Just how retro is the strain of handmade country-blues peddled by Holly Golightly and the Brokeoffs? During their ramshackle hour-long set at IOTA last night, the guitarist/percussionist/singer Lawyer Dave introduced two different tunes as “a song about domestic abuse,” and in neither case did he follow-up with a Chris Brown joke.
Violence between lovers has always been one of the major themes of this music, of course. No one goes to counseling in the blues! Read the rest of this entry »
Chestnuts roasting. Jack Frost nipping. Yuletide carols being sung by the self-described “Mexican Elvis,” and folks dressed up like luchadores — mask-wearing Mexican wrestlers. Isn’t that how that one goes?
Well, that’s how it went at the 9:30 club last night, where Los Straitjackets — an ace surf-rock quartet out of, um, Nashville, despite their custom of performing in those sharp Mexican wrestling headpieces — were the house band for a bizarro 90-minute Christmas party hosted by East L.A. novelty singer/activist El Vez, who made good on his promise to spread “Santarchy,” and James Brown-like front splits, to the masses.
You could even call it a traditional program of holiday fare, assuming the Burlesque is the tradition you mean. Read the rest of this entry »
Tree People: Marketa Irglova and Glen Hansard
They broke up.
Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, for whom life imitated art imitating life when they fell in love playing lovers in the kinda-sorta-semi-autobiographical sleeper romance Once a few years back, are no longer an item. But on the evidence of “Strict Joy,” their first album together since they picked up an Oscar for Best Original Song last year, they remain creatively simpatico. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s perfectly reasonable to be suspicious of a musician with as mighty a moniker as Kurt Vile. If that was a stage name (it’s not*) the intimation would be of the most confrontational, petulant punk, but the Philadelphia-based Vile’s defiantly primitive, accident-prone songs are lazier and hazier than that, rarely straying from the long and droning road but hinting at melodic paths untaken. Imperfection is his ideology.
At the Black Cat Backstage last night, Vile ambled through the final date of a month of shows with his three-piece band, The Violators, for what he said was the largest crowd he’d played. Double digits, still — right-sized. He opened the 70-minute set with a solo take of “Peeping Tomboy,” which, like so much of the spectral folk side of his songbook, seemed to waft in from some phantom radio. Even when the combo joined him for the stouter stuff — like “Freak Train,” the self-explanatory centerpiece of his just-released Childish Prodigy album — the cacophony was more ethereal than kinetic. Read the rest of this entry »
Look, Bruce Springsteen and Joe Strummer didn’t invent this stuff, either. The greased hair and the leathers and the overdriven takes of Mad Men-era rock standards already had a blanket of dust on them a generation thick by the time The Boss and The Clash got around to them.
Jersey pomade-punks The Gaslight Anthem are the most persuasive current exponents of this tradition, and they don’t hide it. Hell, they called their latest album The ’59 Sound. At a sold-out 9:30 Club last night, they ripped through that nostalgic long-player in its near-entirety, frontman Brian Fallon balling up his handsome face to yowl about Redemption and car crashes and good girls in trouble with archaic-sounding names like Gale and — of course! — Mary. Read the rest of this entry »
As long as John Bonham and Kurt Cobain stay dead, there’s probably no more intriguing a musical home* for their former bandmates John Paul Jones and Dave Grohl, respectively, than Them Crooked Vultures, newest and superest of the supergroups.
At the 9:30 Club last night, rock’s own Justice League stuck to what’s been standard procedure since its debut two months ago, performing 85 minutes of unfamiliar, tempo-sliding, sternum-rattling rock, diamond-hard and osmium-heavy. Classics in waiting, possibly, but no covers. No encores. No compromises.
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We know what you’re thinking: Oh, great, another celebrity banjo album.
Actually, yes. The Crow, the collection of banjo tunes written (save for one) and performed by Steve Martin — uh-huh, that one — is truly wonderful. It says so right on the cover. And our opening joke is an, er, homage to one that a barely-legal Martin had in his stand-up routine in the mid-60s, way before Saturday Night Live or the movies or the New Yorker essays or the Kennedy Center honors.
“You’re thinking, ‘Oh, this is just another banjo-magic act’,” he’d quip. Back then, he banjo-ed out of desperation, lacking enough surefire jokes to fill out his contracted 25-minute set. Read the rest of this entry »
“So that’s what you look like!” roared The Voice halfway through Regina Spektor’s set at Constitution Hall last night, when the Russian-by-birth, adorable-by-design songstress rose from her piano to play keyboards on “Dance Anthem of the 80s.”
