Bird and Flower's Not-So-Still Life (Jan. 6/28 2011)

 By Don Allred
 

Columbus combo Bird And Flower began as Eve Searls' one-woman band. "I like the anonymity of a band name," Searls explained. "So it was a matter of finding one that I didn't completely hate, and I was really into the Bird and Flower style of Japanese ink painting."
As in her visual inspirations, Searls' sonic shading unifies sweet and sharp contrasts: High, blue, clear vocal tones, plus rough-and ready stringed instruments, connect with eerie, catchy keyboards. In the studio version of "Hot Boots," lively beats just naturally dance all over a deadbeat lover: "Now I'm all alone, don' tyou feel clever/But with my hot boots, honey, I got friends forever." Personal struggles continue, but we can always tune in "Radio Song," where a tide of melody could get whole roomfuls of people swaying, sincerely serenading (and advising) each other, "I wouldn't trust you/I wouldn't trust anybody.". 

Bird And Flower's visions of alone-together sociability evidently got the speculative Americana group Black Swans' Jerry DeCicca to seek out Searls, who had so far tucked away a few tracks on MySpace. She found herself agreeing to open a 2007 Black Swans show, her first concert performance. Soon, Searls was playing keyboards for lovelorn post-punks PolyAtomic,while contributing mercurially compatible songs, vocals, and instrumental versatility to equally wry folk-pop tribe Super Desserts. The big Super Desserts also made her "feel safe," said the often uprooted former military dependent. Yet DeCicca also found or encouraged this conditioned nomad to be ready once again for ventures, via the co-produced, judiciously bewitching 2009 Bird And Flower debut album, Here We Cease Our Motion. 

Bird And Flower's live vibe still startles as well. In case the target of "Hot Boots" is having too much fun with its studio groove, BaF's Boston podcast version springs a cross-cut strut, courtesy of Tyler Evans' banjo and Searls' ukulele. Friday's show also includes vocalist-accordionist Amber Jacks, multi-instrumentalist Bobby Miller, and versatile string man Erik Kang (just back from touring with Margot And The Nuclear So-And-So's), appearing here on lap steel. Searls promises "at least a couple new songs," adding that she'll be sporting a vintage omnichord. "You can even strum the keypad like a harp. It's pretty Tron." (For more on that 1982 cinemasterpiece: Tron )
Bird and Flower will play Jan. 6 and 28 @ The Basement. For more information, please visit https://promowestlive.com/our-venues/the-basement or call (614) 461-5483

MOUNTAIN GOATS REACH NEW PEAK (April 11 2011)

By Don Allred

(As first heard by this reporter on C-90s in the mid-90s, Mountain Goats tracks were rough-and-ready dispatches from a traveler always in the middle of something, memories and scenes happening now, unfazed by complicated landscapes, sometimes banging an acoustic guitar in what sounded like a park, with recruits chirping on cue, or even coming over the mountains on a flying picnic blanket with his latest finds, if you found yourself leaning out far enough to hear him that way, which could happen more than once.)

Mountain Goats leader John Darnielle is a frequently bespectacled, folk-rocking poet of song, and also a decidedly non-ironic death metal gourmet. Confirming his rep for real talk, the sociable Mr D. helpfully points out that if you don’t crave death metal’s “Cookie Monster” vocals (not like his, but the ones that sound like the results of bong hits from a vacuum cleaner), well, then you---just may not be so metal after all.

As for Darnielle, he still savors the moment he encountered the term “occult blood” in his nursing manual. “ ‘Occult’ just means ‘hidden’ or ‘not immediately obvious’ in medical terminology. I thought it was the greatest thing I’d ever heard.” Becoming a death-metal-loving psychiatric nurse may have inspired some of Darnielle’s songs, but they don’t seem exploitative. His nameless first- person narrator,  eternally strumming and spinning through everyday purgatory and paradise, is both a penitent and rebel, beyond contradiction.  The robust, combustible emotional range of spring-heeled Mountain Goats melodies never leaves much room for error, but the new All Eternals Deck takes an especially risky turn through what could easily settle into morbid clichés, or lectures about them.

