4Play (July 2010)

 By Don Allred

JULY 7

Dex Romweber Duo

Saturday @ The Summit

Singer-guitarist Dex Romweber’s ‘80s-indie-incendiary Flat Duo Jets i

nspiredgarage wizard Jack White to produce Dex and his equally seasoned sister Sara's

 current Duo. Their single "Last Kind Word Blues" brings out the

 pre-White Stripes bounce in Sara's slamming drums, while 

White's howl fits Dex's growl. The Romwebers

also seamlessly shift between rising rituals and sudden turns on

 Live At Third Man and Ruins of Berlin. They trace flowers through

 the moonlit bones of romance (and new rainy days)

 in cosmopolitan punkabilly hearts.

The Madison Square Gardeners

Saturday @ The Rumba Cafe

OSU-reared Aaron Lee Tasjan's Madison Square Gardeners draw from punk alley omen Johnny Thunders' Heartbreakers and Tom Petty's crew too, though Petty might not christen a graceful roots rock song "My Ex-Girlfriend's a Big Lesbian on Drugs." Neither TP nor the late Thunders would typically admit, as Tasjan does, "I spend so much time trying not to feel f*cked up/It's f*ckin' me up!" The six-man Gardeners blossom on stage, especially when "Lightning Don't Strike Twice" crowns remedial and advanced students with starry cymbals.

Locusta

Saturday @ Carabar

Columbus plagesters Locusta's press sheet describes them as "blackened" death metal. Indeed, on their self-titled debut album, Locusta deliver ten very similarly spinning graves of ashes, bone chips and clattering insect carapaces, keeping company with the band's historical namesake. A toxicologist  favored by the Emperor Nero, she's surefooted amidst the charred mists of Brad Deerhake's stage whispers, as zombie legions of guitar notes make their rounds on eroded stone streets. They get to stretch and shake on Dusk at the Mausoleum, but shows are where Locusta's death throes take the throne. 

Umphrey's McGee

Tuesday @ The LC Pavilion

Recent audience recordings find jam band Umphrey's McGee expansively focused, as succinct phrases and themes race and pace each other. They can linger lyrically, or swing on singed hinges, as when the Beatles' "Come Together" and Nine Inch Nails' "Closer" mash rusty rock into bent funk, deftly lurching toward gleaming shadows of reggae and blues. Aiming notes and cast-off frustrations at passing moments, UM earn and burn sweet release, while asking themselves and their audience, "Will you still be awake tomorrow?" If you can keep it up, yes.

JULY 14:

The Hold Steady

Wednesday @ Newport Music Hall

On The Hold Steady’s Heaven Is Forever, surviving usual suspects still fuel parties, hookups, and solo flights with breakaway chunks of Craig Finn’s carefully developed themes, as his Minnesota accent, sympathetically absurd tales, and hearty, hungry productions continue to make delinquent connections between Lake Woebegone and early Springsteen. Mostly, Finn’s still trusting his details-obsessed, itchy-fingered kiddies and THS’s neo-classic rock (with a third guitarist and new keyboard player both added for the tour) to slip us through Heaven and other strangely familiar places. 

Nappy Roots

Thursday @ The Basement

When friends at Bowling Green’s Western Kentucky University formed their rap group in the mid-90s, they dubbed themselves Nappy Roots--which had to do with sticking together, and also supposedly uncool cool, definitely “ballin’ on a budget.”  Flaunting what they didn’t have (and couldn’t lose), they went platinum on 2002’s Watermelon, Chicken & Gritz. On their new The Pursuit of Nappyness, themes of positivity and sheer striving get refreshed by restless nuance, and even wicked wit. “Swimmin’ in a fishbowl,” Nappy Roots croon, joking on and savoring city folks’ smooth smoke.

YellowFever

Friday @ Café Bourbon Street

YellowFever’s Sunbelt home zone is bright and bare outside, cloudy and crowded inside. Both feed the need to make a tiny counter-world of punky art-pop, eventually spinning out of (and around) the house. Their self-titled album makes the most of every inflection. You could step on a crack, break your mama’s back, or just fall in. Either way, better keep dancing better. On their new Bermuda Triangle EP,  young singer-guitarist Jennifer Moore often sounds like a European woman, thus very wise, while still playfully and fervently focused on escape and rendezvous.

On Fillmore with Rachel Grimes

Saturday @ Wexner Center

Pianist Rachel Grimes is a member, though not the namesake, of Louisville post-rock ensemble Rachel’s. She’ll perform soulfully ambient, folk-inclusive miniatures from her solo set, Book of Leaves, probably chased with a taste of Satie’s ricochet romance. On Fillmore is acoustic bassist Darin Gray and Wilco drummer Glenn Kotche, whose experiences with marching bands, the Kronos Quartet, vibraphones, homemade and found sounds also re-tune the summer moon on Extended Vacation. Recurring groves of Latin-accented grooves and healthy-lunged (human) birdsongs help dreams get ready to roll.

