4Play (Jan. 2010)

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).

4Play (Feb 2010)

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.
 


 

4Play (March 2010)

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.

4Play (April 2010)

 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.

4Play (May 2010)

 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.

4Play (June 2010)

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:

4Play (July 2010)

 By Don Allred

JULY 7

Dex Romweber Duo

Saturday @ The Summit

Singer-guitarist Dex Romweber’s ‘80s-indie-incendiary Flat Duo Jets i

nspiredgarage wizard Jack White to produce Dex and his equally seasoned sister Sara's

 current Duo. Their single "Last Kind Word Blues" brings out the

 pre-White Stripes bounce in Sara's slamming drums, while 

White's howl fits Dex's growl. The Romwebers

also seamlessly shift between rising rituals and sudden turns on

 Live At Third Man and Ruins of Berlin. They trace flowers through

 the moonlit bones of romance (and new rainy days)

 in cosmopolitan punkabilly hearts.

The Madison Square Gardeners

Saturday @ The Rumba Cafe

OSU-reared Aaron Lee Tasjan's Madison Square Gardeners draw from punk alley omen Johnny Thunders' Heartbreakers and Tom Petty's crew too, though Petty might not christen a graceful roots rock song "My Ex-Girlfriend's a Big Lesbian on Drugs." Neither TP nor the late Thunders would typically admit, as Tasjan does, "I spend so much time trying not to feel f*cked up/It's f*ckin' me up!" The six-man Gardeners blossom on stage, especially when "Lightning Don't Strike Twice" crowns remedial and advanced students with starry cymbals.

Locusta

Saturday @ Carabar

Columbus plagesters Locusta's press sheet describes them as "blackened" death metal. Indeed, on their self-titled debut album, Locusta deliver ten very similarly spinning graves of ashes, bone chips and clattering insect carapaces, keeping company with the band's historical namesake. A toxicologist  favored by the Emperor Nero, she's surefooted amidst the charred mists of Brad Deerhake's stage whispers, as zombie legions of guitar notes make their rounds on eroded stone streets. They get to stretch and shake on Dusk at the Mausoleum, but shows are where Locusta's death throes take the throne. 

Umphrey's McGee

Tuesday @ The LC Pavilion

Recent audience recordings find jam band Umphrey's McGee expansively focused, as succinct phrases and themes race and pace each other. They can linger lyrically, or swing on singed hinges, as when the Beatles' "Come Together" and Nine Inch Nails' "Closer" mash rusty rock into bent funk, deftly lurching toward gleaming shadows of reggae and blues. Aiming notes and cast-off frustrations at passing moments, UM earn and burn sweet release, while asking themselves and their audience, "Will you still be awake tomorrow?" If you can keep it up, yes.

JULY 14:

The Hold Steady

Wednesday @ Newport Music Hall

On The Hold Steady’s Heaven Is Forever, surviving usual suspects still fuel parties, hookups, and solo flights with breakaway chunks of Craig Finn’s carefully developed themes, as his Minnesota accent, sympathetically absurd tales, and hearty, hungry productions continue to make delinquent connections between Lake Woebegone and early Springsteen. Mostly, Finn’s still trusting his details-obsessed, itchy-fingered kiddies and THS’s neo-classic rock (with a third guitarist and new keyboard player both added for the tour) to slip us through Heaven and other strangely familiar places. 

Nappy Roots

Thursday @ The Basement

When friends at Bowling Green’s Western Kentucky University formed their rap group in the mid-90s, they dubbed themselves Nappy Roots--which had to do with sticking together, and also supposedly uncool cool, definitely “ballin’ on a budget.”  Flaunting what they didn’t have (and couldn’t lose), they went platinum on 2002’s Watermelon, Chicken & Gritz. On their new The Pursuit of Nappyness, themes of positivity and sheer striving get refreshed by restless nuance, and even wicked wit. “Swimmin’ in a fishbowl,” Nappy Roots croon, joking on and savoring city folks’ smooth smoke.

