for comments on this album, see Baez show preview: https://mycolone.blogspot.com/2025/07/4play-aprl-2009.html
By Don Allred
Although the marriage of John Doe and Exene Cervenka ended in 1984, they kept wrangling new tracks with their headstrong, headlong California punk group, X, until 1993. Today, fourteen years after the original line-up of X got back together, singer/songwriter Doe's combustible combo adds up to one highly reliable road band. This fall, having recently toured with the Knitters, a hardy Americana outfit which began long ago as an X side project (one of several), and Jill ("I Kissed A Girl") Sobule, with whom he recorded the sly underdog anthems of 2011's A Day At The Pass, Doe joined X in a round of Latin American shows, opening for Pearl Jam. X will hit the Sunbelt circuit in December, after Doe's own Midwestern shows.
(The last time he played Columbus Cowtown, Doe and Canada's Sadies, also colleagues of art-Americana-suitable Neko Case, brought sincerely and frequently feedback-roasted honky tonk jukebox chestnuts, from their '09 collab, Country Club. The show still turns up on YouTube.)(For instance: "The Have-Nots" live)*
Doe's solo albums have been reinvigorated by X's second life as a concerts-only experience, and, he said, " the freedom from having to write for them." Also, lessons learned from the dissolution of his nearly twenty-five year second marriage helped develop songs such as "Golden State," slamming into its chorus: "We are luck/We are fate/We are the feeling you get in the Golden State." The sound of freedom also sweeps all philosophizing into a new, challenging reality: "It's the feeling I get/When you walk away."
"Pieces of sadness exist in everything, but it doesn't have to be the only thing," Doe said recently. His new Keeper gives us love songs with teeth, such as "Little Tiger," which might be about one of his three daughters, prowling through private sorrow. Still, nothing here is too narrowly defined. "Have you noticed all the time travelers in cities recently?" he asked at least one recent audience, introducing "Giant Step Backwards." It's about a guy who hears that his "factory girl" has suddenly disappeared from where he depended on her to remain, in the story of his life. He's rallying for a new quest, possibly in time, but also, Doe suggested, it has to do with "men getting too far ahead in relationships, needing to let the other person step forward."
The reflections of Keeper are polished just enough, sometimes to a slightly surreal glow. "Moonbeam" is a recently unearthed, vibrantly atmospheric R&B ballad, which gets crowded when the background singers jump into Danny White's vintage original, but Doe's cover keeps the wonder discreetly at hand. We also get a compatibly restive remake of an X classic, in which a battered wife "flips a finger" in farewell to a bartender who can only offer pity. Then she sways towards the Greyhound station, declaring, "Roses are red/Violence is too/Everybody knows/I'm painting the town blue." Sounds like a fairly bright blue, one that might guide her through the smog, or at least the song.
John Doe and His Rockin' Band, with supporting act Robert Ellis, will perform at the Rumba Cafe on Monday, November 28. Doors open 7 p.m. Ellis plays at 9 p.m., Doe at 10 p.m. 18+ show. $12. Under-21 pays $ 2 surcharge at door. (update: full album here: https://johndoex.bandcamp.com/album/keeper
*for more on John Doe and the Sadies in Columbus: John Doe and the Sadies
By Don Allred
JAN 6:
Joey Hebdo
Thursday @ Rumba Café
“Do what you’ve done and you get what you’ve got/I said become, become what you’re not!” Columbus’s Joey Hebdo spins out so many good lines that his post-mystical freedom songs constantly risk confusion. Appropriately so, as he pursues life and love’s mixed blessings, on 2007’s Un EP and 2009’s Prosciutto, which the office dictionary defines as “dry-cured, spiced ham, usually sliced thin.” Yep, Hebdo’s that ham: a show-off with a flare for shiny sonic clarity, carving up vividly intricate imagery (ditto live, especially with his four-piece band).
The Black Swans
Friday @ Rumba Café
On the Columbus-outskirting Black Swans’ 2004 debut, Who Will Walk With You In The Darkness?, backwoods electricity gently probes what’s lurking in Jerry DeCicca’s murky verses, as the late Noel Sayre’s violin and viola swirl way down around swaying, shuffling beats. Thus persistently lured, 2006’s Sex Brain harvests the surreal “Dark Plums,” and gets richly rewarded by “My Lips.” Despite the loss of Sayre, the current Swans deliver a succinctly gorgeous version of their recent single, ”Country Cookie # 3,” in a live performance linked from their site.
The L.E.S. Crew
Friday @ Skully’s
Hip Hop is the basis of the Columbus-based L.E.S. Crew, although DJ Redson, who started the show with MC Taj Mahal was already a seasoned, songwriting guitarist, and Juice rocks some beatboxing distortion. MC E-Roc’s voice also joins those of r & b singer Ev Jones and Brian G., whose own guitar, along with Tony F’s bass, T.L.’s drums and Dan P.’s percussion, further extends this funky Crew. They can also adapt into various subsets of sounds, while consistently bringing another round of views and clues.
Alert New London
Friday @ The Basement
Alert New London make the most of being young in Columbus now, with rowdy, detailed lyrics that wouldn’t have been judged “universal” enough, back when their big, crisp pop-rock sound was radio’s gold standard. They laugh and cry with all the lonely, illin’ people, stampeding through bars and boudoirs, bills and bills (both kinds). They’ve got their own dramas too, but any self-pity is more fuel for the party. When rhymes and reasons hit a wall, guitars can always vault over it, to a new-enough day and night.
JAN. 13:
Shilpa Ray And Her Happy Hookers
Friday @ Café Bourbon Street
“I fell in love and forgot my own mother/My father, my sister/My grandma, it killed her/I waltzed around, wishin’ you’d notice me.” That’s Shilpa Ray’s “What The *** Was I Thinking?,” which actually sounds like a dreamy, early pop-rock ballad. On A Fish Hook, An Open Eye, guilt has imploded, with memories’ shards floating through Ray’s thick, rich diction, while her harmonium’s naturally hovering sound gets lured into her Happy Hookers’ warehouse joy rides. At the crossroads, all the world is Ray’s cage and stage.
The Ragbirds
Saturday @ Rumba Café
The Ragbirds are great, but so what? Sure, Erin Zindle maintains vocal poise, while dancing and trading her electric violin for mandolin, melodica, banjo, accordion, and percussion. True, the rhythm section steams through well-timed, seamless dreams of Caribbean, East European, Middle Eastern, African, Irish and Appalachian themes. Yet they might just be another world-class world music band from Michigan, if not for Zindle’s everyday magic realism. She gossips about the moon, and gets unreasonably reasonable with the proper authorities, in between confiding, “Listen/Tell yourself the truth/Until you believe it.”
The Dutchess And The Duke
Saturday @ Wexner Center
If there were any justice, the couple from Hell who keep burning your candle would be transferred to midnight music therapy, sitting next to The Dutchess And The Duke. Rattling bones and singing along, they’d learn about pop-poetic justice with TDAD (singer-guitarists Jesse Lortz and Kimberly Morrison, backed by percussionist Donnie Hilstad). Leader Lortz is drawn through what could be a safely impressive folk-rock style, into inescapably understandable, sometimes beautifully ugly confessions. His calmly avenging angel-muse’s shadow takes notes, as the clouds and rhythms roll on.
