4Play (July 2010)

 By Don Allred

JULY 7

Dex Romweber Duo

Saturday @ The Summit

Singer-guitarist Dex Romweber’s ‘80s-indie-incendiary Flat Duo Jets i

nspiredgarage wizard Jack White to produce Dex and his equally seasoned sister Sara's

 current Duo. Their single "Last Kind Word Blues" brings out the

 pre-White Stripes bounce in Sara's slamming drums, while 

White's howl fits Dex's growl. The Romwebers

also seamlessly shift between rising rituals and sudden turns on

 Live At Third Man and Ruins of Berlin. They trace flowers through

 the moonlit bones of romance (and new rainy days)

 in cosmopolitan punkabilly hearts.

The Madison Square Gardeners

Saturday @ The Rumba Cafe

OSU-reared Aaron Lee Tasjan's Madison Square Gardeners draw from punk alley omen Johnny Thunders' Heartbreakers and Tom Petty's crew too, though Petty might not christen a graceful roots rock song "My Ex-Girlfriend's a Big Lesbian on Drugs." Neither TP nor the late Thunders would typically admit, as Tasjan does, "I spend so much time trying not to feel f*cked up/It's f*ckin' me up!" The six-man Gardeners blossom on stage, especially when "Lightning Don't Strike Twice" crowns remedial and advanced students with starry cymbals.

Locusta

Saturday @ Carabar

Columbus plagesters Locusta's press sheet describes them as "blackened" death metal. Indeed, on their self-titled debut album, Locusta deliver ten very similarly spinning graves of ashes, bone chips and clattering insect carapaces, keeping company with the band's historical namesake. A toxicologist  favored by the Emperor Nero, she's surefooted amidst the charred mists of Brad Deerhake's stage whispers, as zombie legions of guitar notes make their rounds on eroded stone streets. They get to stretch and shake on Dusk at the Mausoleum, but shows are where Locusta's death throes take the throne. 

Umphrey's McGee

Tuesday @ The LC Pavilion

Recent audience recordings find jam band Umphrey's McGee expansively focused, as succinct phrases and themes race and pace each other. They can linger lyrically, or swing on singed hinges, as when the Beatles' "Come Together" and Nine Inch Nails' "Closer" mash rusty rock into bent funk, deftly lurching toward gleaming shadows of reggae and blues. Aiming notes and cast-off frustrations at passing moments, UM earn and burn sweet release, while asking themselves and their audience, "Will you still be awake tomorrow?" If you can keep it up, yes.

JULY 14:

The Hold Steady

Wednesday @ Newport Music Hall

On The Hold Steady’s Heaven Is Forever, surviving usual suspects still fuel parties, hookups, and solo flights with breakaway chunks of Craig Finn’s carefully developed themes, as his Minnesota accent, sympathetically absurd tales, and hearty, hungry productions continue to make delinquent connections between Lake Woebegone and early Springsteen. Mostly, Finn’s still trusting his details-obsessed, itchy-fingered kiddies and THS’s neo-classic rock (with a third guitarist and new keyboard player both added for the tour) to slip us through Heaven and other strangely familiar places. 

Nappy Roots

Thursday @ The Basement

When friends at Bowling Green’s Western Kentucky University formed their rap group in the mid-90s, they dubbed themselves Nappy Roots--which had to do with sticking together, and also supposedly uncool cool, definitely “ballin’ on a budget.”  Flaunting what they didn’t have (and couldn’t lose), they went platinum on 2002’s Watermelon, Chicken & Gritz. On their new The Pursuit of Nappyness, themes of positivity and sheer striving get refreshed by restless nuance, and even wicked wit. “Swimmin’ in a fishbowl,” Nappy Roots croon, joking on and savoring city folks’ smooth smoke.

YellowFever

Friday @ Café Bourbon Street

YellowFever’s Sunbelt home zone is bright and bare outside, cloudy and crowded inside. Both feed the need to make a tiny counter-world of punky art-pop, eventually spinning out of (and around) the house. Their self-titled album makes the most of every inflection. You could step on a crack, break your mama’s back, or just fall in. Either way, better keep dancing better. On their new Bermuda Triangle EP,  young singer-guitarist Jennifer Moore often sounds like a European woman, thus very wise, while still playfully and fervently focused on escape and rendezvous.

On Fillmore with Rachel Grimes

Saturday @ Wexner Center

Pianist Rachel Grimes is a member, though not the namesake, of Louisville post-rock ensemble Rachel’s. She’ll perform soulfully ambient, folk-inclusive miniatures from her solo set, Book of Leaves, probably chased with a taste of Satie’s ricochet romance. On Fillmore is acoustic bassist Darin Gray and Wilco drummer Glenn Kotche, whose experiences with marching bands, the Kronos Quartet, vibraphones, homemade and found sounds also re-tune the summer moon on Extended Vacation. Recurring groves of Latin-accented grooves and healthy-lunged (human) birdsongs help dreams get ready to roll.

JULY 21:

Eyedea & Abilities

Wednesday @ Skully’s

Battle-rapper Eyedea established artistic credit with DJ Abilities on First Born, then re-sparked his early flash with sharpened skills on E & A.  Currently, By The Throat ingests lessons and musicians from Eyedea’s freestyle-times-jazz group Face Candy and rock combo Carbon Carousel. The shiny rituals of CC’s “Lather, Rinse, Repent”  now enter hip-hop’s staccato flow and rainbow stew, especially via  By The Throat ‘s sometimes uncannily cannibalistic  “Burn Fetish.” It even tries to fry its own scary claws of plausibility: “Empathy is the poor man’s cocaine.” Yes, but these are bargain-hungry times.

 Citizen Cope

Wednesday @ The LC Pavilion

“This is a song about not givin’ up.”  But it’s reduced to chains of rhymes, so Caribbean garage drums can no longer chop and channel the smoke-cured murmur of Citizen Cope’s typically terse verses into narrative momentum. Still, the song’s title and chorus are “Let the drummer kick it,” which definitely happens on stage. Keyboards, bass and guitar also roll urban folk journeyman Cope through an overcast world, as he searches for, courts and defends his love, especially when she’s a liberated, forty-foot billboard woman. The police are so jealous.

Fool’s Gold

Friday @ The Summit

The sliding poise and eloquent chatter of guitars instantly open “Surprise Hotel,” where it wouldn’t be surprising to find Fool’s Gold partying with Extra Golden, Toubab Krewe and Tinariwen,  who previously connected Columbus to electric crosscurrents of African and American music. Primed by “Hotel...,” their self-titled debut album also spins Fool’s Gold through Middle Eastern, Indonesian and Latin refractions, polyrhythmically orbiting their name’s cautionary, anti-utopian irony. “Nadine, please don’t bear your soul to me,” is a heartfelt serenade, from  the lush, sun-brushed depths of Los Angeles-based FG’s kaleidoscopic focus.

Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue

Friday @ Arch Park (McFerson Commons)

“Can you show me something beautiful?” The singer’s voice is young and hopeful, though his melody isn’t that far from Hot Chocolate’s ancient  hit, “You Sexy Thing.” But what are those strangely familiar power chords, slightly south of the border?  Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews, headliner of this summer’s Hot Ribs, Cool Jazz Festival, loves Latin inflections and “Back in Black” too. Mellow and metal colors harmonize with the syncopation and funk of his band, Orleans Avenue, surely as mercurial ballads and hip-hop suit Trombone Shorty’s comfortably stratospheric trumpet.

JULY 28

Chuck Prophet

Saturday @  The Maennerchor

A guy’s watching some Mel Gibson movie, and calling a lady, about “Band-Aids, from the night we patched things up/I got the box right here/If I could hold that moment to my chest/I swear I’d disappear/Would you still love me?” Like his characters, Western alt.country-rock early warning Chuck Prophet (formerly of dusty neon Green On Red) pushes luck. But/and on stage, definitely including these solo shows, Prophet’s tautly tuneful guitar can tap cracked spectacles of bare necessity. Even “Love won’t keep us apart.” 