Instead, Darnielle confidentially confesses the costly allure of---call it superstition, religion, underground political activities, science fiction,  forbidden facts---in the secret living history of this age, or any other, without waiting for the Web to catch up. Dynamic chamber rock is a night nurse for the album’s charged atmospheres and spooked vitality. Certain truths about yourself and others might well be too much (and/or too little) information, though Darnielle’s characters can and will take it. As he (currently) reads their kind’s fortune (commenting on 1979 near-future prophet-driven teen gang movie The Warriors), “The sun’s coming up and they’re safe, but you know the scars are permanent now.”

Though certainty certainly can get old---so, for this tour, perennial bassist Peter Hughes issues an advisory: the MGs have thrown away the setlist of material they relied on for years.  Instead, we’ll get many “ ...new songs, old songs that haven't been performed in years and never with a full band, old songs that have never been performed, period.” The “full band” now includes ace guitarist-keyboard player Yuval Semo, also the arranger of All Eternal Deck ’s eerie, silky strings. Nevertheless, adds Hughes, “Most of these songs, we'd really only had a chance to run through a handful of times.”

Furthering the adventurous potential of this evening, veteran Mountain Goats (and Superchunk) drummer Jon Wurster, also of the radio satire/prankster unit Scharpling & Wurster, will materialize at the Wexner Center Store from 7:30-9:00 p.m., to sign his comedy CDs and bond with the public. Brace yourselves.

The Mountain Goats will be performing with supporting band Megafaun at theWexner Center Performance Space on Monday, April 11. The show starts at 9 p.m. $16 all audiences. For more information, please visit www.mountain-goats.com or www.wexarts.org.

 

 

 

Lydia Loveless, Punky Tonk Purl (April 18 2011)

 By Don Allred

(In 2010, this reporter reported for a Four Of A Kind:
Veteran Columbus OH teen Lydia Loveless sometimes includes the
Replacements' intensely frustrated "Answering Machine" and Def
Leppard's dynamically mesmerized "Hysteria" with her punky tonk combo
deliveries, unstoppabley tumbling up, down and onto life's thrilling,
killing, chilling and flat moments. Loretta Lynn's points of departure
are extended and twisted through Loveless' s compactly epic,
self-written debut, The Only Man, as desperately wired sexual power
struggles zap the void in passing: "Girls suck/They suck and suck and
never get enough," wails one contender, but it's time to ricochet off
another incisive epitaph.)

The living legend of Lydia Loveless began with the 2004 birth of her punk-inflected family new wave band, Carson Drew. Which is also the name of intrepid tween-lit girl detective Nancy Drew's invaluable lawyer-father. So, the band's name could be considered a salute to the then-14-year-old LL's and her sisters' drummer-dad, Parker Chandler. But, as their blog proclaimed, they were all "Carson Drew, Attorneys At Large"---ready to rock the halls of justice. Soon after the 2006 release of Under The Table, Carson Drew disbanded, and the country-bred Loveless reached for her heretofore-spurned roots. She wrote her first songs, busting the male malefactors of Columbus Babylon. 

A still-available "Local Pop Radio Hour" podcast finds Loveless's rhythm guitar and Chandler's drums nailing a whirlwind of unanswered questions to a no-frills, every-night waltz. "Miller High Life" cross-examines the narrator, her man, her God, and even the "champagne of beers," with a relentlessly spare clarity. This makes LL's more typically cascading up-tempo testimonials seem like blessedly tempestuous vacation fare. Her characters were born to struggle, and they thrive on the noise-meets-poise of her 2010 solo debut, The Only Man. Its independent producers excluded Chandler's drums, among several other biz-decisions, but they were true venture capitalists, committed to finding new focus for gawkers in the Loveless jukebox inferno. Columbus-based Peloton Records man Steve McGann released the results, then teamed Loveless and Chandler with the tried 'n' true duo of lead guitarist Todd May and bassist Ben Lamb. McGann's direction led them to Bloodshot, Chicago's sonic stockyard of volatile Americana. 

Loveless, now 20, is producing her first Bloodshot album, Indestructible Machine----an appropriate title, judging by advance tracks. In writing them, she said, "I generally come up with a line that won't let me be. If a song wants to be written, it will get written." The song's gestation can take months, as Loveless tosses a songlet and other things to her band and audience, checking their responses. Then again, Loveless wrote several songs the night before her new album's sessions began. "It was nerve-wracking but fun," she reported. Another creation suddenly materialized at a Rock Potluck jam. "I wanted to be good that day, and my fear made a song come out of me. I'm pretty proud of it." 