YellowFever

Friday @ Café Bourbon Street

YellowFever’s Sunbelt home zone is bright and bare outside, cloudy and crowded inside. Both feed the need to make a tiny counter-world of punky art-pop, eventually spinning out of (and around) the house. Their self-titled album makes the most of every inflection. You could step on a crack, break your mama’s back, or just fall in. Either way, better keep dancing better. On their new Bermuda Triangle EP,  young singer-guitarist Jennifer Moore often sounds like a European woman, thus very wise, while still playfully and fervently focused on escape and rendezvous.

On Fillmore with Rachel Grimes

Saturday @ Wexner Center

Pianist Rachel Grimes is a member, though not the namesake, of Louisville post-rock ensemble Rachel’s. She’ll perform soulfully ambient, folk-inclusive miniatures from her solo set, Book of Leaves, probably chased with a taste of Satie’s ricochet romance. On Fillmore is acoustic bassist Darin Gray and Wilco drummer Glenn Kotche, whose experiences with marching bands, the Kronos Quartet, vibraphones, homemade and found sounds also re-tune the summer moon on Extended Vacation. Recurring groves of Latin-accented grooves and healthy-lunged (human) birdsongs help dreams get ready to roll.

JULY 21:

Eyedea & Abilities

Wednesday @ Skully’s

Battle-rapper Eyedea established artistic credit with DJ Abilities on First Born, then re-sparked his early flash with sharpened skills on E & A.  Currently, By The Throat ingests lessons and musicians from Eyedea’s freestyle-times-jazz group Face Candy and rock combo Carbon Carousel. The shiny rituals of CC’s “Lather, Rinse, Repent”  now enter hip-hop’s staccato flow and rainbow stew, especially via  By The Throat ‘s sometimes uncannily cannibalistic  “Burn Fetish.” It even tries to fry its own scary claws of plausibility: “Empathy is the poor man’s cocaine.” Yes, but these are bargain-hungry times.

 Citizen Cope

Wednesday @ The LC Pavilion

“This is a song about not givin’ up.”  But it’s reduced to chains of rhymes, so Caribbean garage drums can no longer chop and channel the smoke-cured murmur of Citizen Cope’s typically terse verses into narrative momentum. Still, the song’s title and chorus are “Let the drummer kick it,” which definitely happens on stage. Keyboards, bass and guitar also roll urban folk journeyman Cope through an overcast world, as he searches for, courts and defends his love, especially when she’s a liberated, forty-foot billboard woman. The police are so jealous.

Fool’s Gold

Friday @ The Summit

The sliding poise and eloquent chatter of guitars instantly open “Surprise Hotel,” where it wouldn’t be surprising to find Fool’s Gold partying with Extra Golden, Toubab Krewe and Tinariwen,  who previously connected Columbus to electric crosscurrents of African and American music. Primed by “Hotel...,” their self-titled debut album also spins Fool’s Gold through Middle Eastern, Indonesian and Latin refractions, polyrhythmically orbiting their name’s cautionary, anti-utopian irony. “Nadine, please don’t bear your soul to me,” is a heartfelt serenade, from  the lush, sun-brushed depths of Los Angeles-based FG’s kaleidoscopic focus.

Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue

Friday @ Arch Park (McFerson Commons)

“Can you show me something beautiful?” The singer’s voice is young and hopeful, though his melody isn’t that far from Hot Chocolate’s ancient  hit, “You Sexy Thing.” But what are those strangely familiar power chords, slightly south of the border?  Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews, headliner of this summer’s Hot Ribs, Cool Jazz Festival, loves Latin inflections and “Back in Black” too. Mellow and metal colors harmonize with the syncopation and funk of his band, Orleans Avenue, surely as mercurial ballads and hip-hop suit Trombone Shorty’s comfortably stratospheric trumpet.