Rude, yes, but also baffling. Spektor is a wellspring of quirk, and her Dadaesque lyrics offer metaphorical cover without limit. But the stripped-down show gave her no place to hide. Read the rest of this entry »
Never to break up with Pink! She’ll do an album about it (last year’s Funhouse), it’ll go platinum, and pretty soon she’ll be in the middle of 10,000 people at the Patriot Center, just like she was for two lusty hours last night, telling God and everyone how much she doesn’t miss you. Read the rest of this entry »
Wherein on the occasion of U2’s latest ginormous roadshow descending upon our Nation’s Capital — well, Landover — your humble narrator attempts to quantify the relative merits of the U2 discography, minus live albums, compilations, EPs, soundtracks, side projects, mixtapes, or bootlegs.
Continuing from yesterday’s lesson RE: U2’s seventh through twelfth-best albums, we resume our countdown with No 6, after the jump.
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You might think that assessing the relative merits of every album by my favorite band since childhood would be no thang for a seasoned pro like me. That’s where you’d be wrong, Bono — er, boyo. Rating the U2 catalogue turned out to be as difficult and time-consuming as it is pointless.
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James Walbourne isn't pictured.
‘Scuse me, son, but I haven’t seen you hanging around with Chrissie Hynde lately?
Indeed. The pale, intense young fellow stage right at last night’s robust Son Volt gig at the 9:30 club was one James Walbourne, the British guitar prodigy whose serrated-edge leads make the current, boot-cut incarnation of The Pretenders so much fun. He’s even more valuable an addition to Son Volt, whose solid but often grayscale tunes — which aspire to be the iPhone era incarnation of Woody Guthrie’s dust-bowl ballads — tend to need the extra hooch more than Hynde’s do. Read the rest of this entry »
If The Breeders were thought of as indie rock in 1993, when “Cannonball” was all over MTV and Last Splash was speedily going platinum, they’re really indie now. They self-released their latest offering, the four-song EP Fate to Fatal, even posting a video on their website of twin sister-singers Kim and Kelley Deal silk-screening the vinyl album sleeves by hand.
Their Friday night set at the Black Cat was a similarly homespun, unfussy affair, making no apologies for its wobbly pacing or slight duration: 65 minutes, with plenty of momentum-sapping interstitial fumbling. But the individual performances? Perfect in their imperfection, like so much about this band. The sisters’ elfin harmonies and the itchy maelstrom of Kelley’s guitar would home in on the same frequency for two-to-three-minute salvos of buzzing nirvana, collapsing again at the end of each tune.
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M. Ward at the Glastonbury Festival, 27 June 2009. Photo by Cavie78; used under Creative Commons license.
There’s an Old Navy’s worth of sartorial similes in which one could dress the songs of Portland retro-elegist M. Ward. But the one that fits best is to liken them to jeans or T-shirts “distressed” to look and feel older and more lived-in than they really are.
Ward’s ethereal, meant-to-sound-“found” alt-country-rock is soothing and undemanding; just soft-focus enough to hold his spot on the hipper-than-thou Merge Records label. It’s well-crafted. It’s listenable as the day is long. It just isn’t terribly exciting, particularly on a Friday night at an all-standing venue like the 9:30 club.
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Do-It-Yourself is forever cited as the governing mantra of punk, and sure enough, it inspired Green Day leader Billie Joe Armstrong to put his own band together 20-plus years ago. But on the evidence of the sturdy Bay Area trio’s combustible circus at the Verizon Center last night, Armstrong’s progression from Buzzcocks-style petulance to Townshendian hero rock had at least one side effect: He’s discovered the benefits of outsourcing.
In a stunt that felt more American Idol than American Idiot, the 37-year-old guyliner-wearing frontman summoned a half-dozen fans to share his stage. There were the two dudes he had up, separately, to sing competing versions of “Longview,” the 1994 megahit that brought punk’s DIY ethos into the bedroom. Later, he pulled up a sweaty young comer in white tube socks to play guitar on “Jesus of Suburbia.” The kid’s awkward appearance made it feel twice as triumphant when he nailed the song.
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We’ll just get this out of the way, music lovers: Tony Bennett is, er, classic. As in: He was discovered by one Bob Hope. He’s got more years onstage than all the guys in Animal Collective put together. His guest appearance on The Simpsons was way back in Season Two.
So, yes. He is advanced. Eighty-two, in Earth years. But when he crooned “The Best Is Yet to Come” at Wolf Trap Thursday night, how could you not believe him? Read the rest of this entry »
Sorry, Washington, but after careful evaluation of the evidence submitted by our esteemed panel of experts, it is the finding of this commission that you simply are not ready for this jelly.