Freelance Whales

Wednesday @ The Basement

Freelance Whales’ native habitat is the subway platform. There, or just about anywhere, they can breeze through selections from their studio debut, Weathervanes. carrying nostalgia and flimsy whimsy up into a refreshed, open-air mesh of everyday mazes. This mesh was already stronger than cobwebs, but now it smells better too.  Adaptable combinations of acoustic and electronic instruments are practical and  atmospheric. Some good lines get repeated many times, but they and the audience have handy melodies to settle in, like the beloved ghost in some songs has its peaceful socket.

Hamell On Trial

Saturday @ The Rumba Cafe

Come to think of it, human ash isn’t powdery enough to be snorted, at least not straight from the crematorium, as Ed Hamell’s friend supposedly did, supposedly by accident. But picky details probably won’t materialize in your skull while witnessing one-man folk-punk band Hamell On Trial. Hamell applies caustically comic timing  to songs, sometimes in dazzling cycles; ditto casually attention-appropriating stories, confessions, conversations, and insults. He’s also a secret romantic. If you want  to bring that (or any other bright insights) up to him, go right ahead.

The National

Monday @ The LC Pavilion

“I was carried to Ohio, in a swarm of bees,” reminisces Cincy-to-Brooklyn post-post-punk-revival art rockers The National‘s Matt Berninger---no stork for him---as his big ol’ warm plaid voice and venturing imagery can suggest OH-to-UK cult figure Scott Walker. Raw impulses and results are expertly negotiated with the rest of the band and ritualized, amid the streetlights and sails of High Violet. As Berninger mentions, “It always matters more than we know.” So he carefully applies a lingering touch to portraits of his night-eyed muse-objects, can kid his sadcore writing onstage, and gets ready for The National’s very live cover of Psychedelic Furs’ ”Pretty In Pink.”

4Play (Aug 2010)

 By Don Allred

AUG, 8

Gaelic Storm

Friday @ Coffman Park

With a trance-y buzz and rollicking beat, “Blind Monkey” struts through Gaelic Storm’s video postcard from the World Cup Finals. Having survived being the steerage band in “Titanic," these suavely rough-and-ready, cosmopolitan folkies are unfazed by normally crazy soccer fans. Well-prepared also for our Dublin Irish Festival, they bond with more-Irish-than-the-Irish Americans, swinging through the family tree: “My mother’s sister’s cousin’s auntie’s Uncle Barney’s father’s brother/Had a cousin from Killarney!” “Blind Monkey” ‘s briskly mystical call kicks deeper on their brand new Cabbage, which reels around the crisping Sun.

 Candye Kane

Saturday @ The Rumba Cafe

Dealing with her tumultuous upbringing and teen motherhood helped fortify Candye Kane for  80s L.A.’s  punk ‘n’ roots intersections. Having survived pornography and pancreatic cancer, she’s an out bisexual who’s tight with her manager husband and drummer son. Also a convert to Judaism, versatile blues stylist Kane celebrates life and music by frankly tracing their twists and turns. Her inescapable lucidity paradoxically powers Tom Waits-worthy atmospherics, script-flipping dedications, and vanishing-point insights. After all, “I never know/How far to go/Until I’ve gone too far.”

Victoire with Matt Marks

Sunday @ Bar of Modern Art

On  Victoire’s Cathedral City, “A Song For Mick Kelly" 's sampled guitars herald the head-long contemplation of Carson McCullers’ heroine, while  “A Song For Arthur Russell” lyrically grooves with the warm shadow of late dance-pop-genius-cellist AR. Victoire’s  keyboards, violin, bass and clarinet thrive on the tension of melancholy and urgency. Thriving on wired connections between heavenly bodies and spirits, Matt Marks and singer Melissa Hughes perform selections from Marks’ The Little Death, Vol.1, whose characters soulfully torture themselves and each other, as only true believers can.

Spoon

Monday @ The LC Pavilion

Austin-based anglophiles Spoon twitch, slam and throb through  testy, zesty, questing garage alchemy, rolling out their own dark, fragrant barrel of groovy premonitions. Whomever leader Britt Daniel is addressing, in or through the mirror, is someone he values, and he never takes too much for granted. In brooding, nocturnal full bloom, these professional late adolescents are determined not to get arrested. They’re especially persuasive face to face, as electricity and other weighty matters get passed right along, and you may well find yourself parading uphill, grape-stomping through “The Mystery Zone.”

 AUG. 11:

The Girls At Dawn

Wednesday @ The Summit

Cosmic garage trio The Girls At Dawn make themselves at home, as their self-titled EP deftly re-sets the airflow and echo of of voices harmonizing with percussive counterpoint. “C’mon over tonight/Don’t have to fight,” they chirp like early ‘60s Brooklyn hairspray sirens, with an almost-secret message: “Have to, have to.” The Girls At Dawn like to make tempestuous sounds at home too, under brightly reflective/refractive surfaces. Which are also pretty resilient, no matter how many garden-carving guitars and absent boyfriends there are to greet at dawn.

Lydia Loveless

Friday @ The Rumba Cafe

Veteran Columbus teen Lydia Loveless sometimes includes the Replacements’ intensely frustrated “Answering Machine” and Def Leppard’s dynamically mesmerized  “Hysteria” with her punky tonk combo’s deliveries, unstoppably 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.

EL-P

Monday @ Skully’s

Columbus-born, internationally esteemed rapper Camu Tao’s voice was on key as his words were on point, and he has no problem singing on  King of Hearts. Tao died before finishing its production, but his deliberately rough diamonds were set by EL-P, who hosts tonight’s listening party, on the eve of the album’s release. Hopefully, EL-P will also spin his collaboration with Tao  (the duo billed as Central Services), Forever Frozen In Television Time, where romantic psychodramas of internalized politics can morph hip-hop, r&b and rock into audacious beauty. Ditto the ever-budding, zigzagging instrumentals of EL-P’s new  Weareallgoingtoburninhellmegamixxx3.

 Stone Temple Pilots

Tuesday @ The LC Pavilion

“Stone Temple Pilots are elegant bachelors,”  Pavement once sang. In truth, grunge pioneers STP’s only  likely “GQ” cover boy is vocalist Scott Weiland, whose haberdashery and rehab-related activities proliferated along perilous parallels. When Weiland was recruited by Velvet Revolver, some laughed, but an album and tour appeared in due course. STP’s new self-titled set doesn’t fan the flair of SW’s solo debut, 12 Bar Blues, but it’s more fuel for cogent reunion concerts, where Weiland professionally struts his suitably time-roughened stuff, sometimes in well-fitting t-shirt and jeans

 AUG. 18:

Cave

Thursday @ Cafe Bourbon Street

“Take me away and I’ll sleep for a while.” Sure, because the Cave men are only human, and not married to the “faithful dimension” their evolutionary echo explores. Nope, Cave want to stay real enough to send suitably mixed messages to younger seekers: “Teenager/Show, show, show/Teenager/No, no no! ” The smoke signals of  “Brigette” evoke a certain cinema goddess, giving the Sun a cold sassy shoulder, before strutting back to her private kingdom of liberated critters. It’s a true story, but that’s only half of it. Cave’s deep.

Rooney

Saturday @ Newport Music Hall

Rooney are party professionals, working for the weekend like hand-clapping, guitar, piano and nerve-jangling, table-clearing, pool-cleaning, JetBlue-emergency chute-opening slaves. They’ve got the built-in anxieties of power pop’s perpetual adolescence, but they’re still learning the best ways to burn some endless summer.  If the future’s a bill too big to pay, that’s another gap that even non-ID-carrying sounds can fill for a minute. They like lovers’ quarrels, because they want you to school them. With no disrespect to power pop’s dads, the Beatles, “I don’t wanna let it be.”

