4Play (Sept 2010)

 By Don Allred

Junius

Friday @ The Summit

Junius’s Blood Is Bright masterfully mourned media manipulation, while carefully combining shoegaze reflections and metal urges. Perhaps in penance or final processing, The Martyrdom of a Catastrophist compulsively refines its world-shattering subject matter. However, straight-ahead live YouTube performances improve on the album’s mix. Also, a subsequent single, “The Time of Perfect Virtue,”  is promisingly provocative, with slithering instrumental responses to the theme: “We’ll accept our fate/When the glory comes to wipe us out.” Let’s see how they handle the gory glory of their tour mates, Viking berserkers Valient Thorr and sizzling survivors Howl.

Megan McCormick

Friday @ Midland Theatre

Megan McCormick’s debut album, Honest Words, starts in mid-situation, as she wrestles with a dominant love and a big, fuzzy blues-rock guitar. Initially, the candidly careening clarity of this 23- year-old singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist can intimidate the simple male mind. But that guitar is hers, and intriguingly leashed to a prowling momentum, which can get nearly subliminal, until a certain green-eyed love object enters McCormick’s night vision again. She reminds us that 23 can be as dangerous an age as 19, while expertly moving beyond wisdom.

Fo/Mo/Deep & friends

Friday through Sunday @ Genoa Park

This weekend’s Riverfront Art Festival will be greeted by jazz funk voyagers Fo/Mo/Deep (pictured), whose Eclecticism is one of the meatier meteors in hungry Columbus skies. Other highlights include acoustic punk jazz combo Pete Bush and the Hoi Polloi; gracefully uptempo jazz diva Sabrina Tutstone, Marble Park’s rocking r&b, Grooveshire’s bayou-flavored jams, and  Beatles acolytes Hard Days Night. The environmental art experience of WaterFire channels Celtic rockers Ladies of Longford, ditto Opera Columbus, previewing  a season of wizards: Mozart, Gilbert & Sullivan, and Weill.

Screaming Females

Saturday @ Carabar

Soulfully shredding singer/guitarist Marissa Paternoster doesn’t hide in the agile armor of her power trio Screaming Females’ Castle Talk. Warnings to favorite challengers are unsparingly fair: “In record time I realize/I can’t change.” Which, the way it’s told by this record, comes true in a good way: the literal meanings of some key words and phrases remain ambiguous, but they unmistakably shake her certainties like fruit trees. Paternoster also testifies, “You put me in my place/So I gotta be renewed.” The music keeps doing that, so far.

Best Coast

Wednesday @ The Summit

“I watched the cars go by/I thought of you.” Likes like that could make songs like “The Sun is High (So Am I)” no more or less necessary for further contact than a favorite, faded photograph, or another whiny teen ballad. But garage pop trio Best Coast project straight-forward, rocking and mellow soulfulness, filtered through summer, smog and other character-building experiences. Singer/guitarist Bethany Cosentino also draws from  the drones of her earlier experimental band, Pocahaunted, and her avowed idol, Stevie Nicks, distilled into bracingly bittersweet vitality

Van Dyke Parks with Clare & The Reasons

Friday @ The Wexner Center

Composer/arranger Van Dyke Parks collaborated with Brian Wilson on Smile, thee ‘60s psych-pop high point they rounded off (finished writing, re-recorded) and released a few years ago (minus the Beach Boys, but it works ) VDP’s historically inspired style ranges through changes of time and key, shading and degrees, basking in urgent melodies. His expansively intimate piano and crisp little voice are accompanied by fluently French-influenced chamber-pop group Clare & The Reasons, who also open the show. CTR’s new  Live in Amsterdam features “He Needs Me,” a collaboration with Parks, sporting Andrew Bird-worthy violin, singing and whistling. (Clare Muldaur has more than a touch of her father Geoff's 60s-burnished musical grace.)

Justin Townes Earle

Friday @ The Rumba Cafe

Justin Townes Earle sings more smoothly than his namesake, Townes Van Zandt, and his father, Steve Earle. Smoothness paves the way for the younger Earle’s emulation-in-progress  of his forebears’ most succinctly evocative, frankly mordant songs. JTE’s  romantic fatalism is currently far too restless for even the joyful suicide resolution of “Harlem River Blues,” his new album’s title track. Diverting uptempo reveries reverberate through boxcars, bars, beds, and subway tunnel walls, while Earle continues “punching holes in the dark,”  until he gets it just right.

The Lost Revival with Monolithic Cloud Parade

Saturday @ Skully’s

Columbus’ Lost Revival practice scorched and salty Americana. When “the gods of nothing in particular” (maybe including social conditioning) serve your life, pass it along, freshly seasoned, and carved with epic poetic critiques. This release party celebrates The Lost Revival’s  To Hell With Them All and Monolithic Cloud Parade’s equally sociable The Sea and Setting Sun. MCP’s point of departure is closer to familiar modern alternative rock than TLR’s classickally twisted roots, but both bands breathe mythological life into tunefully strenuous new tales of worlds busy getting lost.

SEPT. 24:

Yeasayer

Wednesday @ Newport Music Hall

Synthesizers beam a beautiful dream, until:  “I can’t sleep when I think about/The times we’re livin’ in/The future I was born into.”  On  2007’s  All Hour Cymbals, Yeasayer plunge forward, into musically dazzling defiance and commitment. 2010’s Odd Blood delivers some strong songs, but seems at odds with itself, when rudely resourceful sounds have to counter-balance supposedly mature regrets and apologies. Yet on stage (and YouTube), even  “I Remember”  can become a handy electro-pop vehicle, hijacked into ever-timely surf-disco overdrive, as Yeasayer thunderously race the curfew at UW-Madison.

The Ryan Montbleau Band

Wednesday @ The Rumba Cafe

Jam bands’ studio albums can be awkward. The Ryan Montbleau Band shrewdly work such defensive dilemmas into their debut, Heavy On The Vine. The narrator of “Slippery Road” is spooked by silence, behind festive sonic achievements. He needs to relax, just enough.”So it’s okay/But if I say the same thing tomorrow/Take me down!” Increasingly song-focused leader Montbleau, who also contributed material to Columbus visitor Trombone Shorty’s  Backatown, judiciously blends  funk, folk, reggae, rock and country:14 tracks in 57 minutes, portioned just about right.

Blitzen Trapper

Saturday @ Wexner Center

Blitzen Trapper’s hand-rolled pages  from rock history can make them seem like the cute, hirsute children of Andy Kaufman, born to test and refreshingly mess with our expectations. Their current set, Destroyer of the Void, provides basically sweet, crunchy rides. The epic title track opens with beaded curtains of harmonies, between late ‘60s Beach Boys and the eternal prime of Queen’s Freddie Mercury: “Destroy my petty crimes!” Travelers get and give more than they bargained for, but the fine print never gets petty in this Americana-bordered, tapestry-defined space and time

Arrington de Dionyso with TK Webb

Monday @ Cafe Bourbon Street

“No burial mound can hold us,” proclaims  Arrington de Dionyso, over a Nile-crossing punk-funk groove. Such frictional faith also fuels Old Time Relijun leader de Dionyso’s new band, Malaikat dan Singa”(“Angels and Lions”), as translations of William Blake’s liberated visions co-pilot vintage Indonesian psych-compatible garage levitation. Far from utopian gospel, Columbus-based TK Webb’s opening solo set nevertheless includes implicitly prophetic songs from his latest, self-titled album, reporting bluesy, twilight encounters: “Fable Thrower/Rid this dread of me.” Here and elsewhere, Webb foreshadows de Dionyso’s incandescent rituals.