Gliding down from the pop firmament, then Baltimore, then finally from the Verizon Center ceiling, Sasha Fierce had a tough act to follow last night: her own. ‘Twas mere months ago she came to serenade the new President, albeit in her more modest alter ego of plain old platinum-selling Beyonce Knowles from Houston. Read the rest of this entry »
The band had seasoned their bright FM pop with just enough reggae to make it seem mildly exotic. It won them the world, then they retreated at the height of their fame. Their comeback roadshow dispensed with the usual, dreary half-dozen new songs (they hadn’t written any), instead having their gorgeous blond singer – now a fully formed solo star – cut straight to the old favorites. Read the rest of this entry »
No matter how many Will Ferrell flicks or Stephen Colbert Christmas specials Elvis Costello turns up in, the circa 1978 image of him as the logorheic and self-immolating Angry Young Man endures.
But in the latter two-thirds of his wildly eclectic career, he’s evolved into something more like the Martin Scorcese of music, as much a historian and curator as he is an original artist. Read the rest of this entry »
So, have you heard this new Decemberists record, The Hazards of Love? Dude. It’s an hour-long fantasy rock opera about a young squire who once suffered a vexing enchantment by a vengeful sprite of the wood, and whose lady faire — hey, where are you going? Come back! It’s good! Really!
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The big, sad news out of Camp X last week — the great Los Angeles punkabilly band X, that is —was that singer Exene Cervenka, 53, has been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. But there was neither sign nor mention of infirmity at the quartet’s typically rocket-powered gig at the 9:30 club Friday night, and not a lot of other chithat besides. The seminal foursome played just as they always have, and as every punk band should: Like they’ve got someplace else to be, five minutes ago.
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If your memory of The Bangles begins and ends with their two breakout hits, “Walk Like an Egyptian” and the Prince-penned “Manic Monday,” you could be forgiven for assuming the all-female band was primarily a studio creation like so many of their fellows in heavy rotation on MTV circa 1986. But you’d also be quite wrong. Read the rest of this entry »
Sasha Fierce, keep your distance.
“Y’all know where Beyonce is?” demanded Etta James at the Birchmere Saturday night. The septugenarian sexpot is still cranky that the 27-year-old one-namer who portrayed her in the film “Cadillac Records” got to sing “At Last” for the President and the First Lady back in January.
Read the rest of this entry »
Photo by Derek von Essen / courtesy Yep Roc Records
The great Los Angeles punkabilly quartet known as X had already made their best albums by 1985, when three-fourths of its lineup joined guitarist Dave Alvin to form the country and western offshoot The Knitters. That band took 20 years to brew a follow-up, but X/Knitters co-frontman John Doe’s sand-polished voice instantly proved to be such a natural and expressive delivery system for old-timey C&W that you knew (or at least hoped) he’d eventually get around to cutting a record like “Country Club”— his month-old set of (primarily) Bakersfield-centric “countrypolitan” classics, recorded with Toronto-based roots eclecticians The Sadies.
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Sadly, Bettye did not wear that belt at the 9:30 last night. Reviewed for Post Rock.
Bettye LaVette at the 9:30 Club, Monday, March 9, 2009
The Setlist
01 The Stealer
02 Still Want to Be Your Baby (Take Me Like I Am)
03 Choices
04 Joy
05 My Man, He’s Loving Man
06 You Never Change
07 Let Me Down Easy
08 He Made a Woman Out of Me
09 The High Road
10 Souvenirs
11 Somebody Pick Up My Pieces
12 Your Turn to Cry
13 Talking Old Soldiers
14 ?
ENCORE
15 Close as I’ll Get to Heaven
16 Before the Money Came (The Ballad of Bettye LaVette)
I was hours behind the curve when the Man called Feedom pointed me towards this bulletin this morning, reacting to the announcement that Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band will play the Super Bowl Halftime Show in February. (A few hours later, E Street Band guitar man, “Yankee Stadium” composer, and local hero Nils Lofgren announced he will undergo double hip-replacement surgery tomorrow.)
Anyway, let the setlist-handicapping commence!
Bruce has a history of throwing curveballs in at high-profile appearances with limited stage time. The Sept. 2, 1995 concert celebrating the opening of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland was one of only a handful of times when he performed with the E Street Band between 1989 and 1998, and he threw “Darkness on the Edge of Town” in his short set. When he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame himself in 1999 (Bono gave him an induction speech for the ages; Bruce returned the favor when U2 were inducted in 2005), he and the ESB played “The Promised Land,” “Backstreets,” “Tenth Ave. Freeze-Out,” and, er, “In the Midnight Hour” with Wilson Pickett, who looked younger at 58 then than Bruce looks at, well, 59 now.
For the Super Bowl, my best guess is he’ll do career-shortest versions of:
Tenth Ave. Freeze-Out
The Rising
The Promised Land (if Obama wins) or Darkness on the Edge of Town (if it’s McCain)
Born to Run
American Land (snippet)
