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.