4Play (Oct. 2009)

By Don Allred

OCT. 7: 

Sea Wolf
Wednesday @ Wexner 

Singer-songwriter Alex Brown Church’s advertised literary appeal is musically useful, if old-fashioned. His latest saga, White Water, White Bloom, opens with promises of “dark sapphire blood,” before being transported by “A vision of veils/Shimmering white,” and so on. Nevertheless, Church’s received, observed, and dream-charted imagery swirls into oceanic currents. Strong strings, keyboards and percussion sail a stalwart craft, which may visit a peacefully open farmhouse, or the unventilated vehicle of a Flying Dutchman-like, riverside driver. Sea Wolf is a canny crew, and Cap’n Church never goes overboard. 

Dinosaur Jr.
Saturday @ Newport
 As a garage power trio in the glamorous ‘80s, Dinosaur Jr. indeed seemed like adolescent dinosaur rockers, with ravenously retro-refrying appetites for early punk, metal, psych, and neurotic serenades. On 2009’s Farm, as always, J. Mascis’s old-kid voice provides the drawling set-up for his tirelessly wired guitar. The guitar faithfully provides glimpses of a  mellow undertow, as Lou Barlow’s bass and Murph’s drums barely/expertly control surging urges. They also slyly salute their students, Pearl Jam and Nirvana. Their recent Daytrotter Sessions find older songs still filled with live Dinosaur Jr. DNA.
 

Islands
Monday @ Newport
The third Islands album, Vapours, initially foregrounds sole Islands constant Nick Thorburn’s deadpan delivery of dark tales, against too-similar, subdued settings. Then “On Foreigner” finds him keening like a lonely Beach Boy, tempting himself into the second half’s waves of synthesized immortality.  Web-preserved Islands shows (currently including co-founder Jamie Thompson) can be just as eerily gratifying.
 

Sian Alice Group
Tuesday @ Circus
Sian Alice Group have no “the” in their name: they’re too militantly minimalist for that. Their new album, Troubled, Shaken, Etc., expresses just enough, mostly. Instrumental clues (dry and juicy beats, tilting pianos, sneaky bass notes) can lead to the revelatory melodies of Siam Ahem, when her voice veers through understated drama. ”Close to the Ground” is flat, but several others grow starry orchards. Shades of gray in “The Low Lights” turn out to be reflectively chrome-plated, thanks to tiny, metallic guitars streaming by, as they do on tour.
 
OCT. 14:

STS9
Thursday @ Newport
STS9 (full name: Sound Tribe Sector 9) migrate through jam-mutating connections between speedy, eerie, early ‘70s funk, and digital soundtracks of video games our parents might have approved (at first, anyway). STS9’s new single, “Atlas”, simultaneously suggests aerial ballet and insistent knocking on the back door. “Atlas” is from their forthcoming  Ad Explorata, supposedly the motto of a Cold War satellite intelligence group who detected signals from  “another civilization in our galaxy”, as STS9 excitedly whisper. This bright-eyed, hothouse mix of paranoia, titillation and community fuels their night-flying buzz. All aboard!
 

Sunset Rubdown
Monday @ Summit
Spencer Krug gets the living room rituals going on Sunset Rubdown’s  Dragonslayer, where his supple chants function like the cues of an Appalachian shape-note choir director. The band’s response seems wild at first, but (as with shape-note), it soon makes some winding kind of sense, when instrument-trading, singing players lead the way through Krug’s dense, rich imagery. He restlessly testifies about wise men, lovers and fools (everybody, definitely including himself), and Sunset Rubdown keeps them/us all rising and falling, on the vibrant merry-go-round of acid-folk-rock’s magic lantern sound.
 

Dethklok
Tuesday @ LC
Dethklok are anime stars of Adult Swim’s “Metalocalypse,” on the Cartoon Network. On stage, giant images of Dethklok revel, as a flesh group toils and boils in the shadows. Most of Dethklok’s traveling humans also appear on The Dethalbum II, led by “Metalocalypse” co-creator/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Brendon Small.  Small’s growl rides his constant guitar arpeggios through efficiently scorched soundscapes. It’s all snakes jumping out of a can on a plane, doubtlessly taken further by the touring band’s excellent addition of Mike Keneally, Frank Zappa’s designated “stunt guitarist.” (Also performing: Mastodon, Converge, and High On Fire.)
 

Without A Face
Tuesday @ Basement
“I ain’t got a band/So don’t you give me a chance/Papa Roach fans!” Also known as Henry Dillard, a 23-year old, contrarian Texan, Mr. Face displays a pleasingly piercing tenor on Worst Debut Album Ever. Somewhat reminiscent of a one-man, unplugged, albeit wired They Might Be Giants, he’s evidently also a student of Loudon Wainwright III, circa “Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road,” and a confirmed protégé of nerdcore lords Ludo, whose intriguing side project, The New Heathers, will be appearing with Without A Face.

