By Don Allred
June 18:
Hatebreed
Friday @ Newport Music Hall
Hatebreed skillfully bring the rigor of hardcore punk to death metal. Their leader, Jamey Jasta, generally abstains from death metal’s typically blurry roar, the better to guide us past the “Defeatist” mentality, to the other side of the “Horrors of Self.” Like the spike-crowned Statute of Liberty, he calls, “Give me your broken, give me your victims…This is more than a battle cry…” Yet they have battle cries also, mixing hardcore’s righteousness with death metal’s revelry. Mixed signals, in a bleedin’ blender.
Michelle Shocked
Saturday @ Comfest Grounds
Despite her studio ambitions, much of Michelle Shocked’s best work has either been live or had a live-associated spark of disarming alertness. The Texas Campfire Tapes, recorded on a Walkman at the Kerrville Folk Festival, jumpstarted her indie-minded career in 1986. She didn’t know 2007’s ToHeavenURide was being recorded at the Telluride Festival, and it sports the uninhibited, unpretentious dynamics of small-choir gospel songs, like “Strange Things Happening,” coursing around cheerfully succinct political points and wisecracks. Overall, Shocked maintains a restless sense of musical variety, and a cool sense of community.
Tom Waits
Saturday @ Ohio Theatre
Despite some keepers, Tom Waits’ mid-70s Hollywood-beatnik albums pegged him as one of those kids we might have known or been, trying too hard to seem deep, weird and romantic. But in the early 80s, he did reach deeper into compulsive nostalgia, tapping the funky spirits (and some enablers) of California sonic visionaries Captain Beefheart and Harry Partch. He still bellows like a rusty furnace, but when Waits buckles down and hitches the humor and sentiment of his vocals to hearty tunes and heady arrangements, you know he’s got true carnival knowledge (and sole).
Matisyahu
Tuesday @ LC Pavilion
Matisyahu remains controversial: with his Hasidic Jewish beard and accoutrements, rapping with a fake Jamaican accent, but also with Marley-era reggae’s fervor and flow—is he a truly, if belatedly, enlightened suburban ex-Phish follower, or ultimately just a kosher flava of Vanilla Ice? It’s been pointed out that the original Hasids were not unlike 18th Century forerunners of Jamaica’s Rastafarians, challenging true believers and infidels alike with an exuberantly creative re-affirmation of the real Old School of scripture. With his spacey energy and charm, Matisyahu’s a natural stage presence, anyway.
July 02:
Victoria Vox
Thursday @ Rumba Café
A formerly pink-haired, punk-rocking, scholarship- and award-winning graduate of Boston’s Berklee College of Music, with a degree in composition and decades of playing violin, oboe, trumpet, guitar, keyboards and bass, Victoria Vox has become inspired by the ukulele, one of the world’s easiest instruments. She writes songs on it and sings in a forthright, unpretentious style, with spare but diverting accompaniment (h’mm, is that a muted trumpet or a kazoo?) on lilting tracks like “The Bird Song,” from her current CD, Chameleon, which also brings back her guitar skills.
DJ Heather
Friday @ Spice
Chicago mainstay DJ Heather, arriving with the “House of Om Tour,” was initially recruited by Om Records’ Mark Farina, to help promote his own colorful Mushroom Jazz albums. Her specialty is house music, but her ears were first adjusted by her family’s eclectic collecting, and her own discovery of new wave, punk, ska, hip-hop and industrial. She’s also mixed a lot of r & b, disco, jazz, and elusive lipstick traces of rare groove. Think, “Hey, don’t I know that song?”—and she’ll hit you with another beat. School’s out, Holmes!
Monotonix
Saturday @ Skye
Monotonix is an Israeli power trio of voice, guitar and drums, with a wild stage show, a la The Darkness and Jon Spencer, but has Spencer ever it pulled it off as well in the studio as Monotonix do on their EP Body Language? Anyway, despite a relatively sludgy start, boogie, knights ‘n’ ladies, in your platform boots and spandex, when it’s time to prance through the title song, and the rest of the set rocks steady. Organs and other instruments are channeled through the basic dynamic duo when cool, under vocal acrobatics.