The Crash Kings
Sunday @ the Basement
The Crash Kings, stars of CD101’s Low Dough Show, are a trio with an arena-sized sound. Part of the theatrical effect is the surprising centrality of their musical Pandora’s Box: Tony Beliveau, king of Kings, plays clavinet (like Stevie Wonder on “Superstition.”) It’s a keyboard with guitar strings, and, in this case, even a guitar-style twang bar, for bending notes through various dimensions. Nevertheless, on the Crash Kings’ self-titled debut album, Beliveau belts out plenty of nature imagery, while burning pop-rock calories where they count, in the sonic spotlight.
JAN. 20:
Prefuse 73
Friday @ The Summit
The stars of DJ/producer Prefuse 73’s Everything She Touched Turned Amphexian are tiny sonic organisms, escaping the re-mixer’s semi-divine timing long enough to sing and play yet another tribute to the micro-epic wonders under our skin, rocking every second of every day. Even better, some of this restless beat radiation escapes, growing 73’s cloud-kicking Forest of Insensitivity EP, then rattling and sweeping through the moonlit Andean drama of Savath y Savala’s La Llama. Live, Prefuse 73’s performances converge with those of his tourmates, drummers VOICEsVOICEs and DJ Gaslamp Killer.
Miranda Lambert
Friday @ Nationwide Arena
Young country star Miranda Lambert’s current album, Revolution, cranks up and orbits old folk star John Prine’s “That’s The Way The World Goes Round.” She’s found her own sharp-eyed stoicism, just naturally igniting when rubbed the wrong way too hard. Some say she rocks too hard for country, but Lambert’s “Only Prettier” draws on the droll, drawled comic zingers of honky tonk, and she thoughtfully, tunefully re-affirms her Texas two-step aww-thentication. It helps that her father’s an ace guitar picker, and both parents are also private detectives, specializing in marital disputes (rockin' country material-rich)..
Timbaland
Saturday @ Newport
On his endearingly uneven pop-rap-dance-ballad collection, Shock Value II, studio mastermind/underdog performer Timbaland creatively relates to the hopefully up-and-coming One Republic; the surprisingly okay Katy Perry; the now cheerfully unhip Chad Kroeger (of Nickelback); the unabashedly twangy teen queen Miley Cyrus; the sparky Nelly Furtado; the superstar Justin Timberlake; the soulful babe-in-waiting Esthero; and some obscuro Euros. imbaland does all right by most of them, often enough. You can pick and choose online, of course, and your favorite guests may appear at his show: on stage, and/or a big interactive screen overhead.
Eclipse
Saturday @ Rumba Cafe
On Live At The Mad Frog, the classically cosmic keyboards of Cincinnati’s Eclipse escort equally vintage roughness into popular music’s post-platinum age of the well-educated, necessarily streetwise self-employed. Latin and hip-hop find friction deep in the jazzy flow, while horns, percussion, piano, bass and guitar spin around the tensions found even (or especially) in the most hopeful relationships, as “Shining Star” and the battered “Ohio” also testify. On their self-titled studio album, Eclipse test the fire escapes with “My Couch,” “Mambo Hop,” and “A Taste of India “(word to belly dancers).
JAN. 27:
Deas Vail
Thursday @ The LC Pavilion
Deas Vail, sometimes compared to Ben Gibbard’s main band, Death Cab For Cutie, currently open for Owl City, who often get compared to Gibbard’s side project, Postal Service. But Deas Vail aren’t getting left back They’re journeymen at heart, committed to learning. Spirituality is more evoked than invoked, by their sound (especially singer Wes Blaylock’s more heavenly high notes) and lyrics, which unpretentiously express hope and frustration. Themes tend to blend, though their recent Birds and Cages turns up the guitars. The stage should provide more room to move.
Two Cow Garage
Saturday @ Rumba Cafe
Columbus units Two Cow Garage produce songs like "Girl of My Dreams," reeling visions and/or delusions back into the spin (that's country), while "Come Back To Shelby" mashes startling combinations of familiar elements far into the garage wall (that's rock).
"Shelby" 's radically nostalgic narrator gnarls "Sha, la, la, la, la!" like a bursting Van Morrison pinata. Sweet lost "Sadie Mae" still shatters and hovers. Two Cow Garage keep all spirits, lost and found, kickin' in the stall. Hopefully, this show will fry us some omens of the upcoming album.
Hamilton Loomis
Saturday @ Vonn Jazz Lounge
Hamilton Loomis is blues-centric, although he unselfconsciously includes decades of rock, r&b, jazz, and funk shadings in his groove, while avoiding direct comparisons. Still, Loomis does offer a straightforward tribute to his studio colleague Bo Diddley, on the recent Live In England. Mostly, this disc sports equally up-tempo Loomis originals. Vintage-times-wireless gear juices his guitar and harmonica, along with Stratton Doyle's sax, which can sound like a horn section. Occasionally, Loomis's youthful voice can get a bit G. Love-slick, but the guitar usually knocks some sense back into him.
The Get-Ups
Saturday @ Victorian’s Midnight Café
The Get-Ups began four years ago as a detour for Way Past Gone’s vocalist-guitarist Kasey Chambers and drummer Nathan Hackey, who eventually added WPG colleague Tony Castle on bass. Past Way Past Gone, as they put it in song, ”F*ck it, I’m out.” They’re out where boredom and youth butt heads, ringing like the horns added as they went ska and stayed punk. Satire and exuberance zing and zip through the reflexes of both approaches, so the Get-Ups and their audiences have reasons to celebrate (when required).
By Don Allred
FEB. 2:
The Entrance Band
Wednesday @ The Summit
The Entrance Band is made of singer-guitarist Guy Blakeslee, drummer Derek James, and equally fearless bassist Paz Lenchantin, who’s played with everyone from A Perfect Circle to Zwan. Their self-titled debut album high-steps through all wrong turns, empathizing with those who “Think the darkness is your friend/Time will take your shadow away.” “M.L.K.” twists scary sounds into hungry rainbows, and a live version of “Grim Reaper” on the Daytrotter site mutates Led Zeppelin blues into ecologically contemporary slabs of sludge, finding their way through whirlwinds of toxic moonlight.
The Friday Night Boys
Thursday @ The Basement.
The Friday Night Boys’ 70s-based power pop is a style born to dance with terminally adolescent temptations. “Chasing A Rock Star” eventually talks some possibly seductive sense, as a jealous guy learns to rival the music’s sinfully merry spin. More typically, the Boys scavenge tasty symptoms and specimens of overt obsessions, especially in the festively forensic tracks following “Chasing…” on their 2008 EP, That’s What She Said. Hopefully, they’ll chop their sometimes overcooked full-length debut, Off The Deep End, into a crispy crazy salad for their live audience.
Wine, Women & Song
Saturday @ Maennerchor
The wine is fuel, the women are Nashville's long-running, still prime-time pros, Suzy Bogguss, Gretchen Peters, and Matraca Berg. The songs are effectively their own, definitely as written (Peters and Berg are mainly known that way), and as chosen. The traditional "Farther Along" proves surprisingly emblematic of their unbuttoned, unplugged live sets, and surprisingly similar to the Stones' ""Wild Horses," as both steadily surge almost beyond faith. WW & S's soulfully realistic details and robustly supple tunes also travel "South of Heaven/North of Hell", aiming to continue.