JULY 21:

Eyedea & Abilities

Wednesday @ Skully’s

Battle-rapper Eyedea established artistic credit with DJ Abilities on First Born, then re-sparked his early flash with sharpened skills on E & A.  Currently, By The Throat ingests lessons and musicians from Eyedea’s freestyle-times-jazz group Face Candy and rock combo Carbon Carousel. The shiny rituals of CC’s “Lather, Rinse, Repent”  now enter hip-hop’s staccato flow and rainbow stew, especially via  By The Throat ‘s sometimes uncannily cannibalistic  “Burn Fetish.” It even tries to fry its own scary claws of plausibility: “Empathy is the poor man’s cocaine.” Yes, but these are bargain-hungry times.

 Citizen Cope

Wednesday @ The LC Pavilion

“This is a song about not givin’ up.”  But it’s reduced to chains of rhymes, so Caribbean garage drums can no longer chop and channel the smoke-cured murmur of Citizen Cope’s typically terse verses into narrative momentum. Still, the song’s title and chorus are “Let the drummer kick it,” which definitely happens on stage. Keyboards, bass and guitar also roll urban folk journeyman Cope through an overcast world, as he searches for, courts and defends his love, especially when she’s a liberated, forty-foot billboard woman. The police are so jealous.

Fool’s Gold

Friday @ The Summit

The sliding poise and eloquent chatter of guitars instantly open “Surprise Hotel,” where it wouldn’t be surprising to find Fool’s Gold partying with Extra Golden, Toubab Krewe and Tinariwen,  who previously connected Columbus to electric crosscurrents of African and American music. Primed by “Hotel...,” their self-titled debut album also spins Fool’s Gold through Middle Eastern, Indonesian and Latin refractions, polyrhythmically orbiting their name’s cautionary, anti-utopian irony. “Nadine, please don’t bear your soul to me,” is a heartfelt serenade, from  the lush, sun-brushed depths of Los Angeles-based FG’s kaleidoscopic focus.

Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue

Friday @ Arch Park (McFerson Commons)

“Can you show me something beautiful?” The singer’s voice is young and hopeful, though his melody isn’t that far from Hot Chocolate’s ancient  hit, “You Sexy Thing.” But what are those strangely familiar power chords, slightly south of the border?  Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews, headliner of this summer’s Hot Ribs, Cool Jazz Festival, loves Latin inflections and “Back in Black” too. Mellow and metal colors harmonize with the syncopation and funk of his band, Orleans Avenue, surely as mercurial ballads and hip-hop suit Trombone Shorty’s comfortably stratospheric trumpet.

JULY 28

Chuck Prophet

Saturday @  The Maennerchor

A guy’s watching some Mel Gibson movie, and calling a lady, about “Band-Aids, from the night we patched things up/I got the box right here/If I could hold that moment to my chest/I swear I’d disappear/Would you still love me?” Like his characters, Western alt.country-rock early warning Chuck Prophet (formerly of dusty neon Green On Red) pushes luck. But/and on stage, definitely including these solo shows, Prophet’s tautly tuneful guitar can tap cracked spectacles of bare necessity. Even “Love won’t keep us apart.” 

Freelance Whales

Wednesday @ The Basement

Freelance Whales’ native habitat is the subway platform. There, or just about anywhere, they can breeze through selections from their studio debut, Weathervanes. carrying nostalgia and flimsy whimsy up into a refreshed, open-air mesh of everyday mazes. This mesh was already stronger than cobwebs, but now it smells better too.  Adaptable combinations of acoustic and electronic instruments are practical and  atmospheric. Some good lines get repeated many times, but they and the audience have handy melodies to settle in, like the beloved ghost in some songs has its peaceful socket.

Hamell On Trial

Saturday @ The Rumba Cafe

Come to think of it, human ash isn’t powdery enough to be snorted, at least not straight from the crematorium, as Ed Hamell’s friend supposedly did, supposedly by accident. But picky details probably won’t materialize in your skull while experiencing Hamell On Trial, one-man folk-punk band. Hamell applies caustically comic timing  to songs, sometimes in dazzling cycles; ditto casually attention-appropriating stories, confessions, conversations, and insults. He’s also a secret romantic. If you want  to bring that (or any other bright insights) up to him, go right ahead.

The National

Monday @ The LC Pavilion

“I was carried to Ohio, in a swarm of bees,” reminisces Cincy-to-Brooklyn post-post-punk-revival art rockers The National‘s Matt Berninger---no stork for him---as his big ol’ warm plaid voice and venturing imagery can suggest OH-to-UK cult figure Scott Walker. Raw impulses and results are expertly negotiated with the rest of the band and ritualized, amid the streetlights and sails of High Violet. As Berninger mentions, “It always matters more than we know.” So he carefully applies a lingering touch to portraits of his night-eyed muse-objects, can kid his sadcore writing onstage, and gets ready for The National’s very live cover of Psychedelic Furs’ ”Pretty In Pink.”