Jason Isbell
Saturday @ the Basement
Despite questions (like, “Did he jump or was he pushed?”) regarding singer-songwriter-guitarist-keyboardist Jason Isbell’s departure from the Drive-By Truckers, last year’s solo debut, Sirens of the Ditch (with most of the full- and part-time Truckers aboard), was worth whatever it took. Isbell’s studies, before and after Memphis State, included a Skynyrd-to-Feat-to-Zevon-bred flair for musical pulp fiction (minus the macho tear-jerking), early Steely Dan grooves, and Eudora Welty-style tragicomic character studies, plus Isbell’s distinctive sense of poetic justice (and injustice). The show adds appropriate covers, like Talking Heads’ ever-catchy “Psycho Killer.”
July 30:
Miranda Lambert
Thursday @Celeste
When
tiny blonde Miranda Lambert scored her first country hit by applying
“Kerosene” to a cheatin’ boyfriend, the even-cuter-when-she’s mad factor
promised to get out of hand. But ”Kerosene,” “Gunpowder And Lead” and
“Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” gain more credibility as album tracks:
tabloid-fueled or not, they’re as truly expressive as any other pages
from the diary of a frustrated, sleeplessly dreaming small-town girl.
Speaking of fuel, be sure to check the re-run of Lambert’s “Austin City
Limits” set, where she and her band leave the somewhut more jaded or
just plain tahred Gretchen Wilson’s crew in the dust.
Jimmy Thackery
Thursday @ The Thirsty Ear
Long
before blues guitarist Jimmy Thackery recruited his sax-bass-drums
backing trio of Drivers, he was a veteran of the bar wars, flying with
the Nighthawks. But he’s hardly shell-shocked: as well as ripping and
rippling through rocking, jazzy solos, he’s known for actual songs, like
the mellow-to-explosive Eddie Hinton soul classics covered on We Got It.
More and more, he’s getting into telling his own stories, balancing
expression and excitement. The details can get run over by his trucking
momentum, but we guess that’s why they call it the blues.
Bowerbirds
Sunday @Wexner
Iowa’s
Phil Moore, a professional musician, and North Carolina’s Beth Tacular,
a professional painter, found deep common ground while living and
working together in a South Carolina swamp, all summer long. The
eco-reveries of Bowerbirds (Moore on guitar, Tacular on accordion, Mark
Paulson on violin and piano, all three singing and playing percussion)
are the voices of experience. On 2007’s Hymns For A Dark Horse,
re-issued this summer with two bracing new tracks, Moore’s lead vocals
and words may sometimes wander, but Mamma Nature keeps sending music’s
practicalities to call him back.
Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey
Tuesday @ Skully’s
Some of fans of Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey’s live jams might find their recent Little Tae Rides Again too
concise. But, although it was recorded in an old Tulsa warehouse, full
of “random artifacts,” with basic tracks entrusted to the software and
deliberately sleep-deprived, self-altered states of producer Tae
Maeyulks, the core of JFJO’s appeal comes through strongly enough.
Distant visions and tiny insights get tested by new drummer Josh
Raymer’s due diligence, while echoes and twitches fall into the
murmuring groove, dancing on hairline fractures of a frozen web.
Aug 05:
Made Out Of Babies
Thursday @ Ravari Room
Made Out of Babies is made out of whirlwinds and radiators, led and fed by the well-tuned air raid siren voice of Julie Christmas. On their new album, The Ruiner, Christmas summons her orphans from “a basement of mother’s love,” because it’s time once again to eat and run. The legacy of “The Major” has been cooked by the flames of “Invisible Ink,” but “Buffalo” is the sort of ballad that gambles on dust catching fire. ”There’s nothing they can do to her, that hasn’t been done before!” We’ll see.