Searius Add
Tuesday @ Skully's
Whether he's telling Toledo or schooling the OSU, rapper Searius Add draws on "A college boy's mind and a dope boy's ethic," as demonstrated on The Hard Math Mix Tape. That analytically antic, autobiographical saga of subsets logically leaps to the new Smart Is The New Gangsta. Here, classic R&B thrills and chills "Ideal Idea" (where "The only life I have with you/Is in my head"), while "I'm Winning" is equally vibrant in the present tense. Tonight’s show includes guitarist Dustin Lynch, drummer Anthony Walls, DJ Bam and special guests..
FEB. 10:
The Growlers
Friday @ Newport
The Growlers’ Are You In Or Out? is one glowing wave of bad vibrations, rolling through a dark, dank seaside carnival of echo and reverb. Still, “A Man With No God” is a boldly barefoot street preacher, and the Doors-like “Red Tide” gnaws through massive temptations of pomposity. The Growlers also elbow through Are You…?’s clogged midway, earning a refreshing stroll in “Acid Rain,” while “Empty Bones” suggests Johnny Cash surfing the back alleys of Central Europe and Jamaica, rolling his bones into lucky dice.
Punch Brothers Featuring Chris Thile
Saturday @ Lincoln Theatre
Nickel Creek mandolinist-vocalist Chris Thile’s expository, prairie schooner showmanship suits the flight patterns of Punch Brothers’ unflappable responses. They patrol the underlying pastoral-vs.-country tensions of progressive bluegrass, even when covering Radiohead, whose rippling resourcefulness and rueful reveries fit bluegrass too. In Thile’s four-part “The Blind Leaving The Blind,” romanticism and realness spin in and out of memory’s cycles, crushing some too-sweet valentines. But who really wins such punch bowl punch-ups? Come find out tonight (speaking of showmanship).
Leslie and the Ly's
Sunday @The Summit
"Keeper of the gems I am/with the power to rock your body as I gem/ Can you feel me flowing inside your skull? I am a razorball of lightning, striking your mind." So proclaims Leslie Hall, deadpan hell-raiser. Her on-line gem sweater collection’s popularity brought excess-bandwidth bills that took her to the stage, where it's all good. Deftly downloaded basic tracks back this born rapper (and passable singer), who provides plus-size epiphanies. "Line the pan with Crisco/When I disco"? Whatever; she always makes room for her zoom-lens gems.
Tinariwen
Tuesday @ Wexner Center
Spiky tendrils of electric guitar spread through tomato patches, desert campfires, and back to a man who stands up in daylight on a rocky hillside, to gently sing. “People of Africa/I have a question/Is the revolution like some trees/Whose branches grow/Only if we water them?” That’s on the DVD which accompanies Imidiwan: Companions,Tinariwen’s recent CD. All songs are translated, though calmly kaleidoscopic connections of clarity and mystery, of poise and risk, are self-evident. Sources of truly psychedelic blues echo and extend through the routes of these purposeful wanderers.
FEB 17:
Lotus
Wednesday @ Newport
Instrumental specialists Lotus’ 2008 studio set, Hammerstrike, danced with what the band calls “big rock beauty,” and sardonic sci-fi funk as well. Mellow and other humor also lured Hammerstrike into mutant bliss, though mellowness dilutes some non-album tracks from the same sessions, later released as Oil on Water and Feather on Wood. Still, keepers from those EPs, and Hammerstrike’s ominous “Invincibility of Youth,” flourish In a posting of October’s mostly cogent Cincinnati show, where electric love’s roller coaster also weaves “Spiritualize” through “Contagion,” and sweetly waves its particles at the passing stars.
Mike Droho & Compass Rose
Wednesday @ The Basement
Madison, Wisconsin-based singer-songwriter Mike Droho is a rising rider of the college town circuit. He cites the Dave Matthews Band as inspirational “since childhood.” Droho’s mercifully post-Dave voice and guitar blend folk-rock and hip-hop, as the Matthews Band template is deftly compressed into Compass Rose’s violin, bowed bass, and unobtrusively uncanny vocal percussion. On YouTube, Droho successfully invites his audience to scream all frustrations at an unwitting volunteer. “Next time you see this guy on campus, give him a hug!” Absolutely, Mike, unless you change your mind.
Yonder Mountain String Band
Thursday @ The LC Pavilion
“Burn away the fog of fear/That brings your eyes forever near.” In Yonder Mountain String Band’s spare, yet barely contained, studio-combustible Winds of Fire, fear pulls us in too close, past perspective. So YMSB rolls live audiences through hills and valleys of bluegrass-orbiting Americana and homegrown contemplation. “Rag Mama” and “Ramblin’ Boy” take determined struts in rowdy towns, until the rippling “night is left behind”, in bracing immersions and sudden turns. A recent encore of Ozzy Osborne’s “Crazy Train” also fits Yonder Mountain’s rivers of time.
Wildbirds & Peacedrums
Saturday @ Outland at Liberty
Wildbirds & Peacedrums’ name mainly reflects Mariam Wallentin’s vocal flights and her husband Andreas Werliin’s responsive percussion, though she also plays steel drums onstage, where he sometimes produces an electric guitar. There might be a sampler too, considering some unidentified notes tracing shapely spaces. “Chain of Steel” flips the script on ideals of sisterhood, while “So Soft So Pink” delves far beyond its title. “My Heart” confesses, “I couldn’t live/Without your rhythm.” Wallentin sounds like she’s singing to Werliin, naturally, times the audience, the universe, and her own ticker’s inner zones.
FEB 24:
The Supersuckers
Wednesday @ The Summit
Every worthy rock cliche gets its own "Hail yeah, Ceasarian!" of pumping re-birth at Supersuckers shows. The pleasure principle fuels the conscientious concentration of eternally punktastic journeymen, who want to be "More than satisfied." So, shifting into sensitive overdrive, they deliver a metal valentine to a "Sleepy Vampire," and Eddie Spaghetti's dry-edged, expressive voice proves just as suited to self-observant, truck-driving country songs. The ZZ Top-worthy, beard-gnarling "I Like It All, Man" should be their theme. Either that, or the revelatory science lesson, "Born With A Tail."
Wiz Khalifa
Wednesday @ Skully's
Wiz Khalifa's name means "Wisdom of the successor," and this one-man rap school wisely took advantage of Pittsburgh's nice, quiet scene, for independent studies. Early indie releases found Khalifa coolly dropping syllables into tempo-shifting, sometimes rock-sampling flow, while 2008's Say Yeah built vocal spin on techno, and in Girl Talk's cross-genre-dressing mash-ups. Last summer's mix tape, How Fly, auditioned Khalifa's singing, and, along with Burn Before Rolling, where he creatively messes with other peoples' hits, 2009 also brought Deal Or No Deal, an album which tunefully juices all his tentacles.
So Cow
Thursday @ Café Bourbon Street
“I’ll pretend I’m into sci-fi/And that you’re free to see other guys.” True, Brian Kelly, who says he blundered into making up music via saké-soaked karaoke, as an English teacher in South Korea, is no securely galactic overlord of love, though his tiny, teeming, gleaming tunes zoom in like runaway moons, attracting punky guitars and drums. So Cow’s 2009 self-titled compilation herds absurd breakthroughs, which 2010’s Meaningless Friendly folds into fresh recipes for dynamic discontent. So Cow’s self-tagged “underground pop” runs on strenuous sweetness. Both albums, and the straight-ahead show in WFMU’s archive, sound as though summer’s radiation and bikinis are never so far away.