Woody Pines

Sunday @ The Rumba Cafe

Woody Pines is a man and his band. Pines the man plays sings and plays guitar, banjo, harmonica, and kazoo. Pines the band bring fiddle, acoustic bass and drums. They’re the kind of folkies who like to roll around the French Quarter, earning it. They also like the corner traffic melodies of the Memphis Jug Band, the clash and mesh of Delta grooves, and the pre-Nashville country music capital of Asheville, North Carolina. That’s where vaudeville’s thrills fit with boxcar blues; Woody Pines’ guys know how and why.

Hail The Villain with Airbourne

Tuesday @ The LC Pavilion

“I’m only a man/Back from the dead/To take back the fear.” Hail The Villain’s Bryan Crouch sounds humble and grandiose simultaneously, like a more consistently appealing James Hetfield. Held notes can push Crouch’s luck, but genre-crossing HTV increasingly justify stripping Metallica and others for parts. Meanwhile, young Australians Airbourne celebrate their AC/DC legacy, relying on more on raw, yet fairly rare power. If a peacock could crow, and spread wings that were all of red, orange and yellow, it might become Airbourne. 

AUG. 24:

Califone

Thursday @ The Wexner Center

The “Americana” tag can be an excuse to get maudlin, morbid, and/or just plain mopey. Not so for Califone, who bluntly complain,  “All my friends are funeral singers.” That’s also the title of their latest album, performed tonight while a horror film of the same name is screened simultaneously This multi-media presentation’s live, partially improvised soundtrack will be followed by a straight-ahead set of songs. In both modes, Califone combine the well-timed decay of rich imagery with sly, bluesy urgency and backwoods electronics. Hopefully, they’ll dig up some new friends.

Titus Andronicus

Thursday @ The Summit

Punk-tending combo Titus Andronicus’ name is also the title of Shakespeare’s bloodiest play, in which one villain repents of any good deed he may have ever accidentally committed. Such candor can be refreshingly associated with a surreal saga referencing the Civil War. The Monitor is also a battleship armored in broken hearts, male hormones, wistful thinking, wishful thinking, and art therapy. Shredded parodies of Springsteen add gnarly texture to their sonic interstate’s surface, which covertly tends to smooth out, like a lady’s tauntingly withheld skin.

Megan Palmer & The Hopefuls

Friday @ The Rumba Cafe

Singer/songwriter Megan Palmer, frequent flier between Brooklyn and Columbus, sometimes plays violin with hearty, brainy Columbus saloon crew the Spikedrivers, roving, troving Columbus-bred bard Tim Easton, and mountain fountain pilgrims Luther Wright & The Wrongs. Palmer grows her new album, Old 33, into one big violin, swooping through  illuminations, while The Hopefuls flex and pop like pizzicato strings. She explores the mistakes we tell ourselves we’re learning from. They’re fuel for thought, as thought becomes sweeter fuel. “Love is wine after whiskey/You can never get enough.” 

Rush

Sunday @ The Nationwide Arena

Canadian libertarian power trio Rush have long since learned to balance grand themes and brotherly work-outs.They also know Spinal Tap, of course, so shows genially/carefully provide intentional comedy, with video skits and sci-fi stage effects.They’re currently performing one of their most popular albums, Moving Pictures, in its entirety, with mental-cinema material from 2112, plus two new songs,“BU2B” and “Caravan.”  “In a world where I feel so small/I can’t stop thinkin’ big,” Geddy Lee confides, as “Caravan” ‘s dreams pound and steam into the future.

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.

4Play (Oct 2010)

 By Don Allred

OCT. 7:

Drive-By Truckers

Wednesday @ Newport Music Hall

The Big To-Do is one of the best-played, best-sung, best-recorded, best-written Drive-By Truckers albums ever. Pretty much in that order, to the credit of this self-described ”lyrics-driven” band. The music crashes through “clouds that took Daddy up to Heaven” like angry, daredevil spirits, before discreetly sniffing sleazy, eerie evidence of real life’s solved crimes and lingering mysteries. Young bassist-singer (and sometimes songwriter) Shonna Tucker’s country/Motown/British Invasion-fueled delivery unstoppably testifies, further sparking the catchy crackle of unexpectedly fresh perspectives on known zones of strange weather.

Swans with Baby Dee

Wednesday @Outland

“The only way to begin/Is to reel the first liar in,”  declares ancient art-rock cave painter Michael Gira, stepping into new coiling sounds. Thus freed, seeker summons fellow faithful to  My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky.  It’s carefully wired: bludgeons are applied only when necessary. Meanwhile, transgendered Baby Dee’s transportation-savvy voice comfortably hovers and intriguingly ricochets around her harp and piano, building boldly hopeful ballads, on Songs For Ann Marie.  Dee’s range is more idiosyncratic live, sometimes including bawdy, possibly improvised verses, evolving into sing-along choruses.

Slayer/Megadeth/Anthrax

Sunday @ The LC Pavilion

The subliminal polka beats of Slayer’s current World Painted Blood make juicy DNA with somehow-swinging staccato, and even a breath of hip-hop. Give it up for drummer Dave Lombardo, who also drove Slayer’s sinfully syncretic Seasons In The Abyss,  which the thrash metal prophets now present live, in its entirety. Megadeth do the same for their equally iconoclastically iconic Rust In Peace, with David Ellefson back on bass. Anthrax’s career-spanning set may include songs from their forthcoming album; either way, we get recurring lead throat Joey Belladona.

Women

 Tuesday @ Skully’s

Women are guys. Furthermore, when perky sounds go for a stroll with nightmare noise, their whole approach might initially seem too gimmicky. But on Public Strain, Women can lure even unsympathetic ears and guarded hearts down the garden path of unlikely grooves, until it’s time to go public enough with succinctly melodic memories of lost love. Then the shredding spin and persistent post-punk bounce of “Drag Open” pursue missing beauty again, getting enough secret response to charge the randomly flooded, resplendently rippling stairway of “Eyesore.” Getting there is its own story.

OCT. 13:

Pierced Arrows

Thursday @ The Summit

Along with the other suspects forcibly re-named Lollipop Shoppe, Fred Cole conjured “You Must Be a Witch,”  a ‘60s garage classic, and even a hit. Such music biz vindication didn’t impress guitarist Fred or his bassist wife Toody, who orbited indie rock’s Dead Moon for 20 years, before Pierced Arrows. Fred’s voice can pierce any sound system (or lack thereof). Both of the Coles project psychedelic soul over and through their fractured feedback, buzzing surveillance, Kelly Halliburton’s flying saucer cymbals, and the marching sway of melodies, always ready for more.

Olof Arnalds with Cheyenne Marie Mize

Friday @ The Wexner Center

Icelandic singer/songwriter Olof Arnalds gently nudges folk-shaded nostalgia toward fresh fascination, unmistakable in several languages.  She’s at home covering tropicalia truthmonger Caetano Veloso’s ” Maria Bethania,” a tribute to his equally restless sister, and while slipping through Springsteen’s “I’m On Fire.”  Cheyenne Marie Mize nurtures lines like “I knew we would see/It was all for the best”, in a post-Americana ghost town of explosive implications. She also grows narrative from repetition, like Willie Nelson on a good night. That’s where the resemblance ends, fortunately.

