Month: May 2009

Posted on

Dent May plus cool openers

I went to Schubas on Thursday night (May 28) out of curiosity more than anything else. The headliner, Dent May, is a singer from Mississippi who plays the ukulele, an instrument you don’t see onstage all that often, other than maybe a short novelty number or two in the middle of a concert. The uke is all that May plays during the course of his show, and he grimaces and rears back at times like he’s wailing on an electric guitar, even though he’s just plinking those little nylon strings. It made for an interesting sight, but I have to say his pop music didn’t really connect with me like I’d hoped. It wasn’t bad, but something about his voice and his melodies wore thin on me after a few songs. And yet, a number of people in the crowd seemed to love it, calling out requests for some of his songs, so I can see this guy may be destined to attract even more fans in the future. www.myspace.com/dentmay

I was pleasantly surprised by the two opening acts, however — both of them fledgling Chicago bands that showed a lot of promise. First up was My Gold Mask, a duo with Gretta Rochelle on vocals and drums (which she played standing up) and Jack Armondo on guitar and backing vocals. They rocked with the primitive energy you often get with guitar-and-drums duos, with a great full-on vocal attack from Rochelle on several songs. The band’s debut recording is a cassette tape… Gosh, you know, I appreciate the retro technology, but I’m trying to get rid of all my old cassettes, not gather more of them, so I just bought the card to get a digital download. Check them out at www.mygoldmask.com and www.myspace.com/mygoldmask.

The middle band on the bill was Very Truly Yours, which sounded an awful lot like Camera Obscura — which is a good thing, in my book. Lead singer and vocalist Kristine Capua sings in a pretty, plaintive voice while the band plays swaying pop arrangements that sound straight of the 1960s. THe group has a nice five-song EP called Reminders. The hyperbolic (and, I hope, somewhat tongue-in-cheek) liner notes claim: “Very Truly Yours is America’s leading purveyor of what will someday be called the ‘time capsule sound.’ It’s music handcrafted in the here and now for the nostalgic daydreams we’re all still working on…” In concert, the members of Very Truly Yours seemed surprised that a modest-size crowd of people was paying attention and actually clapping after the songs. “You guys are so intense!” Capua said, giving the impression that Very Truly Yours hasn’t played in front of actual audiences very often so far. Based on how cool they sounded at this show, I hope they’re destined for many more shows and recordings to come. Check them out at www.myspace.com/verytrulymusic

Photos of Dent May, My Gold Mask and Very Truly Yours.

Posted on

Champaign bands rock again

The 1980s were a great time to be a rock fan at the University of Illinois. I was already a big music fan when I arrived as a student there, but I had a lot to learn. (Hey, I still do!) Champaign was where I discovered how great it can be to watch local bands. It was an era of jangly guitars, when a lot of kids wanted to become the next R.E.M. (I’m talking about Murmur-era R.E.M.) Others clearly had spent a lot of time listening to records by the Mats, a.k.a. Replacements.

These memories came back for me this past weekend, when Champaign hosted the “Play or Pose” reunion. The festivities included some unplugged performances on Saturday (May 23) and a rock show Sunday (May 24) at the Highdive featuring the Outnumbered, Lonely Trailer, Cowboy X and the Poster Children. Despite the terribly sad news everyone heard on Sunday afternoon — that Jay Bennett, former guitarist for Titanic Love Affair (and, yes, Wilco) had died — the concert was great, at moments even glorious. Was it appropriate to be having fun listening to music just after the death of a beloved local musician? Well, it did feel weird, but it also felt like the right way to honor his memory. The concert had actually already been dedicated to the memory of another fallen hero of the C-U music scene, Josh Gottheil, a young music booker who died from cancer at the age of 19 in 1989.

The Outnumbered were one of Champaign’s great bands of the mid-’80s, playing tuneful garage rock with a heavy ’60s vibe. They opened for the Replacements and Hüsker Dü and were on the Homestead label at the same time as Sonic Youth and Nick Cave. And they wrote and played some great tunes, including two of my faves, “Boy on a Roof” and “Feel So Sorry Now.” I challenge you not to sing along with that one once you’ve heard it, oh, once or twice. Guitarist-singer Jon Ginoli later formed the band Pansy Division, (a story he recounts in his new book Deflowered: My Life in Pansy Division, The Inside Story of the First Openly Gay Pop-Punk Band). Other members of the Outnumbered were Paul Budin, who has since become a good friend of mine, Tim McKeage, Jonno Peltz and Ken Golub. Those five (with Peltz playing drums most of the set and Golub drumming for one song) were all there Sunday night for a joyful set of their best songs. Ginoli and Budin beamed throughout the show, and Budin tossed out flowers as the set closed with “Cover Me With Flowers.”
Photos of the Outnumbered.