Erin McKeown
Friday @ The LC Pavilion
The synth-folk orchestration of singer-songwriter Erin McKeown's current album, Hundreds of Lions, was financed by her series of online variety shows. In a recent Massachusetts performance, McKeown's jazzy guitar teaches shadows to straighten up and fly right through Broadway gospel, plus intriguing originals like "The Foxes" and "Santa Cruz." Electric piano provides gently selective, see-sawing scales for "James," her gay high school boyfriend. The ricochet lyricism of "Cosmopolitans" began as Judy Garland's late-night taped memoir. It goes well with covers of Missy Elliott, Beyoncè, and, of course, Neil Diamond.
By Don Allred
MARCH 3;
Alkaline Trio
Wednesday @ Newport
Chicago's Alkaline Trio were punk magnets in the '90s, though their insomniac sonic chronicles gradually proved compatible with some metal, emo, and alternative-goes-mainstream (incl. arena) rock as well. The Alkaline ones' new This Addiction churns melodic momentum, while warmly assuring us, "Don't worry/I only feel good with you." They never feel too good with anybody. Classic/reflexive romantics sail forth with tragic sense intact, and "Eyes melting in my skull." AT ride big Midwestern skies (& parodic U2 coattails?) out toward another mellow blood harvest of spring fever, even cutting through crap phones on YouTube.
Hamell On Trial
Thursday @ Rumba Cafe
Hamell On Trial is the musical collusion of punk-folk pioneer Ed Hamell and his 1937 guitar, which cackles, "Hey sonny, wanna go for a ride?" So begins another dazzling spin of attitude and appetite, driving Hamell's live eruption of songs, stories, jokes and insults, along with the implicit theme of self-asserting, self-justifying bad behavior. Good behavior too, in the whole profane, pee-stained panorama of personal/political process, of life on (and as) trial. Yeah, it's a comedian's alibi, but thank goodness and badness that Hamell's even more of a musician.
Prince Paul
Saturday @ Skully's
Rap's Prince Paul, from the nice suburb of Amityville, NY (as in The Amityville Horror, but don‘t believe all of the hype), produced his neighbors De La Soul's daisy-dizzy, proto-nerdcore experiments, times the observant horrorcore of Gravediggaz. Paul's hip-hopera, A Prince Among Thieves, and his brilliant Freudian slip, Psychoanalysis: What Is It?, also partied with these polarities, ditto his mellow-to-romping work with Handsome Boy Modeling School and Baby Elephant. Live, PP mixes everything from early Stevie Wonder to spaghetti western themes, while tonight's resourceful guests include Greenhouse Effect's Blueprint, Illogic, and DJ Raregroove, plus J. Rawls and DJ Inform.
Warpaint
Saturday @ The Summit
Plausible intrigue keeps psych-out sirens Warpaint’s Exquisite Corpse EP from getting lost in space. RHCPs Frusciante and Klinghoffer provide input, but mainly we’re fed cosmic musical clues and led far between the lines. “Billie Holiday” sometimes evokes Neil Young’s “The Needle and the Damage Done,“ appropriately for the subject, but why does the presumably innocent “My Guy” fit just as well? Maybe because spooky fixation is thee odds-rockin’ Warpaint. “Beetles” could be about bombs, drugs, finance charges, and/or music: things suddenly too hot to handle or let go.
MARCH 10:
This Moment In Black History
3/12 @ Carabar
Not all members of Cleveland’s This Moment In Black History are black, but all are historical. Drummer Bim Thomas has even done time with Columbus’s Cheater Slicks, and Challenger Street Gang-chain-reactor Christopher Kulchar’s organ gestures at nasty sounds with deep connections on TMIBH’s Public Square. Every basement-cool move on this punk-packing set must ride with and counter invading hordes of urgently inquisitive, perhaps insatiable vibrations. We also get good screaming over the top and intelligent commentary around the margins, where it belongs.
Toubab Krewe
3/17 @ Newport
North Carolina’s Toubab Krewe approach rock via African directions, and vice versa. Nowadays they’re automatically associated with Vampire Weekend, but the Krewe evoke and extend the Allman Brothers Band’s early exploration of rhythmic and tonal sources. Their 21-string kora and 12-string kamel ngoni can be played as harps or lutes, while infiltrating guitars, bass and drums. Live At The Orange Peel also attracts Umar Bin Hassan, of the proto-rap Last Poets, and Appalachian fiddler Rayna Gellert. Other shows are stashed at the band-approved archive.org, but be sure to check them out with 0 screens between.
The Magik Markers
3/23 @ The Summit
“America’s past pays America’s rent,” Elisa Ambroglio sneers amidst the lost highway traffic of Balf Quarry, the Magik Markers’ current album. Familiar images and sounds of rebellion are too easy to fall into. So the Markers trace a place where sludge keeps speeding up, punk and metal elements turn pop and back, while busts of gutless dreamers seem headed for the mirror. The tension continues as Ambroglio’s voice and guitar spell out the lottery slogan, ”You can’t win/If you don’t play”, like a neon sign in the smog. Woody G salutes you, Markers!
Javelin
3/28 @ Café Bourbon St.
Javelin’s weapon of choice is the boombox. Also the turntable, the sampler, the guitar, other stringed things and homemade implements .Their new album, No Mas, brings nerdcore pleasure and pain, dancing sunny side up. Rainbows may get a little distorted, but raindrops get kicked like soccer balls (and drum machines). A large female singer should kick into Javelin’s foreground occasionally, but they’re already squeaking, “You made a man of me!” They do test their cool on stage, racing between recycled devices of wonder. Talk about lust in the dust!
MARCH 31:
The Robert Cray Band
Thursday @ LC Pavilion
Eric Clapton has never displayed more of an audacious flare than he did in the early 90s, when he challenged himself and singer-guitarist Robert Cray in concert. Some of this is evident on Clapton’s 24 Nights, although Cray’s own live albums are where he shines brightest. On Live From Across The Pond, Cray follows and pursues through desperate phone calls and dreamy shower stalls, parties and battlefields. In volatile ballads and fast vehicles, sometimes fueled by funk, soul, rock, and Caribbean sources, Cray’s blues are unmistakable.
Robert Francis
Thursday @ Summit
"The moon, like a disco ball, hung low in the early morning sky, and within the hour, the sky began to erupt; the wind, tossing and turning, carried each and every color through and about the clouds." That's an update from singer-songwriter Robert Francis, heading out with his band. No disco, alas, but his music can move with this passage's insistently vivid drama of anticipation and apprehension. Lost love and re-discovered, still-youthful vitality slide and roll through luminescent folk-rock, as Francis swears, "I'll be gone by nightfall, " once again.