JULY 28

Chuck Prophet

Saturday @  The Maennerchor

A guy’s watching some Mel Gibson movie, and calling a lady, about “Band-Aids, from the night we patched things up/I got the box right here/If I could hold that moment to my chest/I swear I’d disappear/Would you still love me?” Like his characters, Western alt.country-rock early warning Chuck Prophet (formerly of dusty neon Green On Red) pushes luck. But/and on stage, definitely including these solo shows, Prophet’s tautly tuneful guitar can tap cracked spectacles of bare necessity. Even “Love won’t keep us apart.” 

Freelance Whales

Wednesday @ The Basement

Freelance Whales’ native habitat is the subway platform. There, or just about anywhere, they can breeze through selections from their studio debut, Weathervanes. carrying nostalgia and flimsy whimsy up into a refreshed, open-air mesh of everyday mazes. This mesh was already stronger than cobwebs, but now it smells better too.  Adaptable combinations of acoustic and electronic instruments are practical and  atmospheric. Some good lines get repeated many times, but they and the audience have handy melodies to settle in, like the beloved ghost in some songs has its peaceful socket.

Hamell On Trial

Saturday @ The Rumba Cafe

Come to think of it, human ash isn’t powdery enough to be snorted, at least not straight from the crematorium, as Ed Hamell’s friend supposedly did, supposedly by accident. But picky details probably won’t materialize in your skull while experiencing Hamell On Trial, one-man folk-punk band. Hamell applies caustically comic timing  to songs, sometimes in dazzling cycles; ditto casually attention-appropriating stories, confessions, conversations, and insults. He’s also a secret romantic. If you want  to bring that (or any other bright insights) up to him, go right ahead.

The National

Monday @ The LC Pavilion

“I was carried to Ohio, in a swarm of bees,” reminisces Cincy-to-Brooklyn post-post-punk-revival art rockers The National‘s Matt Berninger---no stork for him---as his big ol’ warm plaid voice and venturing imagery can suggest OH-to-UK cult figure Scott Walker. Raw impulses and results are expertly negotiated with the rest of the band and ritualized, amid the streetlights and sails of High Violet. As Berninger mentions, “It always matters more than we know.” So he carefully applies a lingering touch to portraits of his night-eyed muse-objects, can kid his sadcore writing onstage, and gets ready for The National’s very live cover of Psychedelic Furs’ ”Pretty In Pink.”

4Play (Aug 2010)

 By Don Allred

AUG, 8

Gaelic Storm

Friday @ Coffman Park

With a trance-y buzz and rollicking beat, “Blind Monkey” struts through Gaelic Storm’s video postcard from the World Cup Finals. Having survived being the steerage band in “Titanic," these suavely rough-and-ready, cosmopolitan folkies are unfazed by normally crazy soccer fans. Well-prepared also for our Dublin Irish Festival, they bond with more-Irish-than-the-Irish Americans, swinging through the family tree: “My mother’s sister’s cousin’s auntie’s Uncle Barney’s father’s brother/Had a cousin from Killarney!” “Blind Monkey” ‘s briskly mystical call kicks deeper on their brand new Cabbage, which reels around the crisping Sun.

 Candye Kane

Saturday @ The Rumba Cafe

Dealing with her tumultuous upbringing and teen motherhood helped fortify Candye Kane for  80s L.A.’s  punk ‘n’ roots intersections. Having survived pornography and pancreatic cancer, she’s an out bisexual who’s tight with her manager husband and drummer son. Also a convert to Judaism, versatile blues stylist Kane celebrates life and music by frankly tracing their twists and turns. Her inescapable lucidity paradoxically powers Tom Waits-worthy atmospherics, script-flipping dedications, and vanishing-point insights. After all, “I never know/How far to go/Until I’ve gone too far.”