This show will feature "mostly new songs," according to her latest update; also a few covers, probably including Goldfinger's "Without Me" and CCR's "Someday Never Comes." Steve McGann also reminded us, "She almost always does 'Miller High Life' live."
Lydia Loveless will be performing with supporting acts JKutchma  and Joe Fletcher & The Wrong Reasons at the Rumba Cafe on Thursday, April 21.The doors open at 9 p.m. $6 all audiences. For more information, please visit www.pelotonrecords.com or www.columbusrumbacafe.com.

Lez Zeppelin's Beautiful Balloon (May 20 2011)

By Don Allred
 

Soon after the 21st Century began, former jazz guitarist Steph Paynes reports, “I woke up one morning with the overwhelming desire to put on a white satin dragon suit.” Which is just what she did, in the spirit of Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page. Lez Zeppelin began to ascend. 

In a literal sense, each of Lez Zep’s previous and present lead singers, Sarah McLellan and Shannon Conley, tends to sound more like Heart’s Ann Wilson than (the often androgynous-sounding Led-era) Robert Plant. But all of Paynes’ merry women live their 60s-inspired, Led-to-Lez dream, as fyrebyrds flying through sound barriers ov genre and gender. On Lez Zeppelin’s self-titled debut, Paynes and her 2007 cohorts ricochet through selections from Led Zeppelin’s first six albums, plus two originals: swift, sweet “On the Rocks” and beguilingly unplugged “Winter Sun.” Both fit perfectly. On 2010’s Lez Zeppelin I, the current crew completely cover Led Zeppelin’s own self-titled debut, with mixed results. As Paynes points out, “The first record demands of those brave enough to tread its waters, an immersion into Led’s roots: blues, Celtic folk, rockabilly, and psychedelic rock.  It’s probably the most challenging of all of Led’s records to try and emulate.” 

Lez Zeppelin most consistently meet Led Zeppelin’s crossroads challenge in concert, as often demonstrated on YouTube. Mixing Led Zep’s North African influences with the previously mentioned elements, Paynes and company raise atmospherics and raw precision into improbably good timing. By combining instantly engaging, roughneck volume with a sudden drop into exotic sonic shadows, and then coming back strong, Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” remains the same tricky song, but Paynes’ hand gestures control the eerie, electronic choir of her vintage theremin, and the magic echo of her violin bow, when that last isn’t luring her guitar through “Dazed and Confused.” Vocalist Conley’s acting career doesn’t hurt either, as her ritualized focus gets compressed into little leaps of logic. Multi-instrumentalist Megan Thomas and drummer Leeza Harrington-Squyers also compatibly deliver the vibes and dynamics, in classic crowd-pleasers and astutely chosen surprises as well, with an acoustic oasis between sparky little thrillers and electric epics.  As Paynes testifies, “The synergy between a band and its willing audience can be a lot like sex.”
Lez Zeppelin will be performing with Red Line Chemistry, Danko Jones, and Steel Panther, for Rock On The Range's Special 5th Anniversary Party, at Crew Stadium, on Friday, May 20. The show starts at 7 p.m. Tickets for this show are included with the ROTR Weekend Package. $99.50 General Stadium Admission. For more information, please visit www.lezzeppelin.com or www.rockontherange.com.

Summer of the Black Swans (June 2 2011)

 By Don Allred

On their 2004 debut album, Who Will Walk In The Darkness With You?, the Columbus-based Black Swans' usual slow, post-Americana sway leads the way through what could be just another haunted house. But the parlor crooner wishes too hard for life in one still moment of memory, and his antique easy chair begins to rock.  Some subsequent tracks, like "Black Swan Blues," even brush fresh, beautiful bruises across his suddenly sharpened senses. Lesson learned---so, while the  Swans' sweetly spooked and screwed, brave and inspired 2006 Sex Brain is a leap, it takes no stretch (except in a go-o-o-d way). 