Will Hoge

Friday @ The Basement

In  2008,  rocker Will Hoge crashed his motorcycle. Actually, it was a scooter, not a Harley hog, and he was heading home, not going wild. Such details evidently aid Hoge in adjusting his mirror, while wheeling through 2009’s The Wreckage. The title track turns his serious accident’s impact into “The cheap dime store perfume/Never really washes off/Makes me want to call you up again.” That’s serious too. Hoge’s shrewd studies of Seger, Petty. and the Eagles also inform his new set of unplugged remodels, The Living Room Sessions.

Doc Watson

Friday @ The Midland Theatre

Originally a banjo player, Doc Watson brings a percussive, dancing quality to his flat-picking guitar style, especially when adapting traditional fiddle tunes and blues. Rockabilly, pop, and country got the Watson treatment in the 50s, and another intended whirl on 1995’s Docabilly. 1999‘s Groovegrass 101 found him (and Bootsy Collins) rolling with the Groovegrass Boyz.  2009’s Live At The New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival tracks the 86-year-old guitarist/vocalist through the droll “Frankie and Johnny,” the eerie “In the Pines,” and several levels of  “Sittin’ on Top of the World.”  In tonight’s show, tagged “Home To Our Mountains,“ he performs with guitarist Richard Watson and multi-instrumentalist David Holt.

More by yrs. truly re GrooveGrassin’ with Doc & B-B-Bootsy: https://myvil.blogspot.com/2005/12/groovegrass-boyz.html

OCT. 20:

Marshall Chapman

Friday @ The Wexner Center

Despite the sudden death of intended collaborator Tim Krekel---early NRBQ associate, contributor to oft-revelatory Clash trib The Sandinista! Project, much more---rock-country premonition Marshall Chapman’s Big Lonesome rolls on, through sensuous shades of blue. They Came to Nashville, Chapman’s new book of conversations with fellow pilgrims, led her to complete “Riding with Willie”: “Bobbie and Willie play music all night/Sister and brother/Beautiful sight/Songs long forgotten come to light/That’s the way I like it.”  Despite Wexner’s listing, this free solo show delivers both songs and stories, according to Marshall’s sworn deputies.

Gram Rabbit

Friday @ The Rumba Cafe

Gram Rabbit’s secretly spooky name mixes the creatively cremated ashes of their Joshua Tree neighbor, prodigal Americana prodigy Gram Parsons, with the sizzling signature of ruling chanteuse Jessica Von Rabbit. GR’s occasional desert ballads increasingly get abducted by rocking space-disco and electro-pop. Von Rabbit’s an “Alice In Wonderland”-worthy queen in concert, commanding all swaying subjects, “Get off with your head. “ Still, an onstage rebel often keeps his long-eared cranium in place, when not spinning pugilistic paws. A furry Marie Antoinette may materialize, and this show’s definitely free.

Black Prairie

Saturday @ Kobo

Three roving Decemberists come ashore for Black Prairie’s Feast of the Harvest Moon. The sly slide of Chris Funk’s dobro, the discreet persistence of Nate Query’s bass, and the bold speculation of Jenny Conlee’s accordion now travel with the finger-picking guitar accents of Jon Neufeld, plus the violin and vocal nuances of Annalisa Tornfelt. Amidst a campfire kaleidoscope of Anglo-American, gypsy, and tango-encountering instrumentals, Tornfelt channels adaptive aftershock on “Red Rocking Chair,” rueful resolution on “Single Mistake.”  seductive candor on “Crooked Little Heart,”  and  “Blackest Crow” ‘s  subtle, eerie bliss.Shad

Monday @ Skully’s

On TSOL, Kenya-born, multilingual  journeyman Canadian rapper Shad unpretentiously slides orchestral perspectives and vocal samples through the strata of his world view, while grappling with temptations of feel-good lip service and reductive melodrama, always waiting in easily found sounds. Shad’s no radical, but he expertly veers through  thorny, atmospheric gardens, applying fresh pressure to traditional script-flipping:  “When Abraham went to slash Isaac/In a sense he baptized him/Rabbi said, ‘Don’t trust them cash prizes /The same thing that floats your boat can capsize it.’ Shad also courageously considers resourceful women.

OCT. 27:

Kurt Vile & Friends

Wednesday @ Skully’s

 Kurt Vile’s 12-string guitar rhythms and shrewdly elliptical lyrics navigate psych/folk-rock harmonics, re-carving gravity’s clouds. He’s ready for “Invisibility: Nonexistent” and “Ocean City,” leaving a note that begins,“You’ve got a best friend/Don’t know how.”  Currently backed by the Violators, Vile’s  intriguingly compatible with succinctly volatile punk combo Soft Pack, whose theme song is “Answer To Yourself.”  He’s equally at home with Purling Hiss, judging by their Public Service Announcement. It’s a beer can of microcosmic jams, rolling through high school gymnasium echoes.

GWAR

Wednesday @ Newport Music Hall

 Mortal foolishness provides eternal inspiration, as the gut-wrenching gospel of “Sick and Twisted” heretically heralds the approaching album apocalypse, Bloody Pit of Horror, by GWAR.  Also, advancing track “Zombies, March” challenges tempo-shifting, time-charring chariots of desire, accelerating “A Gathering of Ghouls” and “Storm Is Coming” into the expert, heartfelt meltdown of ironclad irony.

Marty Stuart

Friday @ The Midland Theatre

As Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, Marty Stuart found himself dancing and singing on the tracks by his favorite abandoned Philadelphia, Mississippi depot, then jumping out of the way of a real-life inspiration for his current album, Ghost Train. Here, traditional country artist Stuart usually responds with agility to ruined reputations, spooky relationships, washed-out bridges, and dubious career choices. Tonight’s show includes Stuart’s usual studio/stage support: ace guitarist Kenny Vaughan, plus the bass, drums, and voices of Harry Stinson and Paul Martin.

Eternal Summers

Tuesday @ The Summit

Eternal Summers’  Nicole Yun sounds perfectly serious when she sings, “I need a disciplinarian,”  as the melody freely grows notes around the last word’s syllables. Guitarist Yun and drummer Daniel Cunliff conjure canny confidence: “Nothing to fear/Only money.” On Silver, immediately diverting post-punk ventures often prove smooth and porous, grand and stealthy. When Yun wonders what she can take from you for her caravan, she’s faithfully studying strangely shared dreams. Maybe that’s why even the epic tease of “Bully In Disguise” somehow satisfies.

4Play (Nov Dec 2010)

By Don Allred

NOV. 4:

Oberhofer/Morning Benders

Wednesday @ The Basement

Jilted, jolted, defensive, bruised and resolute, Brooklyn indie rock crew Oberhofer’s  breakup songs stick a tuning fork in stinky fluorescent smog. They’re ready to take stockpiles of gifted thrift store sounds on the road. Oberhofer’s promising hangover remedies are further schooled by poised sophomores the Morning Benders; whose 2010 album Big Echo disclaims. “I can’t help thinkin’ we grew up too fast/I know this won’t last.” Yet while riding such surging, surefooted choruses, the Benders aim straight ahead.

Vanity Theft

Friday @ Circus

Alice Grodecki guides Dayton-based girl gang Vanity Theft’s post-Catholic/ gothic reflections through love’s graveyard, eternally busting a faithless accomplice. If only he’d grab all the baroque lines and catchy dynamics she feeds, bleeds, and leads him with, rising to the occasion. Vanity Theft’s undeniable pop-rock flair shreds shades of new wave and electro-beats. Yet Grodecki’s committed to wrestling with truth, not settling for easy cheese. So who knows how it will go, but meanwhile, like the leather siren sings, “You better get what you came for!”

Keelhaul/Russian Circles

Friday @ The Ravari Room

On Triumphant Return To Obscurity, Cleveland quartet Keelhaul recycle hardcore punk and metal, too sardonically jaded for Satan. But discontent pushes back, guitars scratch like matches, and drummer Will Scharf swings dead ends like a magic landlord.  Nowadays, Keelhaul frequently appears with art-metal trio Russian Circles, whose studio orchestral album Geneva can get cooked into melodies rising like steam and winter breath on stage. Their music’s rich and austere simultaneously, as doom gets its chance for renewal, just like (almost) everything else.

