By Don Allred
NOV. 4:
Oberhofer/Morning Benders
Wednesday @ The Basement
Jilted, jolted, defensive, bruised and resolute, Brooklyn indie rock crew Oberhofer’s breakup songs stick a tuning fork in stinky fluorescent smog. They’re ready to take stockpiles of gifted thrift store sounds on the road. Oberhofer’s promising hangover remedies are further schooled by poised sophomores the Morning Benders; whose 2010 album Big Echo disclaims. “I can’t help thinkin’ we grew up too fast/I know this won’t last.” Yet while riding such surging, surefooted choruses, the Benders aim straight ahead.
Vanity Theft
Friday @ Circus
Alice Grodecki guides Dayton-based girl gang Vanity Theft’s post-Catholic/ gothic reflections through love’s graveyard, eternally busting a faithless accomplice. If only he’d grab all the baroque lines and catchy dynamics she feeds, bleeds, and leads him with, rising to the occasion. Vanity Theft’s undeniable pop-rock flair shreds shades of new wave and electro-beats. Yet Grodecki’s committed to wrestling with truth, not settling for easy cheese. So who knows how it will go, but meanwhile, like the leather siren sings, “You better get what you came for!”
Keelhaul/Russian Circles
Friday @ The Ravari Room
On Triumphant Return To Obscurity, Cleveland quartet Keelhaul recycle hardcore punk and metal, too sardonically jaded for Satan. But discontent pushes back, guitars scratch like matches, and drummer Will Scharf swings dead ends like a magic landlord. Nowadays, Keelhaul frequently appears with art-metal trio Russian Circles, whose studio orchestral album Geneva can get cooked into melodies rising like steam and winter breath on stage. Their music’s rich and austere simultaneously, as doom gets its chance for renewal, just like (almost) everything else.
Mountain Man
Saturday @ Newport Music Hall
Mountain Man are three young women who explore and savor dimensions and implications of everyday imagery, in mostly a cappella harmonies. Emotions also harmonize, so whether you hear them singing “You make my bread and my wine” or “You make my red in my white,” it sounds right. Like Emily Dickinson and the most talented service workers, Mountain Man’s true folk tradition lies in fluidly, boldly editing the stories worth sticking to. They cut their losses and wins into a shapely path.
NOV. 10:
Brendan Benson/Posies
Wednesday @ Outland
Brendan Benson and the White Stripes’ Jack White formed the Raconteurs with members of Cincinnati’s Greenhornes, determined to shake their shared garage band roots free of stale nostalgia. On Benson’s solo album, My Old, Familiar Friend, relationships rattle catchy chains and rainbows of 60s/00s style, as history and mystery go steady. Benson’s currently backed by the Posies, whose own set includes recent songs from Blood/Candy. Their riverside reveries and coded constellations take a sly, hungry look at sweet machines all around us.
Pretty Lights
Thursday @ Bar of Modern Art
Pretty Lights is DJ/producer Derek Vincent Smith, traveling with jazz/hip-hop drummer Adam Deitch. Smith seeded 2010 with metal chesnut “Final Countdown”, which becomes strenuously life-affirming gospel science, right before J.J. Cale’s “After Midnight” calmly pursues Gregg Allman’s “Midnight Rider” over spinning borders. Making Up A Changing Mind ‘s poetic distortion is no more paradoxical than the blues, as a mutating sample spells out: “I know you been hurt/By somebody else/I can tell by the way/You carry yourself.”
The Blow with Melissa Dyne
Friday @ The Wexner Center
The Blow is Khaela Maricich, whose storytelling and indie art pop songs grow through each other on stage, accompanied by multi-media wizard Melissa Dyne. It’s a tricky process, but that’s the point, especially when electro-beats lure us though the gleaming surfaces and dilating depths of her current album, Paper Television. Some plausibly outrageous scenes could overwhelm, if The Blow didn’t sound so innocently, inescapably observant and hopeful. Here/s an eye and ear for “the thin line/Between love and delusion.”