2007's Change! raises a juicy moonlight harvest of homegrown surrealism for a hungry community, then (and always) still forming. Co-founding Swan Jerry DiCicca  also found his way to some seemingly unlikely production clients, secretly ready to be drawn out. Columbus attorney Eve Searls, of the solo-project-to-band Bird And Flower, was one such born traveler. Ditto elusive Georgia country singer Larry Jon Wilson, who showed up sounding right at home, while "runnin' on a long chain." 

DeCicca may have held that thought. The Black Swans set aside their richly promising  Don't Blame The Stars in 2008, and started winding up for a left-field 2010 release, Words Are Stupid. It expertly prowls  the walls of life, like the twisted balloon critters of DeCicca's kiddie-party-entertaining, income-enhancing alter ego, Dr. Silverfoot. Despite the unexpected death of Noel Sayre, who began performing with DeCicca in 1995, Sayre's newly discovered violin tracks swirl through songs growing around his sound. The album's recording process, which DeCicca regarded as "therapeutic," also preceded points of ongoing artistic departure. "All songs are game now,"  DeCicca recently reported. "I made a breakthrough with one in Portugal. I thought it was off-limits 'til  it happened!" 

Thus, the Black Swans found and took the scenic route back to Don't Blame The Stars. Finally out on May 31, its well-populated, mostly live-in-the--garage-studio contemplation surges with the same intimate dynamic as their shows.  The song "Joe Tex" celebrates the congenially inventive soul singer of its title, while the narrator also plows gray fields, with no contradiction. And, after all, "There's no way of tellin'/If the world's cryin' or it's yellin'/So raise up your arms and dance with me." 

This record release party includes most of the Swans appearing on DBTS, plus their regular drummer Keith Hanlon, who recorded the album while Brian Jones sat in for him. We can also expect songs from "previous and forthcoming releases," DeCicca advised. (They just may have another one out later in 2011.)
The Black Swans will be performing with supporting acts the Alwood Sisters Band and Moviola at the Rumba Cafe, on Friday, June 3. The show starts at 10  p.m. $6 all audiences. For more information, please visit www.theblackswans.com or www.columbusrumba.com. For previous Black Swans show previews, incl. more about albums, see https://mycolone.blogspot.com/2025/07/4play-jan-2010.html  also https://mycolone.blogspot.com/2025/07/4play-march-2010.html and https://mycolone.blogspot.com/2025/07/oc4play-oct-2010.html   And the next album: https://mikalrow.blogspot.com/2025/08/musical-august-2012.html 

Tim Easton's Midwestern Global Strategy (June 24 2011)

By Don Allred

Ohio-launched singer/songwriter Tim Easton’s albums have moved from strong support by the likes of Lucinda Williams and members of Wilco, to less famous, long-time colleagues from Columbus, Nashville, Austin, and Brooklyn. As Easton described the process, “It’s not a ‘coming full circle’ kind of thing, but more the center point of a figure-8, where I am passing back through on my way to many other directions.” This also happens in (and to) many of his songs. A recent YouTube posting finds him once again in Japan, still not speaking much of the language, nevertheless bonding with local volunteers. Together, they deliver a twist of Lennon, an undercurrent of Pink Floyd, and a blast of Midwestern plaid punkiness. The song being performed, “Did Your Mother Teach You That?,” taunts and seriously queries the sources of bloody-minded self-righteousness, now transformed into safe, fun, musical violence.   

Easton’s transparent vocals and seamlessly edited, seemingly stream-of-consciousness songs continue to kinetically re-direct familiar stylistic elements and life’s issues, especially on his two new albums. The congenially electric Beat the Band even finds discreet consolation in a sonically sublime vision of anatomy (and/or pickiness) as destiny, via long-lost, sweet home Columbus: “She takes her time/Gettin’ satisfied/And when the time is right/She wants you to take it too/All your desires/weren’t enough, to keep her free/From leavin’ you.” The solo acoustic Since 1966, Volume 1 was recorded in remote areas, way out West, where sunlight and shadows sound equally approachable, and almost equally unavoidable. Several softer tracks set the listener up for the punch of “Why Oh Why,” which could have been forbiddingly grief-stricken. Instead, it trains ears to wait for a certain catchy, yet sparingly applied ingredient, applied by a steady hand, amid unstoppable, unanswerable questions.