Mountain Man

Saturday @ Newport Music Hall

Mountain Man are three young women who explore and savor dimensions and implications of everyday imagery, in mostly a cappella harmonies. Emotions also harmonize, so whether you hear them singing “You make my bread and my wine” or “You make my red in my white,” it sounds right. Like Emily Dickinson and the most talented service workers, Mountain Man’s true folk tradition lies in fluidly, boldly editing the stories worth sticking to. They cut their losses and wins into a shapely path. 

NOV. 10:

Brendan Benson/Posies

Wednesday @ Outland

Brendan Benson  and the White Stripes’ Jack White formed the Raconteurs with members of Cincinnati’s Greenhornes, determined to shake their shared garage band roots free of stale nostalgia. On Benson’s solo album, My Old, Familiar Friend, relationships rattle catchy chains and rainbows of 60s/00s style, as history and mystery go steady. Benson’s currently backed by the Posies, whose own set includes recent songs from Blood/Candy. Their riverside reveries and coded constellations take a sly, hungry look at sweet machines all around us. 

Pretty Lights

Thursday @ Bar of Modern Art

Pretty Lights is DJ/producer Derek Vincent Smith, traveling with jazz/hip-hop drummer Adam Deitch. Smith seeded 2010 with metal chesnut “Final Countdown”, which becomes strenuously life-affirming gospel science, right before J.J. Cale’s “After Midnight” calmly pursues Gregg Allman’s “Midnight Rider” over spinning borders. Making Up A Changing Mind ‘s  poetic distortion is no more paradoxical than the blues, as a mutating sample spells out: “I know you been hurt/By somebody else/I can tell by the way/You carry yourself.”

The Blow with Melissa Dyne

Friday @ The Wexner Center

The Blow is Khaela Maricich, whose storytelling and indie art pop songs grow through each other on stage, accompanied by multi-media wizard Melissa Dyne. It’s a tricky process, but that’s the point, especially when electro-beats lure us though the gleaming surfaces and dilating depths of her current album, Paper Television.  Some plausibly outrageous scenes could overwhelm, if The Blow didn’t sound so innocently, inescapably observant and hopeful. Here/s an eye and ear for “the thin line/Between love and delusion.”

Bottomless Pit

Sunday @ The Treehouse

Sharp lines find their way through the mellow undertow of baritone guitar and bass, as post-punk veterans Bottomless Pit’s lead player Andy Cohen murmurs: “Backwoods in my blood/Sure as sitting ducks.” On Blood Under The Bridge, the swaggering, jagged “Summerwind” finds him hustling city slickers, and such skills even discover new ways to deliver sincere messages like “Kiss Them All For Me,” though the meter’s always running. Subtle vocals even suggest that BT is potentially a world-class backup band, so all you budding rock gods better check them out.

NOV. 17:

Benise

Wednesday @ the Palace Theatre 

Nebraska kid Roni Benise started his own global pop occupation of L.A. streets with performers who sparked the genesis of his current stage saga and album, The Spanish Guitar. Singer-guitarist Benise travels through multi-media evocations of Arabian deserts, ancient Indian Buddhist temples, Havana’s oldest streets, Brazil, Paris, Venice and (oh yeah) Spain. Gorgeously versatile dancers best extend Benise’s flamenco-centric spin.

Bonded By Blood/Overkill/Gama Bomb/Forbidden

Wednesday @ Newport Music Hall

Having taken their name from an early 80s album by punk-influenced thrash (and early Metallica) inspirations Exodus, BBB do their best to live up to their chosen mission on Exiled To Earth. Bobby Blitz’s indestructible wail also evokes the no-frills thrills of Exodus peers Overkill’s 2010  Ironbound. They’re accompanied by sardonically imaginative Irishmen Gama Bomb and even seldom-touring  Forbidden, whose Omega Wave queries/quarries whether Earth’s final crisis isn’t culturally conditioned, self-fulfilling prophecy. Fortunately, negative energy is still one  rockin’ resource

La Otracina

Thursday @ Carabar

Psychedelic power trio La Otracina believe in climate change. Drummer Adam Kriney kicks off  Reality Has Got To Die  with the hearty cry, “Hail fire!” It’s the cue for us all to shed a little more skin, as cold equations get fried and due processes get served another way of rounding up usual and unusual suspects. Hungry young metal dinosaurs, progressive cavemen, tasty classical comets, fluid druids and jazz-rock schemes trace boogie-blues convertible dreams through wide-awake eyes and ears, on a star chart still being tattooed.

Adam Stephens/Felice Brothers

Friday @ The Rumba Cafe

Indie rockers Two Gallants’ underdog persistence invigorates TG co-leader Adam Stephens’ solo album, We Live On Cliffs. It’s elegantly distinctive, until soulfully bereft balladeer Stephens starts  illin’  like a re-cycled  Dylan. But compatibly with the real  Mr. D., Stephens can be cosmically/comically cranky and confessional, as his own muse steals him back for another last dance. The Felice Brothers’ streetwise Americana befits mountaineers who played the subways in more ways than one. Check their self-titled debut and  Yonder Is The Clock.

NOV 24:

Times New Viking

Wednesday@ Carabar

True to the punk tradition, Columbus-based trio Times New Viking are art school drop-outs, who learned to play on stage and in their own basement studio/fortress, at  variously tested North Campus addresses. TNV  allow(?) some of their most consistently intelligible lines to spell out: “”I make the same mistake every day/I walk the streets and say/’Everything will be all right!’ ” That’s what seems to rattle these resonant structures persistently glimpsed through traffic. Ditto,  “I get nervous when I’m high.”

Hot 17 Showcase

Saturday @ The Rumba Cafe

The Hot 17 is a new annual guide to Columbus’  independent musicians, featuring contributions by area writers and photographers. Tonight’s showcase presents  harmonically dynamic art-pop sextet Karate Coyote, plus garage pilgrims Mors Ontologica’s unstoppably personal testimony regarding the OSU-verse.  Also, Low Men  bracingly reel in “Forgotten War” and other exported realities, while singer/songwriter Jason Quicksall deftly deploys all the melodies, metaphors and rhythmic strategies required to keep sight of himself as a moving target of complex clarity.

Charles Walker Band/Stretch Lefty/Mojoflo

Saturday @ Skully’s Music Diner

The Charles Walker Band specializes in dance-worthy r&b, funk and blues, with diva Porsche Carmon electrically conducting us through original songs, from acerbic social commentary to astutely grooving ballads .Also, saxophonist/keyboard player Walker leads a tidal surge through Mississippi wizard Robert Johnson’s “Stones In My Passway.” Other covers include James Brown’s “Get Up Offa That Thing” and Hound Dog Taylor’s “Gimme Back My Wig.” Columbus’ Stretch Lefty and Mojoflo compatibly add reggae and hip-hop to the roots-rich  mix.

Young The Giant

Monday @ Newport Music Hall

Young The Giant’s self-titled debut album begins with the plausibly self-observant spin of a mental romantic, venturing forth into a balancing act of expansively taut tunes and quirky lyrics. Hit-wise, YTG hopefully won’t need their slide into post-yacht rock for economically (and otherwise) inhibited, yet Red Bull-sipping sons of the beach, antsy enough to fantasy dance. Even as such, they score some good stuff, with subtly exotic instrumental vigor always encouraging the singing mastermind to go for real-life gusto, especially on stage.

