4Play (Sept. 2009)

4Play
By Don Allred

SEPT. 5:

Cage The Elephant
Thursday @ The LC
“I’m an anti-social anarchist/I sound like so-and-so/Another Generation X/Who slipped up through the cracks.” Introducing Cage The Elephant’s self-titled debut, Brad Schultz flaunts the cranky cracks his Kentucky Anglophilia attracts. CTE celebrate attitude with funky, street-watching inclusiveness (theme song: “Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked.”) Though they also casually tighten the noose around "Judas,” Schultz is a non-self-righteous pilgrim and sinner, sometimes ingesting and confessing to holy wars and other active ingredients, while slipping around the flames of devilishly clever guitars. Live recordings suggest that  he sometimes lags, but the players don’t.
 

Silversun Pickups
Thursday @ The LC
On Swoon, their second album, Silversun Pickups venture beyond Smashing Pumpkins influences, as harmonics swoop around fuzzy pulsars and cinematic black holes, while guitarist Brian Aubert no longer bothers with a Billy Corganesque auto-yowl. His own sweet little voice delivers key lines, like “It’s nice that you work alone.”  Extended range is also demonstrated when orchestrated urges project into “The Royal We” and other grand tombs, now reclaimed.  Silversun Pickups are dream merchants, so: just go to their show, take something to hold onto, and prepare to be saturated.  

Langhorne Slim
Monday @ Summit
As chronicled on Youtube and Daytrotter, the rootsy, acoustic guitar-strumming Langhorne Slim, who travels dusty roads with his upright bassist and drummer, always was lured toward civilization. Be Set Free‘s, silkier, yet more mercurially responsive studio sounds further school his approach, which is getting to be stardust hobo-to-chimneysweep pop, like Simply Red’s “Holding Back The Years.” This notorious lover always has to re-group, as when he suddenly exclaims, “Wait! I’ll be good!” (Dramatic pause.) “For a little while.” Slim also empathetically serenades  “Cinderella”:  “I know what it’s like to be left out/I wanna be left out with you!”  Rejection is Slim’s most richly entertaining reward.
 

The Vandermark 5
Tuesday @ Wex
The Vandermark 5 adds up to one sporty, self-customized vehicle on the more rugged roadways of contemporary jazz. 2008’s The Beat Reader finds the V5 bopping and beeping down a crowded “Speedway,” before cruising, lights off, through the slowly spreading, skyline shadows of a ballad, “Any Given Number.” Electric cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm can be mellow, but his bowing, and maybe a wah-wah pedal, often provide sizzling rainbow rides; he can lead the way through seeming dead ends, even when the V5 spins, with cut brakes, on thin salty ice (spelling out C. H. I. G. A. G. O., their home town).
 

SEPT, 16:
 

Bad Veins
Wednesday @ Skully’s
Some early crooners sang through megaphones: lonely guys, calling your name. Bad Veins’ Benjamin Davis has the heart and the megaphone; plus guitars, keyboards, a reel-to-reel recorder (bearing up to 70 tracks of orchestration), and Sebastien Schultz’s walking city of drums. These nurture these Cincy sinners’ shows, and their self-titled debut, where warm old sounds splatter Davis’s flowery sentiments with muddy gold. It’s all good; they’re well on the alt-pop-rock road to love. They just have to pace themselves and their ripening formula. So far, they do.
 

The Books
Thursday @ Wexner
The Books play (and sample) plucked, strummed and bowed instruments, while talking and singing with countless other sounds, also sampled (and played).  Waves of fragments move calmly, and, on their first album, The Lemon of Pink, venerable voices provide “helpful” gibberish. The Books like to ricochet through such decay, although the subsequent Lost & Save risks spelling this out a little too plainly, before zigzagging through unexpected insights and comedy. Their new version of Nick Drake’s “Cello Song,” feat. Jose Gonzalez and rec. for the Red Hot Organization’s AIDS charity comp Dark Was The Night,  even grooves with the glitches of a reviewer’s cheapo CD-R!
 

GWAR
Saturday @ Newport
 A former employee of the Magnolia Thunderpussy record store remembers getting a call while GWAR were visiting. “I just want the new Belle and Sebastian,” a little voice whispered, lest GWAR overhear! Yet these metal deities (Beavis and Butthead’s eternal inspiration) often cite even graver sins. On  Lust In Space, they still want to rid the Earth of its polluting humanity. But we’re also GWAR’S eternal inspiration, fueling furiously efficient blood harvests. They earn their Octoberfest, in “Metal Metal Land/Where everything is hard/Except the test you take/So you can drive your car!”
 

Lucero
Saturday @ Rumba
“Jenny lights her cigarette/Wonders how she got in this mess.” Such lines somewhat justify Lucero’s Ben Neill getting called “the Southern Bruce Springsteen,” but Neill sings faster, deftly leaving skid marks on notes. Notes do get delivered, even when Lucero loom like hot boxcars, on  Rebels, Rogues & Sworn Brothers.  Here,  passing reflections of troubled females tend to justify (and revitalize) familiar-sounding, manly striving. As also happens when “her freedom’s drifting like smoke, “ through Lucero’s new single, “Smoke.” It’s not great, but the moody muse sure has these Southerners rising again.

