4Play (Dec. 2009)

 

By Don Allred

Alwood Sisters Band
Friday @ Rumba
Veteran Columbus folk rockers The Alwood Sisters Band’s hopeful reveries can lock into steady, stealthy rhythms, while brushing through sinuous implications, to deliver straight-up balancing acts. Which are necessarily pretty slippery, as in the Alwoods’ rock anthem: “Get it out/Through your mouth/Tell your friends/It’s a lie/It’s about/Getting by/Or better yet/We arrive/Or better yet/Start over.” They’re always starting over, judging by their album, Black Falcon and the Forest Spirit. This bold approach also suggests the gestation of  live discoveries and disclosures

Erik Friedlander
Friday @ Wexner
Cellist Erik Friedlander’s fingerpicking and strumming (bridged by pizzicato plucking) build melodic momentum into impressionistic excursions. Friedlander’s jazz- and folk-fortified tunes also curve around his bows and tuning forks, which can hover like the Northern Lights, while visiting “Rushmore.” That’s on 2007’s  Block Ice and Propane, an album inspired by family expeditions, to explore more than nostalgia. BPAP is now Friedlander’s Wexner-commisioned one-man, multi-media show, including additional music; the cross-country imagery of his father, leading photographer Lee Friedlander; his mother Ava Friedlander’s candid family chronicles; and current fellow traveler-filmmaker Bill Morrison’s restless scenery.

BM Linx
Saturday @ Café Bourbon
BM Linx combine the drive of metal with vividly textured electronic beats. Their current album, Black Entertainment,  is shrewdly mixed by Alan Moulder, who’s worked with  BML’s x-removed antsy ancestors, My Bloody Valentine and Nine Inch Nails. BML channel such extremism through pulp dreams of glory, going gory: “The Outlaw Jimmy Rose” ‘s lost boy seems righteously deluded; ditto the disciplinarians of “Kids On Fire.” “Valentine” ‘s idealistic release raises its own walls, so “the music will separate us”, but BML can’t slow down (they’re too electro-metal-pop for that).

Crystal Antlers
Monday @ Café Bourbon
Even in mellow moments, hairline fractures spread through Crystal Antlers’ shiny, self-enclosed system of armaments and ornaments. Even in shattering passages, they never scatter focal points, usually ready for the compulsive stress tests of this screamo sextet. Elements of garage and classic rock churn and rise through new mental mosaics, into a trash-mashed winter wonderland. On EP and Tentacles, most tracks are short; all are eventful. Key question: “Why must we try/To see with a thousand eyes?”  “Try” and “die” come up a lot in their songs, but that’s life.