DEC. 10;

Freelance Whales/Miniature Tigers

 Friday @ The Basement

Indie art-pop kiddies Freelance Whales have been tagged as "twee",

but especially live, there's also something hard-nosed and practical

about the compact, levitating density of this former sidewalk/subway

platform band. Five-part harmonies infiltrate stringed instruments,

glockenspiels, drums and sustained keyboard chords, like the rowdy

ghost breezing through FW's debut album, Weathervanes. Miniature

Tigers tenaciously swept love's ashes through the Phoenix-to-Hollywood

mirages of 2008's Tell It To The Volcano, and showtime can bring

sharper focus to the stylish highlights of 2010's  Fortress.

Question Mark and the Mysterians/Professors

Saturday @ The Shrunken Head

"The shadows were all I had/Until you came into my life," garage

pioneer Question Mark drawls in "Got To." Whether or not his seemingly

fickle muse actually ended up crying "96 Tears", she definitely

Inspired all of QMM's 1966 classics. The original combo still 

cogently mixes punky, speedy blues with Motown-informed flow

. Mysterians peers The Professors are veterans of Central Ohio's

 Dantes, Dominions and Mods.They cover the Stones, Beatles, 

Animals, even Dylan and the Byrds, in sonic strobe lights.

Here Come The Mummies

Saturday @ Newport Music Hall

Here Come The Mummies are reputedly full-time members of other bands

plus first-call session players, keeping all contracted identities

literally under wraps. With a line-up averaging nine members, counting

the full horn section, their rich vocal and instrumental harmonies

evoke Senior Prom and pep rally resplendence, plus band bus attitude,

as satire and sheer exuberance get acquainted. Grown-up proficiency

rolls though elements of Ellington, Chicago, yacht rock, and

Parliament-Funkadelic. Salty social commentary even celebrates limits

of originality, in expansively pungent perspective.

Buke & Gass

Tuesday @ Kobo

Buke is Arone Dyer, who sings and plays a plugged-in, customized

baritone ukelele, with added pick-ups and strings. She can

simultaneously play an Indian keyboard banjo, via some of her pedals.

Pedals (triggering home-grown electronic sources and kick drums, for

instance) are also employed by Gass, AKA Aron Sanchez, whose electric

bass's range is extended with guitar strings. Buke's youthful voice

and tunes swing confidence and anxiety through the emphatic momentum

of rough-edged, adventurously analytical acid-folk-rock. She's an

"achin' pagan," and a better-equipped Cinderella.

4Play (Jan Mar April 2009)

By Don Allred

JAN. 25

Lambchop

Sun @ Wexner

Lambchop was once an orchestral party of floating friends and strange guests. Almost twenty years later, as a smaller, imperfectly focused but durable unit, they're flexible role models for quirky indie rockers and others. Their new album, OH(Ohio), vividly personalizes the early 70s pastoral romance (hippie make-out music) of Boz Scaggs and Van Morrison, as head Lambchopper Kurt Wagner brings mixed feelings to the one who still inspires his affections and obsessions: his muse-object, that is, and perhaps more than one other listener at times (like when he sounds like he's swallowing tasty froggies, maybe uncooked). But mixed emotions can be very stirring, and he knows the approach: with tiny, surreal, bittersweet jokes, gentle and otherwise, intimately glinting in bouquets of images, usually changed before wilting 

MARCH 9:

Joan Baez

Mon. @ Southern Theatre

"Everyday that passes/I'm sure about a little less/Even my money keeps tellin' me/It's God I need to trust/And I believe in God/But God ain't us." Steve Earle‘s "God Is God" sets the unsettled tone of Joan Baez's latest album, The Day After Tomorrow. Producer Earle keeps the ever-stylized 60s Folk Queen on a solid spirit level, with compact cadences and carefully selected songs. Further along, Patty Griffin's "Mary" is "covered in roses...covered in slashes," finding her (and/or Her) way through the story's edits, somewhat like everybody else. JB’s road band is quite the multi-instrumental trio of Solas-co-founder John Doyle, Todd Phillips, and Dirk Powell

APRIL 8?

Donny McCaslin 

Thursday @ Wexner Center

In frequencies frequently brimming with brio and no cons, tenor saxophonist Donny McCaslin’s quintessence-minded jazz quartet includes bassist Hans Glawischnig, from McCaslin’s 2007 Recommended Tools, plus guitarist Ben Monder and drummer Antonio Sanchez, who play on his latest, Declaration. Each album delivers its visionary version of “Late Night Gospel,” with Monder’s twanging pangs and bright corners accentuating the tension and resolution that cycle through Declaration, recorded while McCaslin anticipated his daughter’s birth. Monder also cuts loose on Declaration ’s “Rock Me,” and hopefully we’ll see even more of that on stage.

The Mary Onettes 

Friday  @ Summit

On Islands, Sweden’s Mary Onettes walk out under starry, synthesized skies, as drums roll around distant hillsides of electric strumming, tingling with elusive string quartets. “You took me far too seriously/ ’Cause all I know is what I fear/Now I dare/To think of something that I’m not.” Despite lunar lapses, their quest’s second half gets paradoxically re-powered by the flying memories of “God Knows I Had Plans.” Recommended to fans of Coldplay and the immortal “Grey’s Anatomy,” which appropriately folded in the Mary Onettes’ “Lost in the Episodes.”

Past Lives

Friday @ Café Bourbon Street

There’s a place for us, as foretold by the hip-swaying way Jordan Blilie sings, “She comes out of no-oh-where.” It’s equally miraculous that Jordan Blilie sings anything, considering that he and two other Past Lives were once screeching Blood Brothers. Yet Past Lives’ Tapestry of Webs skillfully steers ears across an eternally overcast beach of vibrantly hollow beats. Splintery waves of tunes, tones and convictions lightly trace the veins of Jane’s Addiction into a hall of high-voice heroes, where Past Lives may bother to have a cookout.

MBird

Friday @ EspressoYourself Cafe

MBird is Megan Birdsall, a young jazz veteran now traveling through Over The Bones, her Americana chronicle. Birdsall's subtly variable pitch evokes an anxious ingenue, a mature woman, or both at once. The recurring huskiness as she waits "For nothing/Nothing but you" suggests all the ways she's shaded by the pendulum's slow swing. But she also believes that time can be more than a circle game: "One Kiss" could spiral it through the lasso of this watchful cowgirl in the sand. 

APRIL 15:

Stardeath and White Dwarves

Wednesday @ Circus

Stardeath and White Dwarves feature Dennis Coyne, nephew of the Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne, though this band’s first full-length CD, The Birth, isn’t always a mellow-fantastic, Lips-typical trip. Bass and shuddering keyboards permeate”The Sea is on Fire” and harmonies take flight over “New Heat.”  Back in the nest, with his chick gone, the “Keep Score” dude ruefully recounts fumbled ups and downs, trying to prepare for the title track’s scary babies. Stardeath’s daily flash can get slick, yet beats are  always ready to plant stars in the garden.

Trash Talk

Thursday @ Ravari

On Trash Talk’s self-titled album, the bass whips its cape aside as cymbals, voice and guitar pursue a scorched-earth policy. They descend through blind loyalty, betrayal, and blasting for clean (or bare) air. Yeah, this scroll of sonic skin can seem bare, But maybe you’ve heard that the peace sign is an inverted cross? Trash Talk’s scrawled icon is a peace sign upside down, with broken arms thus raised, not straightened. Word on the left: “Onward.” On the right: “Upward.” 

Wiley and the Checkmates 

Friday @ Circus

Herbert Wiley’s original Checkmates backed soul stars like Percy Sledge, Syl Johnson, and many less successful on the Southern circuit. The band’s most recent release, We Call It Soul, sports new Checkmates and mostly new, vintage-style songs and credentialed guests. It’s the testimony/resumé of  60s/00s journeymen—60s-sequenced enough for Wiley’s voice to deliver him from innocence to that serpent in the mirror. His bass enters space, though not before paying dues with (and to) truly funky chickens. It’s an intriguingly measured, bracing taste of their show, currently billed as an all-night dance party.