Mt. St. Helens Vietnam Band
Monday @ The Summit
Despite their geeky name, Mt. St. Helens Vietnam Band’s self-titled debut album offers reggae-tinged, sufficiently-rocking melodrama.  MSHVB’s sound and sensibility evoke the early Police, who toured the backside of America in an old van. MSHVB’s Benjamin Verdoes has that brash desperation, especially when busted for it: “You say I robbed you blind/I just don’t see it/I bet that you don’t gamble!” He keeps chasing the object of  romantic obsessions between bright, battered instruments, which try to trip him up (he deserves it).


SEPT. 23: 

Wino
Thursday @ Newport
Since the early ‘80s, Scott “Wino” Weinrich’s guitar and vocals have tapped the fertile graveyard of early ‘70s metal, while driving The Obsessed, Saint Vitus, Spirit Caravan, and The Hidden Hand.  His strenuous regeneration further energizes the self-titled debut of Shrine Builder, a methodically earth-moving super-group. Wino’s show takes off from his already airborne, exhilarating solo album, Punctuated Equilibrium, with the same drummer, Jean Paul Gaster (of Clutch, who are also performing), and new bassist Brian White. They bring eternal spring to ever-lurking darkness, and vice versa, naturally.
 

Rosewood Thieves
Thursday @ Oldfield’s
Heartaches By The Pound is The Rosewood Thieves’ instantly classic, 2009 garage soul tribute to Solomon Burke. Erick Jordan’s thin, gritty voice is drawn to the incisively sensitive point of each song, between the other Thieves’ shifting shades of blue. (Jordan, fellow guitarist Paul Jenkins, and ingenious keyboardist Mackenzie Vernacchio are core members, currently touring with The 1914’s rhythm section.) On 2008’s Rise & Shine, carnival-haunted atmospherics have to swirl through Jordan’s own romantic fixations, but there and in concert, they often float his weighty boat.   

Sleepy Sun
Friday @ Café Bourbon
The moony, psych-folk-rock moves of Sleepy Sun’s debut album, Embrace, occasionally get too cute, but usually sound right enough. They confidently channel the sonic and other distances they seek, find, and absorb. Sleepy Sun enjoy their compass, especially its arrow’s spin. Male and female voices fall through well-timed avalanches of guitars and drums. They all keep re-appearing, up and down the mountain. He: “Maybe you’ll sleep with me.” She: “Baby, in your dreams.” Together: “We’ll find a home/In the northern sky.”(Meanwhile, “A window’s candle” is cool with them).
 

Passion Pit
Tuesday @ Newport
Passion Pit blossomed when Michael Angelokos’s solo-recorded  Chunk of Change EP became unexpectedly popular—with his girlfriend, although it was her belated valentine; then with the world at large, especially in its group-recorded, expanded version. Manners brings road-tested agility back to the studio, as Angelokos’s “Dreams and alibis/Make light,” to grow a pop-rocking, electronic garden of glass and plastic flowers for his love, amidst bolder beats. When this tricky tenor plausibly recalls “spinning like a discarded wedding ring,” he’s never sounded more on the (still helium-high) level.
 

SEPT. 30:

Drivin N Cryin
Friday @ Headliner’s
“There’s always a chance/ To get restarted/To a new world/New life/Scarred but smarter.” That last line is the title of Drivin N Cryin’s 1986 debut LP, and its sudden final twist still sums up (and still sharpens) DNC leader Kevin Kinney’s outlook. Not that Kinney settles for summing up, especially on DNC’s new Great American Bubble Factory. Past the first two, somewhat impacted tracks, Kinney and co-founder Tim Neilsen drive their cussin’-and-discussin’ Southern alt-rock quartet under thunder, lightning, and eerily clear night skies.

Tin Armor
Saturday @ Rumba
Columbus-based Tin Armor’s music gets tagged as “power pop,” a term that seems to have first appeared in the early ‘70s, when attempts were made to revive the spirit of the mid-‘60s Beatles. Many power poppers are merely nostalgic, but the struggle with emotional regression is Tin Armor’s tried-and-true subject. Two new songs on their blog are demo versions, but post-relationship insights and flashbacks are already getting stress-factored into tight (never claustrophobic) structures, as on 2007’s full-length A Better Place Than I Have Been and 2008’s self-titled EP.

Psychic Ills
Monday @ Newport
Psychic Ills’ latest offering, Mirror Eye, opens with an ever-approaching drone, but its edge starts rippling, responding to other sounds’ enticing signals. While navigating such cosmically close, mostly instrumental encounters,  Mirror Eye sometimes gets foggy, yet usually can feel its way back to the light, thanks to pleasurable flexing, curving, filtering and texturing of strings and percussion.  “I Take You As My Wife Again” is the highest roller (of the winners); then “Fingernail Tea” finds its honeymoon groove, while riding the rings of Saturn through echoes of India.

Them Crooked Vultures
Tuesday @ The LC
Them Crooked Vultures are Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones, on bass, keyboards, and slide guitar; Queens Of The Stone Age’s guitarist-vocalist Josh Homme; and Foo Fighters/Nirvana’s versatile Dave Grohl, who mostly plays drums on TCV’s tour (for which Queens associate Allain Johannes provides additional instrumentation.) The album’s not out yet, but live videos are. “Elephant” is true to its title and their overall approach, with a heavy tread and quick-witted shifts, as Homme warns, “We come to ruin/All that might corrupt,” while barbaric musical splendor rises all around him.

 





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