The Black Swans
Saturday @ Rumba Café
On Words Are Stupid, Columbus Americana avatars Black Swans present language with a new set of sounds, poetically persuasive even when abrasive, and no stranger than George Washington’s wooden teeth. The late Noel Sayre’s violin and kazoo sometimes appear; their relationship always seems key. You could even call this “post-Americana," but only if you mean that the foreign intrigue of “Black Swans Tango” fits too. Despite an ear-popping flight, a typically stubborn romantic jumps onstage “with a band I cannot hear”, serenading his sweetie with very special delivery. Love conquers all! Also vice-versa, but still.
The xx
Monday @ Wexner Center
"Can I make it better/With the lights turned on?" Oh heck no, Romy Croft, you better just keep shaping and shading the space between and within you and your love with your voice and guitar. That's the way the post-punk wavelengths of the xx's self-titled debut album form a vessel of intimacy, even in cheap headphones.Their gracefully minimalist music seems centered around love's fearful power, but while Croft realizes, "You've applied the pressure/To have me crystallized," she's also guiding, at just the right speed.
By Don Allred
APRIL 7:
Bad Rabbits
Wednesday @ The Basement
Boston’s Bad Rabbits flushed an album’s-worth of “dark rock songs,” then blasted off into funk-pop relief. The free download EP, Stick Up Kids, channels the potential darkness of freaky energy into weird science on the dance floor, just like Bad Rabbits’ inspirations, Michael Jackson and Prince, did in their prime. Beyond the beloved “Neverland,” these Rabbits are moved to call, ”Girl, let’s be realistic/See what music you might become!” They’re even better live, spanking that beat around vibrant waves of cymbals, raising the bath water and the roof.
Lackluster
Wednesday @ Skully's
Jon Hayes recently summarized his Columbus-based band Lackluster's work in progress: "There aren't really any tracks that address issues from the point of view that someone else should have done anything differently. It's basically a look at something gone wrong, and stepping back to get a clearer idea and take personal responsibility." He's right. Check the posted version of "Liar," pulsing with compassionately persistent truth-seeking and unblinking self-awareness. The new album's completion continues; meanwhile, even Eddie Murphy's jumping reverie "Party All The Time" fits Lackluster's rocking live sets, in a typically revelatory way.
The Terror Pigeon Dance Revolt!
Thursday @ Café Bourbon Street
Feed the Terror Pigeon Dance Revolt! ‘s I Love You And I'm In Love With You! Have An Awesome Day! Have The Best Day Of Your Life! your head, and you might find yourself traveling with commuters who are unusually bearable. They often shout, but gently and tunefully, mingling vulnerability and reassurance, explosions and flotations. Their shows are expanding thrift store galaxies of lights and costumes, which you can wear. Also, they’ll lead you in song and dance, or you can do your own, or just chill in orbit.
Owen Pallett
Thursday @ Wexner Center
“Freed all the children/Seems there’s nothing more, “muses Lewis, the over-achieving anti-hero of Owen Pallett’s saga Heartland. Nevertheless, if he could reach heaven, “On the bridge of the animal process/I would sing to the masses/Oh, Heartland/Up yours!” Twisted visions get righteously processed in the carving strokes and blossoming outbursts of composer-arranger Pallett, liberating the flamboyance and atmospherics exhibited in earlier work with the Arcade Fire and Grizzly Bear. Current videos indicate that Pallett’s voice, violin and effects (plus possible changes of approach) relish the challenge of solo shows.
APRIL 14 :
Wale
Wednesday @ Newport
Attention Deficit, rapper Wale's debut album (after free downloads like the Seinfeld-smoking The Mixtape About Nothing), suggests his Nigerian birthplace's afro-beat and his Washington, D.C. neighborhood's go-go, which both fold jazzy funk into sample-ready peaks. For instance, "Pretty Girls" balances Weensey's serenade and Gucci Mane's grit on flickering brass, over Wale's clear, peppery flow. Educational opportunities also include Lady Gaga’s cameo, Kanye West studies, recognition of bulimia, love of Nintendo, and "TV On The Radio," featuring tourmate K'naan beaming phonemes through the antenna-ringing production of TV On The Radio's David Sitek.
The 5 Browns
Thursday @ Palace Theatre
The 5 Browns are piano-playing siblings, expressing themselves in solo performances, quintets, and, as ZZ Top would say, “All points in between.” They dare the tides of Rachmaninoff and keep the night watch with Brahms. They dance the blues with Gershwin and Handy, then go Latin in the labyrinth with nuevo tango pioneer Astor Piazzolla. Their latest album, In Hollywood, meshes the spiked shadows of Bernard Hermann’s Hitchcock themes with Disney’s rising stardust, Philip Glass’ eerie meditations and Nino Rota’s sweet sorrow. Gimme culchah, 5 Browns!
Radio Moscow
Friday @ Summit
Radio Moscow slogged through Parker Gibbs’ mid-60s-style garage punk demos to power trio work-outs in a very late-60s-evocative summer of discontent, when mud is baked the hardest, and the only flash is from dented chrome and mirror shades. The Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach channeled Radio Moscow’s self-titled debut through his Akron studio in 2007, and Brain Cycles rides the same blues-infused asteroid belt. Gibbs’ songwriting mostly personalizes gruff basics, but his lyrically stubborn acoustic slide through “Black Boot” is the pause that awes, and a refreshing set-up for more mayhem.
Phantogram
Friday @ Basement
Warped beats settle in around Sarah Barthel’s keyboard like pigeons. She wakes, gently greeting someone, "You almost died." Guitars wrap around her like bells, one last time, as she ends up calling, "I wish you'd think of me/I wish I could believe." Josh Carter eventually responds to someone or something, "Maybe someday I'll miss you/Maybe I'll pull my teeth." They deliver Phantogram (“the illusion of depth”)'s Eyelid Movies: catchy sounds bubbling up from the basement, luring ears back down though rusty walls and tender bruises, where other things still sparkle.
APRIL 28:
The Felice Brothers
Wednesday @ Rumba Café
On Yonder Is the Clock and Mix Tape, young Catskills-hatched Felice Brothers follow Dylan and the Band’s Basement Tapes route in reverse, back to the big city of dinosaur dreams. Echoing through subway hayrides, they cheer trains bound for Heaven and everywhere else, while moodily and shamelessly waltzing around the “Ambulance Man.”. He’s patient, but the Felice Brothers know he doesn’t have all day. Equally vivid is “Boy From Lawrence County,” whom they know they could track (if they knew you’d pay), because “He’s a friend of mine.”
Booker T.
Saturday @ Lincoln Theatre
Best known as co-leader of soul heroes Booker T. & the MGs, Booker T. Jones has also toured with Neil Young and the Drive-By Truckers, both of whom backed him on 2009’s Potato Hole. T.’s original themes proved arena-ready and headphones-friendly, while flying with a breezy salute to Outkast’s “Hey Ya!” and increased oxygen for the Truckers’ “Space City.” Newer material and MGs classics also suit his current crew, whose combined experiences with psychedelic blues, funk, and hip-hop converge in organist Booker T.’s intensely calm grooves and articulate sparks.