During this weekend of shows, Easton’s sporting accompaniment by the Madison Square Gardeners, a sextet including two of his road-tested Columbus-to-Brooklyn co-producers, multi-instrumentalists Aaron Lee Tasjan (former The OSU campus brat) and Mark Stepro. Along with the Gardeners, Easton will back one of his enduring role models, Columbus songwriter/film maker J.P. Olsen. Now that 100 of his own tunes are released and ready for further testing on stage (including solo interludes), Easton also reminds us, “There’s always a new song to drop on folks.”  
Tim Easton will be performing with the Madison Square Gardeners and J.P. Olsen at the Rumba Cafe, on Friday, June 24, and Saturday, June 25. Both shows start at 10  p.m. $10 all audiences. Easton will also perform on the Comfest Main Stage, in Goodale Park, on Sunday, June 26. The show starts at 1 p.m. Admission is free.  For more information, please visit www.timeaston.com or www.columbusrumbacafe.com. More on Porcupine and the Tim show: May 2009

Steve Earle Will Never Get Out Of This World Alive---and here's why (July 28 2011)

 
By Don Allred

In 2009, eight years after beginning his first novel, country singer-songwriter Steve Earle decided he really had to finish the thing. He also felt the need to make a new album. Earle had moved from his longtime Nashville home base to Greenwich Village at the age of 50, while remaining blessed  by:
1. his improbably durable seventh marriage, this one to chanteuse Allison Moorer,
2. having a baby with her, while
3. still keeping up with world news.

Despite such inspirations, Earle was atypically short of original songs. So he came up with Townes, a tribute to his formidable mentor, the late great Townes Van Zandt.
Earle leads off with Van Zandt’s most famous song, “Pancho and Lefty,” in which incorrigible outlaw Pancho takes his last stand, while his possibly treacherous accomplice, Lefty, slips across the border, to linger in the cold shadows of Cleveland. “Townes was both characters,” Earle declared of the ever-mercurial, standard-setting, substance-abusing Van Zandt. Nevertheless, Van Zandt’s crucial advice went beyond reading and writing: “He told me to always use clean needles, “ Earle said. 

Earle, who somehow came out of his own lost years to several bracing albums in the mid-to-late 90s,and his 2001 book of short stories, Doghouse Rose, also drew from experience in writing his first play, Karla, the true life and alleged afterlife story of a Texas drug desperado, born again on Death Row. 

In Earle’s finally completed 2011 novel, I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive, Doc Ebersole, based on a nonfictional, even sketchier type who once claimed he could treat Hank Williams’ alcoholism and spinal bifida with drugs, has fled to San Antonio’s backstreets, after the death of Williams. The self-medicating Ebersole is often accosted by the novel’s eerie, jaunty namesake, the last Hank hit released before he died. A decade later, it’s an eternal jukebox favorite of rich men and poor, also sometimes a cue for the ghots of Willams, which can be backed into at any minute, as it pleads for another shot. All of the novel’s characters, while also evoking the songs and  struggles of Williams, Earle, and Van Zandt,  morph into visions of  “how different people come to experience spirituality,” as Earle put it. He defined spirituality  as “a one-to-one encounter with God, or whatever word you use.”

Earle’s new album, also titled I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive, cobbled together with the help, for instance, of several songs he wrote for Joan Baez’s Earle-produced 2008 Day After Tomorrow*. distills his own brand of frankly 12-step-based, self-observant spirituality. We’re greeted by some wry celebrations: “Even my money keeps telling me It’s God I need to trust/And I believe in God, but God ain’t us.” (Sure ain’t your Baez usual, but she sang it first.) Meanwhile, Earle’s still  “walkin’ on the water, ‘cause I never learned to swim.” He and wife Moorer sound  at home while gliding through the discreetly psychedelic aura of T-Bone Burnett’s Americana production, especially as they sing (in a song he first offered to Alison Krauss and Robert Plant for the now-cancelled follow-up to their surprise hit duet debut, Raising Sand) , “I love you baby, but I just can’t tell/This kinda love comes from Heaven or Hell.” 