Gil Mantera’s Party Dream

Saturday @ Skully’s

Recordings of Gil Mantera’s Party Dream sometimes gleam like evidence between cracks, and vice-versa. Yet Youngstown’s Gil and Ultimate Donny aren’t Rust Belt journalists, they’re productive partytronic citizens. Even before drummer-producer Anthony Paterra appeared on Dreamscape and the Ballerina EP,  Bloodsongs was warm as a nice firm bag of plasma. Still, even among ecstatic (and even happy) posts on their blog, one fan, referring to an MTV performance, could only hope that “having special needs people tell you that you suck is an anomaly.” Journalists hope so too!

APRIL 22:

Extra Golden

Friday @ Rumba

Extra Golden equals two American rock guitarists times two Kenyan benga singer-percussionists.  On EG’s third album, Thank You Very Quickly, bouncing, strutting beats and crowing, high-note licks meet down-tuned tones. Sometimes they energetically settle in together---right before shifting tectonic party plates of texture and rhythm dare players and listeners to adapt. But it all fits. “Fantasies of the Orient” satirically swings like an exotic golf pro. The title track and “Ukimwi” veer through true stories of political arrest and AIDS, respectively, continuously developing the album’s most compelling melodies.

Dave Alvin

Saturday @ Maennerchor

“California’s burning/You can smell it in the air.” Formerly of the Flesheaters, Blasters. Knitters, and X, Dave Alvin, master songsmith-guitarist and journeyman singer, works a husky suggestiveness into his Golden State citizenship: “What that fire burns down, boys/We’ll just build back again.” But no boys’ club actually materializes on  Dave Alvin and the Guilty Women, where Wild West sirens such as Amy Farris and Laurie Lewis spin Alvin through paydays, ghost towns, and a rollicking/shrugged-off toast to the unknown, “Que Sera, Sera.”  One of his Guilty Men, Chris Martin, will provide electric guitar for Alvin’s (otherwise-unaccompanied)  “acoustic show” on Saturday.

If These Trees Could Talk

Saturday @ Carabar

Akron’s all-instrumental If These Trees Could Talk avoid the knottiness of “math rock” for evocative, alternating motifs, evidently intended as spiraling sequences of dynamic development (not too much so for those of us who are math-challenged).On their self-titled first album, “The Death of Paradigm” is the most consistently soulful flight, casting aside alternation for straight-up momentum and accrual, as a typically expansive opening theme passes from sorrow to solace to passionate resolution: a promise made is a promise kept, this time. A new track, “What’s in The Ground Belongs to You,” provides a new degree of warmly engaging, wrap-around sound quality.

Vegas 66

Saturday @ Ravari 

Columbus trio Vegas 66’s version of the rockabilly classic “Fireball” fire-brews a hell-bent-for-leather-und-lederhosen, beer-ific connection between the polka-fueled Southwest and Midwest. Subliminal oom-pah beats continue galloping on sharp-edged hooves, as Vegas 66’s original “Rosalene” leads storm clouds through the vanishing point. The title track of their new Wild Ride To Hell is one of several swinging with devilish horns, which will also attend this CD’s release party, along with go-go dancers Stephy de Lis and Holley Holloway.  Warning: unidentified flying strip-tease artistes sometimes spontaneously appear at Vegas 66 functions.

APRIL 29: 

Junior Boys

Wednesday @ Skully’s

 On their new album of ‘80s-schooled synth-pop, Begone Dull Care, the Junior Boys get lured from taking to making, then breaking notes.  Sonic capsules open, guiding seekers across the dance floor, to “somewhere down the hall…let it burn into the sky.”  Then they slip between the beats. A lonely Junior Boy may try to “Sneak A Picture” in the dark (where “I can see you better”), before growing up to be “The Animator.” Still, “What It’s All For” is something women, God bless ‘em, already know---so the JBs ain’t telling.

Max Tundra

Wednesday @ Skully’s

While his tour mates, the Junior Boys, build on tensions of pulse and impulse, Max Tundra steppes right up with his current collection, Parallax Error Beheads You. The clustering keyboards could be claustrophobic, if Tundra didn’t ride his mower though this junkyard garden of buzzing, blooming sounds. Most songs are short, sharp and sweet. At 11 minutes and change, “Until We Die” is by far the longest, but also the last track, thus easily skipped (thanks, Max!) Tundra’s voice is high, but never strained, spaced or earnest, even though he’s English.

Tim Easton

Friday @ Rumba

Tim Easton attended The OSU, rode with the Columbus-based Kosher Spears and Haynes Boys, then sang in European streets. Easton’s fifth solo album, Porcupine, tests quills, chills, and guitar slides with two other Cowtown vets, bassist-vocalist Matt Surgeson and drummer Sam Brown (of the New Bomb Turks, Haynes Boys and Gaunt). They’re pacemakers and jumper cables for Easton’s compulsively mobile characters, who mostly fear getting “too cold to sweat the dark out” (his own confession). As Easton says of Amsterdam, Porcupine is for “anyone with all eyes open.”

Chamaira

Tuesday @ The LC

 On The Infection, Cleveland’s Chimaira keep  Resurrection ‘s metal fever dream glowing. Vocalist Mark Hunter’s an impossibly articulate cookie monster. He simultaneously inhales, inventories and recycles a world of hurt’s black rainbow, even “Coming Alive” for “fiber pure, touching scars…psychoactive and delicate.” Meanwhile, deep inside the twisted beast, guitars wind body-clocks, stretch sinews and pump the juice, heated by the rhythm section’s staccato rounds. And so it comes to pass: here, ears are systematically/faithfully re-heated and re-sensitized, by a basic metal diet of irrational rations, long after “the final warning.”

 

 

4Play (May 2009)

MAY 6:

Grace Adele
Saturday @ The Thirsty Ear
 Columbus singer-songwriter Grace Adele dances old and new dreams together, warm as vinyl and clear as digits. She reports from the sultry shadows: “I’m the one you love, dear/But you don’t want me/The passion I feel is mine alone. “ Not that she can’t have fun driving herself crazy as a rock-a-billy baby, “In my silent romance/With a man who’s unaware.” She’s more into self-scrutiny than self-pity, hanging up her hang-ups next to her raincoat, where they’re “Never Lost” (also her album’s title)
 

Great Northern
Sunday @ Skully’s
Great Northern’s  Remind Me Where The Light Is is a reality show adventure, sailing and sliding across a shining soundscape—or is it?  True, Rachel Stolte brings the wake-up call, through several layers of ice: “We want the ancients/Who can’t hold a key.” It’s becoming clear that the ancients’ mixed-up appetites, idealism, analysis, and mythological views come with the inherited/invaded fossil-fuel wasteland Great Northern’s trying to rock clean through. ”We are collapsing/Onto our feet.”  But discovering the powers of illusion also gives them more plot points to spin around, just in time!
 

The Dears
Sunday @ Skully’s
On Missiles, with most of the Dears having quit, scavenged sounds are set carefully, lighting (sometimes burning) the void, where Murray Lightburn and Nathalie Yanchak share intimately distanced, everyday spiritual crises and musical medications. Distancing provides protection in (sometimes skewed) perspective, so Lightburn eventually feels like humbly contributing a grandly orchestrated “Meltdown” of electric colors to another vagabond visionary (who’s already melting down). Yes, Lightburn might well have been too much for the old Dears, but he and Yanchak now guide a new crew and their ethereal arsenal through the traffic.
 