Lynn Miles
Saturday @ Maennerchor
Lynn Miles was recently spotted on YouTube, leafing through lyrics that list all the things she's tired of, ending with “singer-songwriters.” Ho-ho, she knows she’s in that game for life, as her steady voice gets deeper and darker, especially on full-bodied, country-tinged coffin-thumpers like “I Give Up.” On Live At the Chapel, Miles shifts into bruised cruise control for “Night Drive” and “You Don’t Love Me Anymore,” a wised-up kissin’ cousin to the Eagles’ best ballads. Meanwhile, “Black Flowers” bloom so beautifully, as coal dust settles on their petals.
kOTO
Monday @ Scarlet and Grey Cafe
EOTO began as an electronic experiment of the Sting Cheese Incident’s Michael Travis and Jason Hann. While other jam bands like STS9 extrapolated from 70s-based space funk, EOTO crunched their budding versatility into improvised patterns of shattered 90s motions and notionS. It's not techno or trance, but it’s good for bumping around. Strobe lights and high-stepping beats generally keep up with mysterious narratives of sampled kindergarten voices, tuneful percussion, guitars, bass, and cartwheels of static. Not necessarily all at once: there’s breathing room in EOTO’s little traveling volcano.
By Don Allred
MAY 5:
Laura Marling
Wednesday @ Wexner Center
At seventeen, British singer-songwriter Laura Marling released Alas, I Cannot Swim, powered by a teenage appetite for folk-flavored melodrama and mischief. If your castle explodes, it might be justice, or just because. Marling’s new I Speak Because I Can conjures with spontaneity, stagecraft, complex subtexts and direct address. Concerning her banished lord of disorder, she confides, “We write, that’s all right/I miss his smell.” Maybe that’s all right too: now 20, Marling muses, “ I wouldn’t want to ruin something that I couldn’t save.” Let’s hold her to it.
Weedeater
Wednesday @ Carabar
“Untied we stand/Long live dirtweed/Mankind is unkind, man/God luck and good speed.” As delivered, that last line suggests that “God luck” is about as likely as good luck or good speed (hint: not very).. But Weedeater’s sound also suggests the successful ingestion of at least tolerably effective speed with weed, so maybe there’s some comparable luck waiting for us lonesome forager monsters. Meanwhile, along with what’s defiantly stated and reliably fated, there’s the sometimes compelling, always compulsive friction of lost and found, high and low ground, in this grizzled power trio’s seething strata of homegrown, industrial strength Dixie sludge (come for yon comfort food. y'all).
The Cab
Friday @ Newport Music Hall
You may well be aware of certain perfectly presentable, mostly male pop-rock combos that keep coming around, best understood by actual nineteen-year-old girls, not those of us who merely wish to be. The Cab somehow veer from this caravan on their debut album, Whisper War. Combining analog-associated warmth and digital clarity, judiciously assertive voices, guitars, pianos and drums evoke ‘70s power-pop and later decades of smooth r & b influences. The Cab fly about as right as a band convincingly homesick for “Vegas Skies” ever could or should.
mr. Gnome
Saturday @ Ruby Tuesday
Cleveland’s mr. Gnome like their name to be lower- and upper-cased, atop the other cute, cliché-risking contrasts. They’re yet another guitar-drums duo, with sly little vocals materializing in passing caverns of sound: But singer-guitarist Nicole Barille has such a touch, ditto drummer Sam Meister. Their songs are rocking Rubik’s Cubes of interlocking variations, channeling indie roots flannel, mountain vampire twang, surf king Dick Dale’s Middle Eastern modality, 70s glam, and “ Cleveland Polka” into new psychic adventures. “I saw my love/ Shut his eyes and call it over.” That’s the spirit!
MAY 12:
Local Natives
Wednesday @ The Basement
On Local Natives’ Gorilla Manor, voices rise from cool, safe shadows to the mythological ambition of “Sun Hands.” Native harmonies, melodies, and beats spin the empathy of “World News,” becoming overwhelming as “Who Knows, Who Cares” abandons ship for the river of sound. But it all pertains to getting the girl back. Local Natives’ favorite drugs are memory’s bittersweet sugar high and confession’s rocket fuel for the soul.
Growing
Friday @ The Summit
”Lab dance,” Sadie Laska mutters, as beats and textures slide into different speeds, on Growing’s Pumps! It’s a heads-up, as Laska and her colleagues bring a disruptive/disrupted balance, sometimes with a rippling edge, to Growing’s hectic electric beach. It’s also a cue for sounds usually tagged as “abstract” to come out of their cubicles and socialize, surfing on a blackboard through the waves, laundromat, and car wash, often simultaneously. They’re fairly dance-worthy; probably more so live. Growing’s showtime seems like the right time to beep with the one you love.
J. D. Souther
Saturday @ The Bar of Modern Art
After recording as Longbranch Pennywhistle with Glenn Frey, J.D. Souther provided the Eagles and others with songs and production, moving from L.A. country rock to Nashville pop country when the time was ripe. Rain, Souther’s new live release, even brings out the latent Latin jazzness of his musical heirloom tomatoes. Compatible new ballads extend Souther’s mix of romance and sharp-eyed attitude, implicitly including his own cool tourism in “That golden cup of style/On your journey down the Nile,” kinda late-70s Steely Dan style, minus that SD era’s tendency to smooth self-pity. Souther’s well-preserved voice and guitar will be accompanied tonight by pianist Chris Walters, a key player on Rain.
Jason Aldean
Monday @ The Schottenstein Center
Back in ’06, Jason Aldean rode around his beloved “Hicktown,” with its truly country view of “The neighbor’s butt-crack/As he’s nailin’ up the shingles.” Most songs on 2010’s Wide Open seriously emphasize the tension of peeling away from (and as) roots by cranking up mid-tempo strum and sway. That works best after a refreshing jolt of “She’s Country,” which is not unlike “Back in Black.” Judging by YouTube and Aldean’s rowdy encounter with Bryan Adams on CMT‘s “Crossroads,” we can expect some more tangy twang on stage.
MAY 19:
Screaming Females
Wednesday @ The Summit
House party-bred-and-breeding power trio Screaming Females’ sound is a rough and ready, yet intriguingly detailed, hot tomato soup poured from the battlements of Castle Talk and other mercifully mercurial milestones. Not too gradually: their songs are succinctly slamming sagas, tight and sometimes bouncy. For instance, the ska beat of “Mothership” boots Odysseus to Mars, through a fairy tale fractured by the furious humor of singer-guitarist Marissa Paternoster, a visionary pilgrim tramping out the sustaining, shadow-hungry center of the storm. You may well sing along: “You make me feel so important/Like a letter from God in her purse!”
The B-52s
Friday @ The LC Pavilion
Since the mid-‘70s, the B-52s have danced real people out of silly poses, with a super-silly blend of genre benders, which are also the real deal. Even space age sirens with bouffant/bomber/hairdos sometimes have to wail, “Why don’t you dance with me /I’m not no lim-bur-ger!” 1989’s “Love Shack” is still open to all, though 2008’s “Funplex” is private property, as Jersey mall cop Fred Schneider warns Georgia peaches Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson. But they’ll race him through Keith Strickland‘s guitar, until he has to call, “Faster, Pussycat! Thrill! Thrill!”
Mumford and Sons
Saturday @ Wexner
"Tremble, little lion man /Your boldness stands alone/Among the wreck." Drawing on their reputation for poetically rowdy shows, UK folk-rockers Mumford and Sons’ "Little Lion Man" is a shrewd point of risky departure for their debut album, Sigh No More. The slight penitent waits for the music’s shots of tough love’s grace. He gets enough to break away, through rising cycles of obsessive drama. These can turn bleak; that’s the risk. But the diminutive immigrant does a “Dustbowl Dance,” while hometown love and war renew their vows.