Bottomless Pit
Sunday @ The Treehouse
Sharp lines find their way through the mellow undertow of baritone guitar and bass, as post-punk veterans Bottomless Pit’s lead player Andy Cohen murmurs: “Backwoods in my blood/Sure as sitting ducks.” On Blood Under The Bridge, the swaggering, jagged “Summerwind” finds him hustling city slickers, and such skills even discover new ways to deliver sincere messages like “Kiss Them All For Me,” though the meter’s always running. Subtle vocals even suggest that BT is potentially a world-class backup band, so all you budding rock gods better check them out.
NOV. 17:
Benise
Wednesday @ the Palace Theatre
Nebraska kid Roni Benise started his own global pop occupation of L.A. streets with performers who sparked the genesis of his current stage saga and album, The Spanish Guitar. Singer-guitarist Benise travels through multi-media evocations of Arabian deserts, ancient Indian Buddhist temples, Havana’s oldest streets, Brazil, Paris, Venice and (oh yeah) Spain. Gorgeously versatile dancers best extend Benise’s flamenco-centric spin.
Bonded By Blood/Overkill/Gama Bomb/Forbidden
Wednesday @ Newport Music Hall
Having taken their name from an early 80s album by punk-influenced thrash (and early Metallica) inspirations Exodus, BBB do their best to live up to their chosen mission on Exiled To Earth. Bobby Blitz’s indestructible wail also evokes the no-frills thrills of Exodus peers Overkill’s 2010 Ironbound. They’re accompanied by sardonically imaginative Irishmen Gama Bomb and even seldom-touring Forbidden, whose Omega Wave queries/quarries whether Earth’s final crisis isn’t culturally conditioned, self-fulfilling prophecy. Fortunately, negative energy is still one rockin’ resource
La Otracina
Thursday @ Carabar
Psychedelic power trio La Otracina believe in climate change. Drummer Adam Kriney kicks off Reality Has Got To Die with the hearty cry, “Hail fire!” It’s the cue for us all to shed a little more skin, as cold equations get fried and due processes get served another way of rounding up usual and unusual suspects. Hungry young metal dinosaurs, progressive cavemen, tasty classical comets, fluid druids and jazz-rock schemes trace boogie-blues convertible dreams through wide-awake eyes and ears, on a star chart still being tattooed.
Adam Stephens/Felice Brothers
Friday @ The Rumba Cafe
Indie rockers Two Gallants’ underdog persistence invigorates TG co-leader Adam Stephens’ solo album, We Live On Cliffs. It’s elegantly distinctive, until soulfully bereft balladeer Stephens starts illin’ like a re-cycled Dylan. But compatibly with the real Mr. D., Stephens can be cosmically/comically cranky and confessional, as his own muse steals him back for another last dance. The Felice Brothers’ streetwise Americana befits mountaineers who played the subways in more ways than one. Check their self-titled debut and Yonder Is The Clock.
NOV 24:
Times New Viking
Wednesday@ Carabar
True to the punk tradition, Columbus-based trio Times New Viking are art school drop-outs, who learned to play on stage and in their own basement studio/fortress, at variously tested North Campus addresses. TNV allow(?) some of their most consistently intelligible lines to spell out: “”I make the same mistake every day/I walk the streets and say/’Everything will be all right!’ ” That’s what seems to rattle these resonant structures persistently glimpsed through traffic. Ditto, “I get nervous when I’m high.”
Hot 17 Showcase
Saturday @ The Rumba Cafe
The Hot 17 is a new annual guide to Columbus’ independent musicians, featuring contributions by area writers and photographers. Tonight’s showcase presents harmonically dynamic art-pop sextet Karate Coyote, plus garage pilgrims Mors Ontologica’s unstoppably personal testimony regarding the OSU-verse. Also, Low Men bracingly reel in “Forgotten War” and other exported realities, while singer/songwriter Jason Quicksall deftly deploys all the melodies, metaphors and rhythmic strategies required to keep sight of himself as a moving target of complex clarity.