Lonely Trailer were one of the oddest bands in the C-U scene — really uncategorizable. There was a bit of punk in what they were doing it, but it was more like a dada version of country music mixed with jazz, rock, avant-garde… Oh, forget it. Whatever it was, it was idiosyncratic and riveting. All that wonderful weirdness came right back as the Lonely Trailer guys reunited onstage Sunday night, and a few of the group’s hard-core fans went wild, yelling out the names of their favorite songs. Drummer-singer Brian Reedy looked like he was going to topple out of his chair with laughter at a few points, he was having so much fun. (And Reedy also had a bunch of his quirky paintings on exhibit down the street at the Radio Maria restaurant.)
Photos of Lonely Trailer.

Cowboy X were up next, with a solid set of their melodic pop-rock. Definitely a more mainstream-sounding band than Lonely Trailer, but still enjoyable. I was wondering if they would do the cover that I remembered them doing back in the ’80s, and sure enough, they pulled it out: a rap-rock version of Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle.”
Photos of Cowboy X.

The final act of the night was the Poster Children. I did not follow these guys in their early days, but I’ve learned lately just how fun they are to see in concert. Unlike the other groups playing on Sunday, the Poster Children have been pretty active in recent years and they sounded tight and energetic as they rampaged through their songs. As always, bassist Rose Marshack was jumping around and shaking her hair like a maniac, despite the fact that, as her husband and Poster Children singer Rick Valentin phrased it, “she just pumped out a kid a few weeks ago.”
Photos of the Poster Children.

The concert prompted to look back at a mix CD I made several years ago with some of my favorite music from the ’80s Champaign scene: These bands, plus groups like Turning Curious, Weird Summer, the Nines, the Big Maybe, the B-Lovers and the Vertebrats. I do wish someone would put out a high-fidelity collection of the best songs by those bands and others.

Posted on

More about Bennett on WBEZ

Chicago Public Radio WBEZ 91.5 FM plans to air a story I reported about Jay Bennett on the Eight Forty-Eight show 9-10 a.m. Friday (May 29). It will be available for listening online later.

Also, you can hear me chatting for a few minutes about local music and concerts every Wednesday now — usually sometime between 2:20 and 2:40 p.m. — on the Vocalo radio station. That’s the new public radio project at 89.5 FM. The signal’s not that strong in a lot of places around Chicago (yet), but you can stream it at http://vocalo.org.

Posted on

Remembering Jay Bennett

I happened to be in Champaign-Urbana this weekend when a sad news story broke: the death of Jay Bennett, a remarkably talented musician I had interviewed several times over the past eight years. Bennett was best known for his role as lead guitarist, keyboardist, all-around studio whiz and occasional songwriter in Wilco, making an indelible mark on much of the band’s best records, including Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and Summerteeth. He also recorded several solo records and one in collaboration with Edward Burch, the excellent The Palace at 4am (Part I).

But I first encountered Bennett back in the 1980s, when he was the lively guitarist for Titanic Love Affair, a hard-rock band on the University of Illinois campus. Here are some photos by David Ghent showing him in action, which I ran when I was an editor at the Daily Illini in 1988. Bennett’s fluid guitar playing impressed me at the time, and I was already hearing that he was talented at recording music.

In June 2001, when Wilco was finishing up Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, I interviewed him for the first time. We sat on the back porch of his house in Arlington Heights, Illinois, with birds singing in the background. Click here for an extended version of the article I wrote, including a Q&A. I had no inkling that Jeff Tweedy would ask Bennett to leave the band a few months later, but that is in fact what happened. I was stunned at the time. Bennett had contributed so much to Wilco’s music, it seemed impossible he would be fired. You can read all about what happened from multiple angles in Greg Kot’s book Learning How to Die. I later came to realize that Bennett was a genius whose obsessive work habits might just drive some people a little crazy. But I never lost faith in his musical abilities.

At that first interview, I was struck by how much Bennett seemed like a combination of rock-star dude, philosophical intellectual and VCR repairman. In April 2002, as Bennett and Burch released Palace, I interviewed him again. The Q&A is so long it’s in two parts: Part 1 is mostly about The Palace at 4am (Part I). Part 2 is mostly about Bennett leaving Wilco.

A year after that, I spent a couple of hours at Bennett’s recording studio in Chicago, focusing more on his production techniques and gear for a story in Tape Op magazine.

I’m posting a 13-minute podcast here with selections from those three interviews. What you hear is a few minutes of Jay talking in 2001 about collaborating with Tweedy in Wilco; Jay explaining what happened when he left the band; Jay in his Pieholden Suite studio, where the great young musician David Vandervelde was hanging out at the time; and then some additional thoughts from that 2002 interview. Click here to download my podcast featuring Jay Bennett in his own words. (My apologies for the spotty audio quality in some segments.)