Victoire with Matt Marks

Sunday @ Bar of Modern Art

On  Victoire’s Cathedral City, “A Song For Mick Kelly" 's sampled guitars herald the head-long contemplation of Carson McCullers’ heroine, while  “A Song For Arthur Russell” lyrically grooves with the warm shadow of late dance-pop-genius-cellist AR. Victoire’s  keyboards, violin, bass and clarinet thrive on the tension of melancholy and urgency. Thriving on wired connections between heavenly bodies and spirits, Matt Marks and singer Melissa Hughes perform selections from Marks’ The Little Death, Vol.1, whose characters soulfully torture themselves and each other, as only true believers can.

Spoon

Monday @ The LC Pavilion

Austin-based anglophiles Spoon twitch, slam and throb through  testy, zesty, questing garage alchemy, rolling out their own dark, fragrant barrel of groovy premonitions. Whomever leader Britt Daniel is addressing, in or through the mirror, is someone he values, and he never takes too much for granted. In brooding, nocturnal full bloom, these professional late adolescents are determined not to get arrested. They’re especially persuasive face to face, as electricity and other weighty matters get passed right along, and you may well find yourself parading uphill, grape-stomping through “The Mystery Zone.”

 AUG. 11:

The Girls At Dawn

Wednesday @ The Summit

Cosmic garage trio The Girls At Dawn make themselves at home, as their self-titled EP deftly re-sets the airflow and echo of of voices harmonizing with percussive counterpoint. “C’mon over tonight/Don’t have to fight,” they chirp like early ‘60s Brooklyn hairspray sirens, with an almost-secret message: “Have to, have to.” The Girls At Dawn like to make tempestuous sounds at home too, under brightly reflective/refractive surfaces. Which are also pretty resilient, no matter how many garden-carving guitars and absent boyfriends there are to greet at dawn.

Lydia Loveless

Friday @ The Rumba Cafe

Veteran Columbus teen Lydia Loveless sometimes includes the Replacements’ intensely frustrated “Answering Machine” and Def Leppard’s dynamically mesmerized  “Hysteria” with her punky tonk combo’s deliveries, unstoppably 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.

EL-P

Monday @ Skully’s

Columbus-born, internationally esteemed rapper Camu Tao’s voice was on key as his words were on point, and he has no problem singing on  King of Hearts. Tao died before finishing its production, but his deliberately rough diamonds were set by EL-P, who hosts tonight’s listening party, on the eve of the album’s release. Hopefully, EL-P will also spin his collaboration with Tao  (the duo billed as Central Services), Forever Frozen In Television Time, where romantic psychodramas of internalized politics can morph hip-hop, r&b and rock into audacious beauty. Ditto the ever-budding, zigzagging instrumentals of EL-P’s new  Weareallgoingtoburninhellmegamixxx3.

 Stone Temple Pilots

Tuesday @ The LC Pavilion

“Stone Temple Pilots are elegant bachelors,”  Pavement once sang. In truth, grunge pioneers STP’s only  likely “GQ” cover boy is vocalist Scott Weiland, whose haberdashery and rehab-related activities proliferated along perilous parallels. When Weiland was recruited by Velvet Revolver, some laughed, but an album and tour appeared in due course. STP’s new self-titled set doesn’t fan the flair of SW’s solo debut, 12 Bar Blues, but it’s more fuel for cogent reunion concerts, where Weiland professionally struts his suitably time-roughened stuff, sometimes in well-fitting t-shirt and jeans

 AUG. 18:

Cave

Thursday @ Cafe Bourbon Street

“Take me away and I’ll sleep for a while.” Sure, because the Cave men are only human, and not married to the “faithful dimension” their evolutionary echo explores. Nope, Cave want to stay real enough to send suitably mixed messages to younger seekers: “Teenager/Show, show, show/Teenager/No, no no! ” The smoke signals of  “Brigette” evoke a certain cinema goddess, giving the Sun a cold sassy shoulder, before strutting back to her private kingdom of liberated critters. It’s a true story, but that’s only half of it. Cave’s deep.

Rooney

Saturday @ Newport Music Hall

Rooney are party professionals, working for the weekend like hand-clapping, guitar, piano and nerve-jangling, table-clearing, pool-cleaning, JetBlue-emergency chute-opening slaves. They’ve got the built-in anxieties of power pop’s perpetual adolescence, but they’re still learning the best ways to burn some endless summer.  If the future’s a bill too big to pay, that’s another gap that even non-ID-carrying sounds can fill for a minute. They like lovers’ quarrels, because they want you to school them. With no disrespect to power pop’s dads, the Beatles, “I don’t wanna let it be.”

Woody Pines

Sunday @ The Rumba Cafe

Woody Pines is a man and his band. Pines the man plays sings and plays guitar, banjo, harmonica, and kazoo. Pines the band bring fiddle, acoustic bass and drums. They’re the kind of folkies who like to roll around the French Quarter, earning it. They also like the corner traffic melodies of the Memphis Jug Band, the clash and mesh of Delta grooves, and the pre-Nashville country music capital of Asheville, North Carolina. That’s where vaudeville’s thrills fit with boxcar blues; Woody Pines’ guys know how and why.

Hail The Villain with Airbourne

Tuesday @ The LC Pavilion

“I’m only a man/Back from the dead/To take back the fear.” Hail The Villain’s Bryan Crouch sounds humble and grandiose simultaneously, like a more consistently appealing James Hetfield. Held notes can push Crouch’s luck, but genre-crossing HTV increasingly justify stripping Metallica and others for parts. Meanwhile, young Australians Airbourne celebrate their AC/DC legacy, relying on more on raw, yet fairly rare power. If a peacock could crow, and spread wings that were all of red, orange and yellow, it might become Airbourne. 

AUG. 24:

Califone

Thursday @ The Wexner Center

The “Americana” tag can be an excuse to get maudlin, morbid, and/or just plain mopey. Not so for Califone, who bluntly complain,  “All my friends are funeral singers.” That’s also the title of their latest album, performed tonight while a horror film of the same name is screened simultaneously This multi-media presentation’s live, partially improvised soundtrack will be followed by a straight-ahead set of songs. In both modes, Califone combine the well-timed decay of rich imagery with sly, bluesy urgency and backwoods electronics. Hopefully, they’ll dig up some new friends.

Titus Andronicus

Thursday @ The Summit

Punk-tending combo Titus Andronicus’ name is also the title of Shakespeare’s bloodiest play, in which one villain repents of any good deed he may have ever accidentally committed. Such candor can be refreshingly associated with a surreal saga referencing the Civil War. The Monitor is also a battleship armored in broken hearts, male hormones, wistful thinking, wishful thinking, and art therapy. Shredded parodies of Springsteen add gnarly texture to their sonic interstate’s surface, which covertly tends to smooth out, like a lady’s tauntingly withheld skin.

Megan Palmer & The Hopefuls

Friday @ The Rumba Cafe

Singer/songwriter Megan Palmer, frequent flier between Brooklyn and Columbus, sometimes plays violin with hearty, brainy Columbus saloon crew the Spikedrivers, roving, troving Columbus-bred bard Tim Easton, and mountain fountain pilgrims Luther Wright & The Wrongs. Palmer grows her new album, Old 33, into one big violin, swooping through  illuminations, while The Hopefuls flex and pop like pizzicato strings. She explores the mistakes we tell ourselves we’re learning from. They’re fuel for thought, as thought becomes sweeter fuel. “Love is wine after whiskey/You can never get enough.” 

Rush

Sunday @ The Nationwide Arena

Canadian libertarian power trio Rush have long since learned to balance grand themes and brotherly work-outs.They also know Spinal Tap, of course, so shows genially/carefully provide intentional comedy, with video skits and sci-fi stage effects.They’re currently performing one of their most popular albums, Moving Pictures, in its entirety, with mental-cinema material from 2112, plus two new songs,“BU2B” and “Caravan.”  “In a world where I feel so small/I can’t stop thinkin’ big,” Geddy Lee confides, as “Caravan” ‘s dreams pound and steam into the future.

4Play (Sept 2010)

 By Don Allred

Junius

Friday @ The Summit

Junius’s Blood Is Bright masterfully mourned media manipulation, while carefully combining shoegaze reflections and metal urges. Perhaps in penance or final processing, The Martyrdom of a Catastrophist compulsively refines its world-shattering subject matter. However, straight-ahead live YouTube performances improve on the album’s mix. Also, a subsequent single, “The Time of Perfect Virtue,”  is promisingly provocative, with slithering instrumental responses to the theme: “We’ll accept our fate/When the glory comes to wipe us out.” Let’s see how they handle the gory glory of their tour mates, Viking berserkers Valient Thorr and sizzling survivors Howl.

Megan McCormick

Friday @ Midland Theatre

Megan McCormick’s debut album, Honest Words, starts in mid-situation, as she wrestles with a dominant love and a big, fuzzy blues-rock guitar. Initially, the candidly careening clarity of this 23- year-old singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist can intimidate the simple male mind. But that guitar is hers, and intriguingly leashed to a prowling momentum, which can get nearly subliminal, until a certain green-eyed love object enters McCormick’s night vision again. She reminds us that 23 can be as dangerous an age as 19, while expertly moving beyond wisdom.

Fo/Mo/Deep & friends

Friday through Sunday @ Genoa Park

This weekend’s Riverfront Art Festival will be greeted by jazz funk voyagers Fo/Mo/Deep (pictured), whose Eclecticism is one of the meatier meteors in hungry Columbus skies. Other highlights include acoustic punk jazz combo Pete Bush and the Hoi Polloi; gracefully uptempo jazz diva Sabrina Tutstone, Marble Park’s rocking r&b, Grooveshire’s bayou-flavored jams, and  Beatles acolytes Hard Days Night. The environmental art experience of WaterFire channels Celtic rockers Ladies of Longford, ditto Opera Columbus, previewing  a season of wizards: Mozart, Gilbert & Sullivan, and Weill.

Screaming Females

Saturday @ Carabar

Soulfully shredding singer/guitarist Marissa Paternoster doesn’t hide in the agile armor of her power trio Screaming Females’ Castle Talk. Warnings to favorite challengers are unsparingly fair: “In record time I realize/I can’t change.” Which, the way it’s told by this record, comes true in a good way: the literal meanings of some key words and phrases remain ambiguous, but they unmistakably shake her certainties like fruit trees. Paternoster also testifies, “You put me in my place/So I gotta be renewed.” The music keeps doing that, so far.

Best Coast

Wednesday @ The Summit

“I watched the cars go by/I thought of you.” Likes like that could make songs like “The Sun is High (So Am I)” no more or less necessary for further contact than a favorite, faded photograph, or another whiny teen ballad. But garage pop trio Best Coast project straight-forward, rocking and mellow soulfulness, filtered through summer, smog and other character-building experiences. Singer/guitarist Bethany Cosentino also draws from  the drones of her earlier experimental band, Pocahaunted, and her avowed idol, Stevie Nicks, distilled into bracingly bittersweet vitality

Van Dyke Parks with Clare & The Reasons

Friday @ The Wexner Center

Composer/arranger Van Dyke Parks collaborated with Brian Wilson on Smile, thee ‘60s psych-pop high point they rounded off (finished writing, re-recorded) and released a few years ago (minus the Beach Boys, but it works ) VDP’s historically inspired style ranges through changes of time and key, shading and degrees, basking in urgent melodies. His expansively intimate piano and crisp little voice are accompanied by fluently French-influenced chamber-pop group Clare & The Reasons, who also open the show. CTR’s new  Live in Amsterdam features “He Needs Me,” a collaboration with Parks, sporting Andrew Bird-worthy violin, singing and whistling. (Clare Muldaur has more than a touch of her father Geoff's 60s-burnished musical grace.)

Justin Townes Earle

Friday @ The Rumba Cafe

Justin Townes Earle sings more smoothly than his namesake, Townes Van Zandt, and his father, Steve Earle. Smoothness paves the way for the younger Earle’s emulation-in-progress  of his forebears’ most succinctly evocative, frankly mordant songs. JTE’s  romantic fatalism is currently far too restless for even the joyful suicide resolution of “Harlem River Blues,” his new album’s title track. Diverting uptempo reveries reverberate through boxcars, bars, beds, and subway tunnel walls, while Earle continues “punching holes in the dark,”  until he gets it just right.

The Lost Revival with Monolithic Cloud Parade

Saturday @ Skully’s

Columbus’ Lost Revival practice scorched and salty Americana. When “the gods of nothing in particular” (maybe including social conditioning) serve your life, pass it along, freshly seasoned, and carved with epic poetic critiques. This release party celebrates The Lost Revival’s  To Hell With Them All and Monolithic Cloud Parade’s equally sociable The Sea and Setting Sun. MCP’s point of departure is closer to familiar modern alternative rock than TLR’s classickally twisted roots, but both bands breathe mythological life into tunefully strenuous new tales of worlds busy getting lost.

SEPT. 24:

Yeasayer

Wednesday @ Newport Music Hall

Synthesizers beam a beautiful dream, until:  “I can’t sleep when I think about/The times we’re livin’ in/The future I was born into.”  On  2007’s  All Hour Cymbals, Yeasayer plunge forward, into musically dazzling defiance and commitment. 2010’s Odd Blood delivers some strong songs, but seems at odds with itself, when rudely resourceful sounds have to counter-balance supposedly mature regrets and apologies. Yet on stage (and YouTube), even  “I Remember”  can become a handy electro-pop vehicle, hijacked into ever-timely surf-disco overdrive, as Yeasayer thunderously race the curfew at UW-Madison.

The Ryan Montbleau Band

Wednesday @ The Rumba Cafe

Jam bands’ studio albums can be awkward. The Ryan Montbleau Band shrewdly work such defensive dilemmas into their debut, Heavy On The Vine. The narrator of “Slippery Road” is spooked by silence, behind festive sonic achievements. He needs to relax, just enough.”So it’s okay/But if I say the same thing tomorrow/Take me down!” Increasingly song-focused leader Montbleau, who also contributed material to Columbus visitor Trombone Shorty’s  Backatown, judiciously blends  funk, folk, reggae, rock and country:14 tracks in 57 minutes, portioned just about right.

Blitzen Trapper

Saturday @ Wexner Center

Blitzen Trapper’s hand-rolled pages  from rock history can make them seem like the cute, hirsute children of Andy Kaufman, born to test and refreshingly mess with our expectations. Their current set, Destroyer of the Void, provides basically sweet, crunchy rides. The epic title track opens with beaded curtains of harmonies, between late ‘60s Beach Boys and the eternal prime of Queen’s Freddie Mercury: “Destroy my petty crimes!” Travelers get and give more than they bargained for, but the fine print never gets petty in this Americana-bordered, tapestry-defined space and time

Arrington de Dionyso with TK Webb

Monday @ Cafe Bourbon Street

“No burial mound can hold us,” proclaims  Arrington de Dionyso, over a Nile-crossing punk-funk groove. Such frictional faith also fuels Old Time Relijun leader de Dionyso’s new band, Malaikat dan Singa”(“Angels and Lions”), as translations of William Blake’s liberated visions co-pilot vintage Indonesian psych-compatible garage levitation. Far from utopian gospel, Columbus-based TK Webb’s opening solo set nevertheless includes implicitly prophetic songs from his latest, self-titled album, reporting bluesy, twilight encounters: “Fable Thrower/Rid this dread of me.” Here and elsewhere, Webb foreshadows de Dionyso’s incandescent rituals.