Nick Jaina
Tuesday @ Treehouse
 Nick Jaina is a sociable guy, and The Narrow Way is a house party. But the conga line’s passing a TV that’s turned off. He’s a “folkie,” but with some electric instruments, just loud enough. Meanwhile, truth and lies find quiet little places; love and luck can’t resist pushing (through) each other. Not to slight differences; for instance, Jaina may sometimes behave like the devil, but “I don’t feel like the devil.” Also, our host points out “the kind of fruit you leave on the vine.” So don’t say you weren’t warned.
 

MAY 13:

Lydia Brownfield
Wednesday @ Skully’s
Reading about Lydia Brownfield’s punkamorphic saga through the Southeast and NYC, then return of the Cowtown native to multi-media enterprises—none of that warned of the abyss peering warmly from deep-ass mp3s. Steve Louis’s bass and Matt Hopkins’ drums un-pave Brownfield’s way down through Andrew Bird’s  “Fiery Crash,” around her own “Liar” ‘s equally unstoppable assurances. The Orff-ian percussion and too-understandable orphan carousel quest of “A Horse Named Yankee” turn the key eternally. New album’s out this summer, but don’t wait for time (is her urge, it seems). Go to her now.

Willem Maker
Thursday @ Summit
Willem Maker’s not much for burying meanings. They might poison him like the dioxin dump did, way back in Georgia. He’s got one song specifically about that, but it’s as short as the others. Bare facts have to be quickly re-gathered, re-twisted up the neck of his guitar, peeled by his slide into images flying by, all around the rising gravity of Maker’s New Moon Hand. He’s singing his truth through bad and good dreams: learning to “leave the fever in the past,” starting at the end of the line.

 Bob Log III
Thursday @ Summit
Bob Log III is the kind of bluesman who, if he didn’t have no taste, wouldn’t have no taste at all. Yes, he was born under a NO sign, which he took to mean was no sign at all, to not name his new offspring My Shit Is Perfect. He’s one happy pappy, and indeed, this one-man-guitar-and-foot-drum-band (very eventually) had us twang-dancing like a tooth that can’t fall out. Also, it turns out that hyper-agility and total collapse go together like that “Boob Scotch” he’ll (deservedly) ask you for tonight.

Duff McKagan’s Loaded
 Saturday @ Crew
Coming out of Guns ‘N’ Roses, Duff McKagan formed Loaded in 1998, as a righteous safety valve. Seattle comrades are ready when he is, to trade his bass for vocals and guitar. Velvet Revolver probably helped prime him for Loaded’s new Sick, but market scams also have Playboy financial columnist McKagan sassing the “Sleaze Factory,” while demonstrating how to invest glam holdings wisely (and how to write a thrilling “IOU”). Each song’s a set-up for the next. This filthy-lucrative set gives as good as it gets.

MAY 20:

Couch Forts
Thursday @ Circus
Couch Forts is a scintillating C-bus trio, including Owen Kelly, who sings and plays electric guitar, between the sometimes zig-zagging rainbow vibrations of fiddler Matt Opachick and the steely underpasses of banjo plucker Tyler Evans. Kelly also kicks a lone drum, jolting the box and reminding the spirals to complete the trippy tapestry and mental maze of Couch Forts. Three-in-one variations of neurotic-erotic-romantic conflation earn resolution through social hazards of inner/outer-world adventure. Art and the heart faithfully hook up for another visionary blind date, on a folktastic catharsis break.
 

The Floorwalkers
Friday @ Frog Bear & Wild Boar
Columbus’s Floorwalkers are five tunefully jammy, seemingly rainproof souls. Their 2005 self-titled EP uncorks an after-midnight sound, sweet and chilled, basically unperturbed by female departure, despite re-tuning to a keening booty call. Sorrrow blossoms, solace is spontaneously given, then more strenuously sought; ditto salvation, resulting in blues. The Frankfort EP takes them across ”foreign shores” of further insight, though “I don’t know what’s to come here after/But if you call for me, I’ll sing for you,” and that’s the Floorwalkers’ truest, bluest key to the highway sky.
 

Ocean Ghosts
Friday @ Skully’s
Ectoplasmic Cowtown mariners Ocean Ghosts sometimes do the afterglow with Frank Zappa, judging by 2008’s American Pride. At least in terms of lofty attitudes behind earthy humor; still, their funk-sample farming feeds all. Frankly speaking, “You don’t like Lou Rawls/And your tattoos suck loose balls” is a stunning conclusion, but they don’t stop. The music takes magnanimous victory laps (though 2007’s disco-delic cruise, Pepperoni Lovers, is even more expansive). They even eventually share with Americans, that “It’s too late to feel ashamed.” So let’s get another “Death of the Party” started!
 

Lady Antebellum
Saturday @ Crew
  Cheesy name not withstanding, contemporary country trio Lady Antebellum seek soulfully sexy self-improvement. Manly, vulnerable Charlie Kelly belts from the same brave point of view as righteously hot Hillary Scott (and L.A.’s mainly co-composing Dave Hayward). They’re “Lookin’ For a Good Time “, which keeps turning back into love. Although, when Scott realizes that “Home Is Where The Heart Is” doesn’t include her hometown sweetheart, Kelly’s the guy she leaves at the altar, learning to cope. But neither is ever the villain that songs addressed to “you” occasionally (and excitingly) reveal.

 MAY 27:

Jessica Lea Mayfield
Thursday @ Basement
 Kent’s Jessica Lea Mayfield sang on Akron's Black Keys’ Attack & Release, foreshadowing the charged nocturnal atmosphere of her own album, With Blasphemy So Heartfelt. The Keys’ Dan Auerbach produces, encouraging Mayfield’s stealthy, catchy pace. Auerbach also provides an electronic dirge to further illuminate  “I Can’t Lie To You, Love.” The dirge returns too insistently later, but here it mourns and raises another song’s early glimpse. “My life is fallin’ apart /Gettin’ better, I don’t know.” Yeah, you do know: both are true; to each other, most of all.

The Silent Years
Friday @ Basement
The Silent Years’ self-titled debut’s Sunday drives were low-octane until “Devil Got My Woman” drew leader Josh Epstein’s depressive reflexes into eerie blues-pop extensions. The last three songs found emotional rescue from Sargasso seizure via sonically naughty nautical encounters. The cruise continued on 2008’s The Globe, where the warped and the mellow waltzed backwards through crunchy sunsets, into orbital outpourings like “Goddamn You!,” an ill child of R.E.M’s “Everybody Hurts.”  TSY’s forthcoming EP Let Go upgrades some melds and shades, while their live-in-the-studio Daytrotter Sessions promise a pretty good show.

Gypsy Dave and the Stumpjumpers
Friday @ Red Door
Stumpjumpers are what some residents of far northwestern Pennsylvania call each other. David Washousky takes his pensive Pennsy roots and their distance along, while sharing his name in art (and “wandering faith”) with an archetypal folk figure. His voice and guitar, times the Stumpjumpers’ fiddle and bass, slip tunefully and thoughtfully through all weather, as “The right slips by, in the moving light/Of paintings and suppertimes.” Is that political? Either way, “A black ‘n’ white/Violet summer sky” gently/boldly follows, bonding differences sensuously. (Stumpjumping indeed, by cracky!)

Harlem Gospel Choir
Sunday @ Lincoln
The Harlem Gospel Choir was founded twenty years ago by Allen Bailey, already a versatile music biz veteran. The HGC soon performed with U2, also stars of opera and most other genres.  Bailey, the Choir’s manager and master of ceremonies, reportedly will have his chronicle of their worldwide musical journeys published soon. Accompanied by synthesizer and drums, the HGC’s often interactive performances include blues, jazz and sometimes rock, always guided by gospel’s stylized spirit. At the very least, their voices elevate the roof as high as any ol’ band can.