In current shows, Earle and Moorer (who also gets her own mini-set) also swing the spotlight to touring guitarist Chris Masterson and multi-instrumentalist Eleanor Whitmore’s dirt road adventure, “The Other Shoe.” Speaking of good story material, these frontliners are aided and abetted by bass player Kelley Looney, the longest-lasting Duke by far, and drummer Will Rigby, also a good songwriter and still member of jangle-wave pioneers the dBs  Nowadays, Earle often brings out his recently deceased (at the hands of writer George Pelecanos, as was The Wire ’s Earle incarnation) Treme character Harley’s battered guitar for the indomitable “This City.” Earle & co. tend to include a song associated with the city they’re playing (recently in Houston, hats off to local boyz ZZ Top‘s “Francine.”). So maybe we could request, say, “Big Balls in Cowtown”? Referring, of course, to the old nickname for Columbus, AKA Austin of Central Ohio.  
Steve Earle and the Dukes and Duchesses will perform at the Southern Theatre, on  Thursday, July 28. Showtime: 8  p.m. Tickets:$29.50 and $37.50. *for comments on this album, see Baez show preview: https://mycolone.blogspot.com/2025/07/4play-aprl-2009.html

John Doe, A Dear (Nov. 23 2011)

By Don Allred


Although the marriage of John Doe and Exene Cervenka ended in 1984, they kept wrangling new tracks with their headstrong, headlong California punk group, X, until 1993.  Today, fourteen years after the original line-up of X got back together, singer/songwriter Doe's combustible combo adds up to one highly reliable road band. This fall, having recently toured with the Knitters, a hardy Americana outfit which began long ago as an X side project (one of several), and Jill ("I Kissed A Girl") Sobule, with whom he recorded the sly underdog anthems of 2011's  A Day At The Pass, Doe joined X in a round of Latin American shows, opening for Pearl Jam. X will  hit the Sunbelt circuit  in December, after Doe's own Midwestern shows.

(The last time he played Columbus Cowtown, Doe and Canada's Sadies, also colleagues of art-Americana-suitable Neko Case, brought sincerely and frequently feedback-roasted honky tonk jukebox chestnuts, from their '09 collab, Country Club. The show still turns up on YouTube.)(For instance: "The Have-Nots" live)*

Doe's solo albums have been reinvigorated by X's second life as a concerts-only experience, and, he said, " the freedom from having to write for them."  Also, lessons learned from the  dissolution of his nearly twenty-five year second marriage helped  develop songs such as "Golden State," slamming into its chorus: "We are luck/We are fate/We are the feeling you get in the Golden State." The sound of freedom also sweeps all philosophizing into a new, challenging reality: "It's the feeling I get/When you walk away."

"Pieces of sadness exist in everything, but it doesn't have to be the only thing,"  Doe said recently. His new Keeper gives us love songs with teeth, such as "Little Tiger,"  which might be about one of his three daughters, prowling through private sorrow. Still, nothing here is too narrowly defined.  "Have you noticed all the time travelers in cities recently?" he asked at least one recent audience, introducing "Giant Step Backwards." It's about a guy who hears that his "factory girl" has suddenly disappeared from where he depended on her to remain, in the story of his life. He's rallying for a new quest, possibly in time, but also, Doe suggested, it has to do with "men getting too far ahead in relationships, needing to let the other person step forward." 

The reflections of Keeper are polished just enough, sometimes to a slightly surreal glow. "Moonbeam" is a recently unearthed, vibrantly atmospheric R&B ballad, which gets crowded when the background singers jump into Danny White's vintage original, but Doe's cover keeps the wonder discreetly at hand. We also get a compatibly restive remake of an X classic, in which a battered wife "flips a finger" in farewell to a bartender who can only offer pity. Then she  sways  towards the Greyhound station, declaring, "Roses are red/Violence is too/Everybody knows/I'm painting the town blue." Sounds like a fairly bright blue, one that might guide her through the smog, or at least the song.

John Doe and His Rockin' Band, with supporting act  Robert Ellis, will perform at the Rumba Cafe on Monday, November 28. Doors open 7 p.m. Ellis plays  at 9 p.m., Doe at  10 p.m. 18+ show. $12. Under-21 pays $ 2 surcharge at door. (update: full album here: https://johndoex.bandcamp.com/album/keeper
*for more on John Doe and the Sadies in Columbus: John Doe and the Sadies