Charles Walker Band/Stretch Lefty/Mojoflo
Saturday @ Skully’s Music Diner
The Charles Walker Band specializes in dance-worthy r&b, funk and blues, with diva Porsche Carmon electrically conducting us through original songs, from acerbic social commentary to astutely grooving ballads .Also, saxophonist/keyboard player Walker leads a tidal surge through Mississippi wizard Robert Johnson’s “Stones In My Passway.” Other covers include James Brown’s “Get Up Offa That Thing” and Hound Dog Taylor’s “Gimme Back My Wig.” Columbus’ Stretch Lefty and Mojoflo compatibly add reggae and hip-hop to the roots-rich mix.
Young The Giant
Monday @ Newport Music Hall
Young The Giant’s self-titled debut album begins with the plausibly self-observant spin of a mental romantic, venturing forth into a balancing act of expansively taut tunes and quirky lyrics. Hit-wise, YTG hopefully won’t need their slide into post-yacht rock for economically (and otherwise) inhibited, yet Red Bull-sipping sons of the beach, antsy enough to fantasy dance. Even as such, they score some good stuff, with subtly exotic instrumental vigor always encouraging the singing mastermind to go for real-life gusto, especially on stage.
DEC. 10;
Freelance Whales/Miniature Tigers
Friday @ The Basement
Indie art-pop kiddies Freelance Whales have been tagged as "twee",
but especially live, there's also something hard-nosed and practical
about the compact, levitating density of this former sidewalk/subway
platform band. Five-part harmonies infiltrate stringed instruments,
glockenspiels, drums and sustained keyboard chords, like the rowdy
ghost breezing through FW's debut album, Weathervanes. Miniature
Tigers tenaciously swept love's ashes through the Phoenix-to-Hollywood
mirages of 2008's Tell It To The Volcano, and showtime can bring
sharper focus to the stylish highlights of 2010's Fortress.
Question Mark and the Mysterians/Professors
Saturday @ The Shrunken Head
"The shadows were all I had/Until you came into my life," garage
pioneer Question Mark drawls in "Got To." Whether or not his seemingly
fickle muse actually ended up crying "96 Tears", she definitely
Inspired all of QMM's 1966 classics. The original combo still
cogently mixes punky, speedy blues with Motown-informed flow
. Mysterians peers The Professors are veterans of Central Ohio's
Dantes, Dominions and Mods.They cover the Stones, Beatles,
Animals, even Dylan and the Byrds, in sonic strobe lights.
Here Come The Mummies
Saturday @ Newport Music Hall
Here Come The Mummies are reputedly full-time members of other bands
plus first-call session players, keeping all contracted identities
literally under wraps. With a line-up averaging nine members, counting
the full horn section, their rich vocal and instrumental harmonies
evoke Senior Prom and pep rally resplendence, plus band bus attitude,
as satire and sheer exuberance get acquainted. Grown-up proficiency
rolls though elements of Ellington, Chicago, yacht rock, and
Parliament-Funkadelic. Salty social commentary even celebrates limits
of originality, in expansively pungent perspective.
Buke & Gass
Tuesday @ Kobo
Buke is Arone Dyer, who sings and plays a plugged-in, customized
baritone ukelele, with added pick-ups and strings. She can
simultaneously play an Indian keyboard banjo, via some of her pedals.
Pedals (triggering home-grown electronic sources and kick drums, for
instance) are also employed by Gass, AKA Aron Sanchez, whose electric
bass's range is extended with guitar strings. Buke's youthful voice
and tunes swing confidence and anxiety through the emphatic momentum
of rough-edged, adventurously analytical acid-folk-rock. She's an
"achin' pagan," and a better-equipped Cinderella.
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