Halestorm
Saturday @ Crew Stadium
A certain power ballad sure feels like a sultry country night, as the lady recalls summer love. Until she suddenly taunts her old sweetheart, who shouldn’t feel too bad. She also loves doing that to stalkers, voyeurs and other favorite audience members. On Halestorm’s self-titled debut album, Lzzy (yeah, “Lzzy”) Hale’s brand of metal shares ‘70s/80s-rock-based connections with restlessly nostalgic modern country. She’s a leather working girl, whose extreme measures sometimes have to battle her own heart, and that’s country too. But no twangy strings or singers need to apply.
MAY 29:
Beth Nielsen Chapman & The Harmony Project
Wednesday & Thursday @ The Lincoln Theatre
“We’ll dance until we’re dead/While the clouds hurl shadows at the wind.” The jolting spiritual adjustments of “Shadows” flow through the besieged fourth quarter of singer-songwriter Beth Nielsen Chapman’s Back To Love, sociably connecting with earlier tracks’ experienced leaps of faith and jumping musical precision. Chapman’s stress-tested quests now compatibly spend two evenings with the practical idealism of Columbus’ choral Harmony Project. This benefit for Project Feed also includes versatile keyboard stylist Bobby Floyd and a 12-piece band.
Main Street Gospel
Saturday @ Ruby Tuesday’s
“I might f*** you up/I might drag you down/I might see you around.” No wonder this opening track bears the title of Main Street Gospel’s new album, Love Will Have Her Revenge. The departing spirit puts a hex on her ominous ex at the crossroads, and sends MSG’s psych-blues drone searching overcast, still vivid topography. The music only falters when it goes where it thinks it should. But when Barry Dean growls, “Take what you need/Take what you can/Leave a little for the travelin’ man,” she whets his appetite.
Shellshag
Monday @ Carabar
Shellshag’s corrugated strum ‘n’ thump forms a nice, plain, indie-traditional frame, inviting you to step through, as characters appear in the cracked mirror of Rumors in Disguise. They’re shuffling a deck of clues, but drummer Jenny Shag is consistently supportive and elusive; while guitarist Johnny Shell ponders just the right degrees of heat and sharpness. They suggest several ways time and self-image can ease over the brink together. Meanwhile, let’s warble along with gifted child Johnny: “They never understood/All their words are made of wood/And they burn with fuh-fuh-fire.”
Tony Monaco
Tuesday @ Rumba
As developed by pioneers like Jimmy Smith, trios featuring the Hammond B2 organ delighted club audiences and thrifty owners, while economically conjuring orchestral splendor. In the hands of Smith’s student Tony Monaco, the present-day B3 finds an agility which can be both fluid and spiky, while poised at any speed. Columbus-based Monaco, who also tours with jazz stars Pat Martino and Harvey Mason, is at home in funky trio classics and modernist excursions. He’s joined this evening by equally cosmopolitan resident legends, guitarist Derek DiCenzo and drummer Reggie Jackson.
By Don Allred
JUNE 2l
Attack! Attack!
Saturday @ Newport Music Hall
Columbus-based road dogs Attack! Attack! return with a new, self-titled album, flaunting their signature mix of poptronic fireworks and metal shadows. “Clean” singing (still with intermittently audible Auto-Tune, despite advance assurances) and Cookie Monster throat-blasting take turns busting each other. That keeps righteousness flexible; ditto the poptronic parody of “Shut Your Mouth.” Parody even slips some compensation into the very clean “Fumbles O’Brien”, while “Sexual Man Chocolate” ’s title undercuts and underscores its serious theme. They try not to oversell these extremely spicy little appetizers before the show.
Eric Brace and Peter Cooper
Saturday @ Red Door Tavern
Singer-songwriters Eric Brace and Peter Cooper have fancy resumes in journalism, but don’t hold that against them. You Don’t Have To Like Them Both finds the intrepid reporters tracking a community of frequently melancholy, always observant and opinionated souls, frequently (but not always) walking the clock. Vocal and instrumental harmonies of Brace, Cooper, and others gleam like headlamps, while their rolling country stroll can get droll, though never really laid back. “We used to fly like we had wings/When we were easier to please.”
The Complaints Choir of Columbus
Saturday @ First Congregational Church
Complaints Choirs sing new compositions for massively volunteered complaints, all around the world. As the Complaints Choir of Columbus prepares its performance (free, but donations benefit Haitian relief), composer David Holm provides a dynamic demo recording. Choir (and RJD2) accompanists Derek DiCenzo, Happy Chichester and Sam Brown blues-rock cell phones, Ohio and many other outrages. Holm invites his imaginary studio audience to submit more complaints: ”The real thing will go on much longer, and be even more fun.” Hey, wait, that’s not a complaint!
These United States
Tuesday @ The Summit
As These United States’ First Sight opens in 2008, Jesse Elliott watches a girl talk. Suddenly he has a vision of all that will follow, for many generations, and “I couldn’t wait to get started.” Yet he becomes an increasingly isolated, compulsive inventor. During their series of live Daytrotter Sessions, the evolving band lures Elliot into deft showmanship, which initially seems too glib on 2009’s Everything Touches Everything. But they soon gallop and glide through Americana art pop, in a tense, generous gold rush fever of complex plausibility.
JUNE 9:
Pete Francis
Wednesday @ The Rumba Café
A 2009 show posted on the artist-approved archive.org spotlights singer/songwriter Pete Francis’s restless balancing act of romance, wordplay and social commentary, curling through the gravitational curves of his rhythm guitar and reggae-psych-blues band. Francis’s The Movie We Live In should have included 3-D glasses, considering its luminously mysterious imagery, fluid melodies and smoothly surreal electronics. We do get midnight matinee revelations: “Watchin’ the ships run aground/The moon curves like a thorn/I feel your love in my bones.” When in doubt, follow his guitar, especially during tonight’s solo show.
Kidz In The Hall
Thursday @ Alrosa Villa
"It’s like ‘Groundhog’s Day,' and the parody is old,” rising rappers Kidz In The Hall muse darkly, as the dawn of success returns with their third album, Land of Make Believe. They’re determined to jam variations through the loop of hip-hop familiarity, and the insatiable undertow of all consumers’ hype-conditioned, divinely designed dreams. Poignant irony blends into the fuel for expansively effervescent engines of big-breasted destiny. Meanwhile, the “Simple Life” guy sits on the curb, chasing his Hennessey with sunshine reflected in Kidz’ passing flash.
The Dodos
Sunday @ Newport Music Hall
The Dodos combine refined and rude music into a world of local concerns, rolling and tumbling with their elusive namesake through dynamically extinct dimensions of good and bad vibrations. They have an actual vibraphone, with Keaton Snyder’s mallets and pedals testing Logan Kroeber’s rigorously non-standard percussion and Meric Long’s amplified acoustic guitars. Long’s got a railroad of pitches on his 24-string drum guitar, and some gracefully moody tunes. Bad vibes override when his lyrics get too much room, but live recordings often celebrate the Dodos’ beautifully cracked noise
Damien Jurado & Saint Bartlett’s Band
Monday @ The Summit
Americana rocker Damien Jurado’s Saint Bartlett creates an intimately shape-shifting aura around viney, veiny voices and visions growing back together. We’re led and left to make connections between and within songs. But lines like, “Rachel, I’m sorry to call/I can’t sleep at all/The closet’s unfamiliar/Your parents will be home soon” arrive on time. In concert, Jurado’s tour mates Kay Kay And The Weathered Underground also appear as Saint Bartlett’s Band, a discreetly orbiting chamber orchestra who further explore the sonic adventures of his soulful, or at least soul-full, sincerely sketchy characters.
