4Play (Nov. 2009)

 By Don Allred

NOV. 8:

The Devil Makes Three
Wednesday @ Carabar 

The Devil Makes Three make the kind of pre-bluegrass, mountain-bred music that traveled through vaudeville halls, carnivals, radios, alleys, and less hygienic vantage points. On DM3’s  Do Wrong Right, ragtime bounce and contemporary commentary ride boxcars with the eerie likes of “Working Man’s Blues.” The working man’s steadfast, even militant, though subterranean musical undercurrents may be undermining (and/or guiding) this miner. Even on less inspired tracks, preachiness always arrives with some generation of devilishness, often ramblin’ ‘round leader Pete Bernhard’s sense of moral and verbal limits.
 

Justin Townes Earle
Thursday @ Newport
So far, singer-songwriter Justin Townes Earle’s post-rehab albums don’t have the range (or ranginess) of his father Steve’s own prodigal peaks. No problem: the reflective alertness and hopeful smoothness of  Midnight At The Movies strongly suggest that the younger Earle’s his own kind of escape artist, thankful for the breathing room he’s earned, and the floor plans he’s committed to memory.  More expansively, on  The Good Life, Earle’s striding through honky tonk neon shadows, thoughtfully singing to passing lovers and friends, while exercising his still-young lungs with that bracing night life air.
 

Chostface Killah
Saturday @ Skully’s
Rapper Ghostface Killah goes from strength to strength, never complacently.  Raekwon’s recent  Only Built For Cuban Links 2 finds GK still rattled by everyday body counts. GK’s own  Ghostdini: The Wizard of Poetry in Emerald City sleeplessly seeks and dreamily finds a lady, reading books, while wearing designer glasses (and short shorts). Still, he has to ask: “Have you got what it takes/To get in my will? “ Ghostdini… explores domestic happiness like it’s an r & b fairy tale, tirelessly remodeled by serious comedy’s chills and thrills.
 

Fever Fever
Sunday @ Basement
On Columbus combo Fever Fever’s new album, LoveQuest, the lead singer quickly finds everything but hope. He joins other voices, veering through the star charts of synth-rock machines. Such gleaming vessels could become ends, not means, but Fever Fever decline the opportunity.  They bail, falling to “Sweet Eden”, which promises, “If you can shape it in your mind/You can find it in your life”, while “the wonders of the world” wait so patiently.  LoveQuest ‘s sweet mysteries of life continue, minus excess calories, as Fever Fever carefully burn on.

NOV.11: 

The Blastronauts
Wednesday @ Skully’s
A flock of budget electronics, strongly suggesting feathers, eyes, beaks, claws, screeches and songs, fly around and through the guitar necks and drumsticks of The Blastronauts. It’s all happening in the funky telescope of  Galileo, the first of four EPs celebrating astronomers. Whether or not the psych-pop Blastronauts have, like G., been shown the instruments of torture, they’re jauntily bitter, cheerfully defiant, even tunefully raucous. They’re also community-minded, so flock to this benefit for the Full Belly Food Drive, co-starring The Loyal Divide and The Town Monster. Yum!

Red Fang
Friday @ Summit
It’s really industriously evil, the way that “sludge” has crept into reviewers’ complimentary box of chocolates. But it does fit the way Red Fang’s self-titled debut’s thick tide suddenly rises into the long shadow of punk ‘n’ metal history. That’s where the sludge mostly grows blessedly efficient critters. “Prehistoric Dog” sets the pace, stomping and shuffling between Rufus Thomas’s Memphis out-cat special, “Walking The Dog,” and the Stooges’ basement-bred “I Wanna Be Your Dog.“ Yeah, it’s basically familiar stuff, but can inspire the ancient RF mutants’ cry, “Humans remain/Human remains!”

John McCutcheon
Sunday @ Unitarian Universalist Church
“Our chins a-drool with sticky bliss/Eyes rolled back in our heads/Next to a three-piece business suit/And a homeless guy in dreads.” Folksinger/multi-instrumentalist John McCutcheon’s floating through doughnut heaven, in “Krispy Kreme.” He also knows that, “Like beauty too/Its time is fleet,” so get ‘em fresh-baked. McCutcheon learned a lot in Appalachia, and most other places. On TV, he hears about “Sara Tucholsky,” a senior citizen with a blown-out knee, trying to make every base so her home run will count. Everything McCutcheon sings about counts.

Aloud
Tuesday @ Bernie’s
Henry Beguiristain could make elegantly sad young music; so could Jen de la Osa —but when he contemplates being “fatalistic”, she rhymes it with “sadistic.”  Aloud’s  Fan The Fury updates X’s Exene Cervenka and John Doe’s dynamically domestic civil war, now spilling into the streets and vice versa, as hyper-aware, media-bombarded harmonies and discord fall into place and fly by, between the sheets and screens. The personal and the political trust and bust, while Aloud’s co-leaders’ voices and guitars insist, “The end will be our beginning,” once again. 

NOV 18:

Carrie Rodriguez
Thursday @ Circus
On young singer-songwriter Carrie Rodriguez’s new Live in Louisville, atmospherically detailed stories are told boldly, as variations of key phrases veer through the resolutely shivery delivery of her violin and other instruments, times the evocative electric guitar of Hans Holzen (present tonight). Rodriguez also steps up to Tammy Wynette’s Loretta Lynn-worthy “I Don’t Wanna Play House,” and briskly uncovers sexy subtext in Bill Monroe’s magisterial “You Won’t Be Satisfied That Way.”  Micro-epic outbursts and mercurial ballads never chase the nice clouds away, or the slow male she’s usually addressing
 

Digital Leather
Friday @ Summit
Digital Leather’s  Warm Brother emits analog-sounding electronic heat, rumbling impatiently, deep in the shed. When the door’s rolled up, there’s more of a fleshy humidity, a startling proximity to Shawn Foree’s engagingly idiosyncratic reports from the backside of somewhere. It’s a backside strangely recognizable; ditto Foree’s rough-edged,  musical tattoos, bright and dark and bitter as ink. He ceremonially preserves the feeling of real love, and the protective sense of illusion too. So deep-enough warmth rides home-made synth-rock, (even pop, sometimes), while murmuring, “You’ll be fine. Not now. Maybe later.” Amen, Brother!
 

The Black Hollies
Sunday @ Summit
“She’s a collision of hues/She’ll take you further, my friend.” As far as possible, psych-pop journeymen The Black Hollies track and sort such collisions through their kaleidoscopes. But, on 2008’s  Casting Shadows, girls blow sensitive tour guide Justin Morey’s mind. Excitable drums and guitars encourage him to leave arty gardens for strobe-lit dance floors and relationship trips. On 2009’s  Softly Towards The Light, surging sonic urges actually battle very prominent, respectable vocals and keyboards. That’s exciting too. Especially with girls possibly watching, while surely preparing to ascend once again.
 

The Flatlanders
Sunday @ Maennerchor
“With a backpack full of yesterdays/On a freeway full of smoke and haze/Where the power lines and fault lines double cross.” From country cliché to California evening news to righteous wordplay that eventually slips deeper, the dustbowl soul of the Flatlanders’ Hills and Valleys rolls on, through all zones. Alt.country pioneers Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Joe Ely and Butch Hancock, mostly writing together, are philosophical scavengers, poised and antsy. Years and miles definitely (sometimes densely) add up, but meanwhile, “If time is money/Space is credit/They’re talkin’ ‘bout it all over town!”