Charlie Daniels Band
Thursday @ Celeste
After recording and touring with Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, Nashville’s Charlie Daniels began his 1071 self-titled debut with a mellow vibe (a gentle remynder that he had produced the Youngbloods' Elephant Mountain), but soon veered toward that road map on the cover, where he’s been ever since. Despite the generous, cross-genre-pickin’ picnic of his CDB, he’s wound tight enough to speed into the vigilante visions of “Simple Man,” for instance. But he also sparked last year’s soulful Duets, even past its hastier moments, and what other classic Southern Rock act this side of the Allman Brothers Band deserves so many live albums?
Eef Barzelay
Friday @ Rumba
Eef Barzelay, former “leader” of the smooth, tense Clem Snide, specializes in hitching smooth, tense folk-rock melodies to the devoutly twisted visions of those who make and break deals with self-gratification and self-denial. If you decide either way, your sweet and mortal self becomes too real. So there’s always another exciting opportunity to “Lose Big,” as in the title song to Barzelay’s new solo album, and to sing along on old choruses, such as “I don’t wanna know me better,” with a passing stranger, one raised on the gospel of punk.
Beres Hammond
Friday @ Alrosa
Beres Hammond’s reggae vocal style is as inspired by Motown classics (demonstrated with easy-rolling, fervent flair on the roll-calling “Rockaway”), as by Bob Marley. He also applies militant phrases like “putting up resistance” to a more conservative (or cautious) working-man’s despair, and weaves dreamy, bluesy courtship rituals over the urgently discreet, digital beats of “Tempted To Touch.” On “Who Say,” he keens around Buju Banton’s wry, guttural interjections (“Even a big man has to cry, yah never miss your water ‘til your well runs dry”). Hammond’s forever looking into the wine of life.
Aug. 13:
Martha Wainwright
Wednesday @ The LC
Martha Wainwright, daughter of folkie deities Kate McGarrigle and Loudon Wainwright III, little sister of flamboyant prodigy Rufus Wainwright, is forever bashing her own way through thickets of influence and expression, emptiness and overload---the usual stuff. Her new I Know You’re Married But I’ve Got Feelings Too romps all over and past graying guests like The Who's Pete Townshend and Steely Dan's Donald Fagen. That’s just the latest strong and shaky way this self-identified “Slowlita” has found, now having broken through the thirtysomething finish line, to keep folk and rock, dreams and clocks, friends and foes on their toes.
Ozomatli
Thursday @ The LC
L.A.-based Ozomatli jam and build on Latin jazz and r&b, while their hip-hop interests were schooled by early members Cut Chemist and Charlie 2na, both of whom were also in the Jurassic 5. (Charlie, that wayfaring, agile MC, has been showing up again in Ozomatli’s recent concerts.) Their latest album, Don’t Mess With The Dragon, messes with expectations, by venturing into more use of rock, ska, reggaeton, and Eastern elements, but Ozomatli’s characteristic spirit rolls “Magnolia Soul” through post-Katrina New Orleans, as “Violeta” appears to an American soldier in Iraq.
Bodies Of Water
Monday @ Skully’s
Bodies Of Water are an instantly distinctive quartet of male and female voices, rolling and soaring over pulses and polyrhythms. Their first album gave fair warning and promise in its title, Ears Will Pop & Eyes Will Blink. The new set, A Certain Feeling, is a little more subtle, but just as exciting. Both discs draw smoke and fire from all over the map, while often suggesting the kind of restless reveries and pioneering developments that can always get out of hand, but sonically and thematically, they’re into risk(y) management.
Black Cobra
Tuesday @ Café Bourbon
We who are still aware of humankind’s need for metal also crave a certain steady intake of the reliably back-in-black basics, delivered by those who would rather carve than paint the walls of our caves. Black Cobra is just such a two-man crew. Jason Landrian’s pedals split, saw and fry the difference between bass and his guitar, to which Rafael Martinez’s drumming might be more compatible because of his own (actual) bass-playing with Acid King. Their EP, Feather And Stone, continues to fortify the vigil for this fall’s full-length darkness!
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