JUNE 16:
The Fiery Furnaces
Wednesday @ Outland
Rehearsing My Choir was the surging, microcosmic cityscape pop trek collaboration of TFF’s central siblings Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger with their testifying grandmother, Olga Santoros. Bitter Tea less challengingly served up Eleanor’s more sultry tones, suggesting a ruefully surviving Karen Carpenter. Widow City turned her into a brooding, b-movie troublemaker. The Furnaces’ current I’m Going Away has Eleanor channeling the early, innocent fervor of Smokey Robinson and Michael Jackson, simultaneously foreshadowing their later detours. Matthew’s cinematically edited catchiness keeps ,credibility crackling like surviving nitrate film, as relationships burn on (ditto in their volatile shows).
Baaba Maal
Wednesday @ Newport Music Hall
African singer Baaba Maal declares, “The musician’s role is to give advice, to warn people, and to make them aware.” News you can use, not so far from his take on TV: “A stranger…you don’t care who he is…he just seems to come from nowhere and gives you information.” So Brazilian Girls swirl in bittersweet bliss around “Television”, the magical title track of Maal’s current set. He’s an unblinking guide, who also points out “A big balloon/Beside the moon” while an acoustic guitar hovers eagerly near by.
JD Samson
Thursday @ Axis
JD Samson projects assurance and vulnerability. As DJ, producer, keyboard player and singer, Samson’s a natural performer, both solo and with disco-punks Le Tigre and Men, plus dance-pop combo New England Roses. “Credit Card Babies” critiques and empathizes with straights and gays wanting kids, wistfully musing “It’s not so hard/To make a heart.” She also mixes the kind of flamboyant dance music that doesn’t seem to need mixing, until you hear what Samson brings to it.
Robert Earl Keen
Tuesday @ Huntington Park
Texas singer-songwriter Robert Earl Keen likes to mess with comfortable materials. Verses keep flexing the context of his most famous (and bumper sticker-ready) chorus, “The road goes on forever/And the party never stops.” Most of the songs on Keen’s The Rose Hotel also provide excellent points of departure for restless guests. Even the citizen who nostalgically dwells on “Throwing Rocks” with his country rock honey gets overtaken by events smoothly infiltrating and re-calibrating his sentiments and grooves. Vitality rides with mortality, and a bunch of colorful, slippery maps.
JUNE 23:
Greensky Bluegrass
Thursday@ The Shrunken Head
Some people prefer to think of bluegrass as coming from the 1730s, not the 1930s, when migrating mountaineer Bill Monroe worked factory jobs in places like Flint, Michigan. Kalamazoo suburbanites Greensky Bluegrass got into Monroe's approach via David Grisman and Jerry Garcia, but they got there, and found the blues. Cutting and rippling through rock, funk and much older trade routes, the fun and the cost of living blend and bend notes around the mountain, as this wiry acoustic quintet also encounters occasional meteor showers, without a fiddle.
Frog Eyes
Thursday @ The Summit
Frog Eyes' singer-guitarist Carey Mercer summons and careens through shades of Van Morrison, Pere Ubu’s Crocus Behemoth, and other ancient deities, on Paul's Tomb: A Triumph. Lured by the elliptical, jittery visions of Morrison and Thomas, Mercer's crew conduct a spiritual quest as inquest, shredding dread while lifting juicy chunks of conflict towards the light. "I am dreaming of a painting/From the spring of my mind/I have de-finalized/And now I shake." Get ready to spill the sacramental wine, brothers and sisters!
Wicked Divas
Saturday @ Chemical Abstracts Service Lawn
Stephanie Block was an early Elphaba, anti-heroine of Broadway‘s "Wicked," which conjured with characters from "The Wizard of Oz." This outdoor concert with the Columbus Symphony Orchestra features Block and Julia Murney, another Elphaba, in a duet and "duking it out," as Blocrecently promised us, for the roles of the Wicked Witch of the West and her intriguingly clean cousin, Glinda The Good. The CSO will play selections from other hip musicals, plus selections from “Carmen,” ragtime, conga, and the Supremes, while casting their own spells.
The Soft Tags
Saturday @ Hal & Al's
"The Weather Ship is known on high defense," small voices murmur knowingly."And we all hold on/Questioning the air." Or is it "heir"? Either way, the cheeky Soft Tags recall those "small people" the head of BP is worried about. They necessarily ride with the tide and resourcefully go with the flow, having tapped a whirling, garage/chamber rock rush of expanding horizons and fleeting clues on sets such as Mathematical Monsters. Despite that title, they're not "math rock," as starry, earthy shows approved for Archive.org drive home.
JUNE 30:
Hacienda
Wednesday @ Newport Music Hall
"Last time we met/We was lyin' in her bed," a little hick boy sadly recalls. He doesn't care if we think that's funny, or that his own bed is now full of strange sounds. On Big Red and Barbacoa, San Antonio's Hacienda continue to emulate their early mentor, the Black Keys' Dan Auerbach, by tunefully threading characters through big wheels of surreal roots rock production. Their truest tales are told as Hacienda's sinuously grinding garage groove splits the difference between subtle, simple and simply outrageous on stage.
Couch Forts
Thursday @ The Rumba Cafe
The present incarnation of Columbus-based cosmic folk voyagers Couch Forts began during a local power failure, but their voices, fiddle, guitar, banjo and kick drum always light up the dusty barefoot sky in our big living room. Of course, hat’s just the beginning and end of all things great and small, including needs and wants. So they juggle the romantic friction and static of ewes and eyes, koala bears and elephant shoes, exploding moons and floating oranges, letters and nerves, into bioelectric music of the spheres and steers.
Deluka
Friday @Outland on Liberty
Classic post-punk style isn't just packaging for young quartet Deluka, it's the fuel that keeps dancing through singer Ellie Innocente's anxiety attacks, and everything else in her head. Which definitely includes intelligence, but she's hooked on observation and fair-minded, endless evaluation. The music's too electro-pop to let endlessness settle down: it's compulsively tuned up for well-timed, sparkling, rattling whirlpools of drama. "The boy won't give a straight answer/The girl can't ask a straight question" is one more thirsty call for the chronic tonic of Deluka's sonic companionship.
The Town Monster
Tuesday @ Skully's Music Diner
The Town Monster is a community-minded, three-headed entity. They know that an angel falling out of the blue Buckeye sky may be burned at the stake, but only in the dew of due process. Meanwhile, they don't wait for the circus to come to town, they grow their own, as rocking bass and drums meet fertile sentiments and keyboards worthy of Prince, and even Game Boy. TTM‘s Ohio Sessions, a monthly series of often splendid download EPs, parade with the universe and other crispy critters.
By Don Allred
JUNE 30:
