By Don Allred
JAN. 25
Lambchop
Sun @ Wexner
Lambchop was once an orchestral party of floating friends and strange guests. Almost twenty years later, as a smaller, imperfectly focused but durable unit, they're flexible role models for quirky indie rockers and others. Their new album, OH(Ohio), vividly personalizes the early 70s pastoral romance (hippie make-out music) of Boz Scaggs and Van Morrison, as head Lambchopper Kurt Wagner brings mixed feelings to the one who still inspires his affections and obsessions: his muse-object, that is, and perhaps more than one other listener at times (like when he sounds like he's swallowing tasty froggies, maybe uncooked). But mixed emotions can be very stirring, and he knows the approach: with tiny, surreal, bittersweet jokes, gentle and otherwise, intimately glinting in bouquets of images, usually changed before wilting
MARCH 9:
Joan Baez
Mon. @ Southern Theatre
"Everyday that passes/I'm sure about a little less/Even my money keeps tellin' me/It's God I need to trust/And I believe in God/But God ain't us." Steve Earle‘s "God Is God" sets the unsettled tone of Joan Baez's latest album, The Day After Tomorrow. Producer Earle keeps the ever-stylized 60s Folk Queen on a solid spirit level, with compact cadences and carefully selected songs. Further along, Patty Griffin's "Mary" is "covered in roses...covered in slashes," finding her (and/or Her) way through the story's edits, somewhat like everybody else. JB’s road band is quite the multi-instrumental trio of Solas-co-founder John Doyle, Todd Phillips, and Dirk Powell
APRIL 8?
Donny McCaslin
Thursday @ Wexner Center
In frequencies frequently brimming with brio and no cons, tenor saxophonist Donny McCaslin’s quintessence-minded jazz quartet includes bassist Hans Glawischnig, from McCaslin’s 2007 Recommended Tools, plus guitarist Ben Monder and drummer Antonio Sanchez, who play on his latest, Declaration. Each album delivers its visionary version of “Late Night Gospel,” with Monder’s twanging pangs and bright corners accentuating the tension and resolution that cycle through Declaration, recorded while McCaslin anticipated his daughter’s birth. Monder also cuts loose on Declaration ’s “Rock Me,” and hopefully we’ll see even more of that on stage.
The Mary Onettes
Friday @ Summit
On Islands, Sweden’s Mary Onettes walk out under starry, synthesized skies, as drums roll around distant hillsides of electric strumming, tingling with elusive string quartets. “You took me far too seriously/ ’Cause all I know is what I fear/Now I dare/To think of something that I’m not.” Despite lunar lapses, their quest’s second half gets paradoxically re-powered by the flying memories of “God Knows I Had Plans.” Recommended to fans of Coldplay and the immortal “Grey’s Anatomy,” which appropriately folded in the Mary Onettes’ “Lost in the Episodes.”
Past Lives
Friday @ Café Bourbon Street
There’s a place for us, as foretold by the hip-swaying way Jordan Blilie sings, “She comes out of no-oh-where.” It’s equally miraculous that Jordan Blilie sings anything, considering that he and two other Past Lives were once screeching Blood Brothers. Yet Past Lives’ Tapestry of Webs skillfully steers ears across an eternally overcast beach of vibrantly hollow beats. Splintery waves of tunes, tones and convictions lightly trace the veins of Jane’s Addiction into a hall of high-voice heroes, where Past Lives may bother to have a cookout.
MBird
Friday @ EspressoYourself Cafe
MBird is Megan Birdsall, a young jazz veteran now traveling through Over The Bones, her Americana chronicle. Birdsall's subtly variable pitch evokes an anxious ingenue, a mature woman, or both at once. The recurring huskiness as she waits "For nothing/Nothing but you" suggests all the ways she's shaded by the pendulum's slow swing. But she also believes that time can be more than a circle game: "One Kiss" could spiral it through the lasso of this watchful cowgirl in the sand.
APRIL 15:
Stardeath and White Dwarves
Wednesday @ Circus
Stardeath and White Dwarves feature Dennis Coyne, nephew of the Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne, though this band’s first full-length CD, The Birth, isn’t always a mellow-fantastic, Lips-typical trip. Bass and shuddering keyboards permeate”The Sea is on Fire” and harmonies take flight over “New Heat.” Back in the nest, with his chick gone, the “Keep Score” dude ruefully recounts fumbled ups and downs, trying to prepare for the title track’s scary babies. Stardeath’s daily flash can get slick, yet beats are always ready to plant stars in the garden.
Trash Talk
Thursday @ Ravari
On Trash Talk’s self-titled album, the bass whips its cape aside as cymbals, voice and guitar pursue a scorched-earth policy. They descend through blind loyalty, betrayal, and blasting for clean (or bare) air. Yeah, this scroll of sonic skin can seem bare, But maybe you’ve heard that the peace sign is an inverted cross? Trash Talk’s scrawled icon is a peace sign upside down, with broken arms thus raised, not straightened. Word on the left: “Onward.” On the right: “Upward.”
Wiley and the Checkmates
Friday @ Circus
Herbert Wiley’s original Checkmates backed soul stars like Percy Sledge, Syl Johnson, and many less successful on the Southern circuit. The band’s most recent release, We Call It Soul, sports new Checkmates and mostly new, vintage-style songs and credentialed guests. It’s the testimony/resumé of 60s/00s journeymen—60s-sequenced enough for Wiley’s voice to deliver him from innocence to that serpent in the mirror. His bass enters space, though not before paying dues with (and to) truly funky chickens. It’s an intriguingly measured, bracing taste of their show, currently billed as an all-night dance party.