OCT. 21

Antje Duvekot
Thursday @ Victorian’s 

Singer-songwriter Antje Duvekot, whose "Black Annis" and vocals appeared on Reunion, the studio and live CD/DVD by Dublin, OH's  2006 Irish Festival star performers Solas, combines a cute, girlish voice with a knowing, fluid lucidity. Past the fatalistically earthbound “Vertigo,” The Near Demise of the Tightrope Dancer observantly travels through clouds of imagery, tracked by subtle, sometimes sneaky rhythms and other connections: “In the interest of pride/We carry our shame along” comes up in a geopolitical context, but just may relate back to the same song’s “Summer boys with restless hands” too, if that’s where your restless mind takes you. (Though she’s much more interested in games than shame.) (see also: https://mycolone.blogspot.com/2025/07/solas-system-burnin-down-cottage-aug.html )
 

Six Finger Satellite
Saturday @ Summit
A Good Year for Hardness is the second set dropped since these pre-neo-post-punk-funksters (who once included future LCD Soundsystem mastermind James Murphy) reassembled, in jigsaw jubilation.  Dr Frankenstein and his neurotic monster can’t touch this scientific quartet and its garage golem, J. Ryan, fearlessly working out with dead soul heroes and everything else this world has to offer. Ryan’s dancing head eventually dips way down and sideways, then comes back up, very far! Before “Drinkin’ deep/From the muddy waters/Makin’ time/ For all the sons and the daughters,” once more.
 

Gogol Bordello
Thursday @ Newport
His magnificent mustache and gypsy heritage notwithstanding, vocalist-impresario Eugene Utz resembles a loose-limbed, yet down-to-earth Ukrainian farmer, always ready for the fantastic machine that is Gogol Bordello. GB harvests hybrid acres of jazz, metal, art-pop, klezmer, and other worlds of musical love, especially live. GB’s new CD/DVD release, Live From Axis Mundi, gathers studio rarities as well as concerts, for rocking parallels to George Clinton’s P-Funk All-Stars and Sun Ra’s Arkestra, with Utz as the classic provocateur, who knows when to get the hell out of the way.
 

This Is My Suitcase
Tuesday @ Skully’s
Ever wondered what it might feel like, to have “Seinfeld” ’s Kramer drop that Junior Mint into your open incision? Listen to Columbus sextet This Is My Suitcase’s The Keys To Cat Heaven,  and wonder no more. Or wonder differently, as TIMS’s Joe Camerlengo   shudders and calls from the other side of a spinning sugar blast of extreme psych-pop. Surgical urges disrupt sweet sounds, and vice versa, then both are cut short, via fifteen zigzagging tracks. Still, these Keys may well fit better, in this evening’s (free!) operation.

 OCT. 28:
 

Meg & Dia
Saturday @ Newport
Dia Frampton is “taking a taxi to Kentucky.”(Wait, aren’t she and her sister Meg from Utah?) She’s stocked clothes, shoes, paintings—whatever’s necessary, to cover “skeletons in my bed.”  Something Real, M & D’s debut, compellingly sought an ideal combination of honest complexity and pop-rock appeal. Here, Here, and Here sounds more lived-in, and more artfully extrapolated from the interplay of voices and dramas. Each correspondent’s always reeling in her own guy to wrestle with, while spinning out crisp, tuneful, dizzyingly detailed critiques, before, during and after the occasional “Goodbye.”
 

The Blakes
Saturday @ Café Bourbon
 The Blakes raise swaying walls of garage-y sound, in free downloads on the Daytrotter site. Yet they’ve also intimately inquiring: “Lyin’ next to me/Explain what’s in your eyes/If you’re not with another man/I’d like to be with you for a while.” Whether or not “2 Times” inhabits a literal orgy (like “Magoo”), the Blakes are considerate. On their more refined, still expressive CD,  Souvenir, they know “I’ll never hurt you” is the best way to warn a woman. They always sound so wistfully twisted (Black Lips fans take note).
 

The Dead Trees
Tuesday @ Newport
The Dead Trees make what Western land barons call “wise use” of rock’s country resources. Even when sardonically empathetic verbal zingers fall short, guitars, bass and drums come strutting, to present corrosively flourished, charcoal valentines. Their current album, King of Rosa, suggests “Dead Flowers”-era Stones (ditto the Kinks and Cracker), but the Trees ease through new-enough twists in hard-boiled nostalgia and other sentiments. “Rayna”, a newly posted demo, salutes an elusive bank robber, finding cold cash consolation for being one of those women whom men never see.
 

Bob Dylan
Tuesday @ The LC
“Things could explode or retreat back at any time, and there would be no way to predict the consciousness of any song.” Switching from traditional two-beat strumming to “thematic triplets” liberated Dylan’s live performances, at least as depicted in his memoir, Chronicles. This leg of the Never Ending Tour has been given a hotfoot by the return of Texas guitarslinger Charlie Sexton. Meanwhile, on  Christmas In The Heart, Dylan prowls “The Christmas Blues” like a lonesome cowpoke, before finding harmonic bliss on “Christmas Island.” He also polkas through the Brave Comboesque “Must Be Santa”: “Special night! /Is it right!” No question!