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.