Gil Mantera’s Party Dream
Saturday @ Skully’s
Recordings of Gil Mantera’s Party Dream sometimes gleam like evidence between cracks, and vice-versa. Yet Youngstown’s Gil and Ultimate Donny aren’t Rust Belt journalists, they’re productive partytronic citizens. Even before drummer-producer Anthony Paterra appeared on Dreamscape and the Ballerina EP, Bloodsongs was warm as a nice firm bag of plasma. Still, even among ecstatic (and even happy) posts on their blog, one fan, referring to an MTV performance, could only hope that “having special needs people tell you that you suck is an anomaly.” Journalists hope so too!
APRIL 22:
Extra Golden
Friday @ Rumba
Extra Golden equals two American rock guitarists times two Kenyan benga singer-percussionists. On EG’s third album, Thank You Very Quickly, bouncing, strutting beats and crowing, high-note licks meet down-tuned tones. Sometimes they energetically settle in together---right before shifting tectonic party plates of texture and rhythm dare players and listeners to adapt. But it all fits. “Fantasies of the Orient” satirically swings like an exotic golf pro. The title track and “Ukimwi” veer through true stories of political arrest and AIDS, respectively, continuously developing the album’s most compelling melodies.
Dave Alvin
Saturday @ Maennerchor
“California’s burning/You can smell it in the air.” Formerly of the Flesheaters, Blasters. Knitters, and X, Dave Alvin, master songsmith-guitarist and journeyman singer, works a husky suggestiveness into his Golden State citizenship: “What that fire burns down, boys/We’ll just build back again.” But no boys’ club actually materializes on Dave Alvin and the Guilty Women, where Wild West sirens such as Amy Farris and Laurie Lewis spin Alvin through paydays, ghost towns, and a rollicking/shrugged-off toast to the unknown, “Que Sera, Sera.” One of his Guilty Men, Chris Martin, will provide electric guitar for Alvin’s (otherwise-unaccompanied) “acoustic show” on Saturday.
If These Trees Could Talk
Saturday @ Carabar
Akron’s all-instrumental If These Trees Could Talk avoid the knottiness of “math rock” for evocative, alternating motifs, evidently intended as spiraling sequences of dynamic development (not too much so for those of us who are math-challenged).On their self-titled first album, “The Death of Paradigm” is the most consistently soulful flight, casting aside alternation for straight-up momentum and accrual, as a typically expansive opening theme passes from sorrow to solace to passionate resolution: a promise made is a promise kept, this time. A new track, “What’s in The Ground Belongs to You,” provides a new degree of warmly engaging, wrap-around sound quality.
Vegas 66
Saturday @ Ravari
Columbus trio Vegas 66’s version of the rockabilly classic “Fireball” fire-brews a hell-bent-for-leather-und-lederhosen, beer-ific connection between the polka-fueled Southwest and Midwest. Subliminal oom-pah beats continue galloping on sharp-edged hooves, as Vegas 66’s original “Rosalene” leads storm clouds through the vanishing point. The title track of their new Wild Ride To Hell is one of several swinging with devilish horns, which will also attend this CD’s release party, along with go-go dancers Stephy de Lis and Holley Holloway. Warning: unidentified flying strip-tease artistes sometimes spontaneously appear at Vegas 66 functions.
APRIL 29:
Junior Boys
Wednesday @ Skully’s
On their new album of ‘80s-schooled synth-pop, Begone Dull Care, the Junior Boys get lured from taking to making, then breaking notes. Sonic capsules open, guiding seekers across the dance floor, to “somewhere down the hall…let it burn into the sky.” Then they slip between the beats. A lonely Junior Boy may try to “Sneak A Picture” in the dark (where “I can see you better”), before growing up to be “The Animator.” Still, “What It’s All For” is something women, God bless ‘em, already know---so the JBs ain’t telling.
Max Tundra
Wednesday @ Skully’s
While his tour mates, the Junior Boys, build on tensions of pulse and impulse, Max Tundra steppes right up with his current collection, Parallax Error Beheads You. The clustering keyboards could be claustrophobic, if Tundra didn’t ride his mower though this junkyard garden of buzzing, blooming sounds. Most songs are short, sharp and sweet. At 11 minutes and change, “Until We Die” is by far the longest, but also the last track, thus easily skipped (thanks, Max!) Tundra’s voice is high, but never strained, spaced or earnest, even though he’s English.
Tim Easton
Friday @ Rumba
Tim Easton attended The OSU, rode with the Columbus-based Kosher Spears and Haynes Boys, then sang in European streets. Easton’s fifth solo album, Porcupine, tests quills, chills, and guitar slides with two other Cowtown vets, bassist-vocalist Matt Surgeson and drummer Sam Brown (of the New Bomb Turks, Haynes Boys and Gaunt). They’re pacemakers and jumper cables for Easton’s compulsively mobile characters, who mostly fear getting “too cold to sweat the dark out” (his own confession). As Easton says of Amsterdam, Porcupine is for “anyone with all eyes open.”
Chamaira
Tuesday @ The LC
On The Infection, Cleveland’s Chimaira keep Resurrection ‘s metal fever dream glowing. Vocalist Mark Hunter’s an impossibly articulate cookie monster. He simultaneously inhales, inventories and recycles a world of hurt’s black rainbow, even “Coming Alive” for “fiber pure, touching scars…psychoactive and delicate.” Meanwhile, deep inside the twisted beast, guitars wind body-clocks, stretch sinews and pump the juice, heated by the rhythm section’s staccato rounds. And so it comes to pass: here, ears are systematically/faithfully re-heated and re-sensitized, by a basic metal diet of irrational rations, long after “the final warning.”
No comments:
Post a Comment