The last time I wrote about Bennett was at the end of 2004, when he was releasing a solo album called The Beloved Enemy. He had also seemed upbeat whenever I’d interviewed him, but lately, I’d been hearing alarming reports that he seemed depressed or intoxicated at some live performances. One fan was concerned enough to post a question on the message board of Bennett’s record label, Undertow Music: “Is Jay OK? Seriously.”

“The answer to ‘Am I OK?’ is a resounding ‘Yes,'” Bennett said when I asked him about this. “I am going through a divorce. … I certainly had my issues with drinking.” He also acknowledged having used drugs, though he said he didn’t currently have a problem with substance abuse.

“Most of my adult life, I’ve been a drinker. And I’ve dabbled in everything else that most rockers have done. Was it to the point that it interfered with my life? I don’t think so,” he said. “I’ve had my share of rock ‘n’ roll excess, where it was impeding my judgment here and there … I had friends express concern about me. At various times in my life, I was self-medicating. I have an anxiety disorder. I’ve been though seven therapists in five or six years. I’ve finally found one who clicks. It works.”

When he first answered his phone that time, Bennett was in the middle of a therapy session. He said he also viewed his latest records as a kind of therapy. “This record is a way to get rid of some of that pain by expressing it,” he said. “Drugs and alcohol were a way to deal with that same pain.”

Bennett, who had moved to Urbana, made news just a few weeks ago when he filed a lawsuit seeking royalties from Wilco. He’d also posted a note on myspace saying he was in need of a hip replacement. It sounded like he was facing some serious health problems.

Strangely enough, the reason I was in Champaign this weekend was for the Play or Pose reunion event featuring local rock bands of the 1980s: the Outnumbered, Lonely Trailer, Cowboy X and the Poster Children. (I’ll blog more about that later.) At an open-mike event on Saturday, a number of people asked, “Where’s Jay?” — hoping he would attend, even if he did not perform. His former bandmates from Titanic Love Affair were there in the bar, and one of his ex-Wilco mates, Leroy Bach, performed a beautiful set of three songs. But Jay was nowhere to be found.

The next day, the word came via Twitter and Facebook messages from Undertow Music that he had died in his sleep the night before. Sunday night’s concert at the Highdive went on, and it had some of those great moments when you feel the triumphant power of music, but the evening also had a shadow hanging over it. At a few points, the musicians on stage asked audience members to lift their drinks to Bennett’s memory. Steve Tyska of Cowboy X said, “Champaign was a very important place to him, and he was very important to Champaign.”

Back when I interviewed Jay in 2002 about leaving Wilco and recording Palace, we spoke for more than two hours, and my mini-Disc recorder ran out of space just minutes before we concluded. And so, alas, I failed to get a recording of his final remarks that evening. I scribbled them down as quickly as I could. Here is what he said:

“There’s a basic human urge to be understood. I could be accused of trying too hard to be understood… When in reality, only the people closest to you understand you… I do like the idea of putting the whole transcript [of this interview] on the Internet, right down to my last words, which are: Peace, love and understanding to the world, including my ex-bandmates.”

Posted on

‘Rock ‘n’ Roll’ and Plastic People

Can rock ‘n’ roll change the world — not just change what’s on the radio but who’s in charge of the government? Maybe, but as music critic Robert Palmer once noted, that’s an awful lot of weight to put on a little piece of music. Tom Stoppard’s play Rock ‘n’ Roll, now at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, shows one example of a situation where rock music was viewed as a dangerous political force: Cold War-era Czechoslovakia, where records and concerts by a group called Plastic People of the Universe were driven underground by fearful Communist officials.

This play is not exactly what you might expect from that description, however. There’s a lot of heady, intellectual dialogue, and the rock ‘n’ roll is not as dominant as you’d think, given the title. It’s well worth seeing for its lessons in recent history and an excellent performance by Mary Beth Fisher, among other things. And how cool is it to see a play featuring music by the likes of Syd Barrett — as well as a Barrett-like figure perambulating around the edges of the action, sometimes riding a bicycle.

Still, I wondered sometimes if this show was too much talk and not enough rock. I don’t want to sound anti-intellectual, but shouldn’t a play about the power of rock music to change the world actually show that happening? We hear people talking about more than we witness the actual rock being played. I wanted something more visceral — more moments like that startling shock when a Communist policeman smashes an LP into pieces.

And for a play that includes a lot of references to the Plastic People of the Universe, it’s strange that we hear only one brief passage of that band’s music. The band seems phantom-like, hovering off stage, never quite audible.

That’s the sort of presence the Plastics have had in the real world of rock music — banned in their homeland, discussed but rarely heard outside the Czech Republic. I was lucky to catch a performance by the Plastics last September at the Hideout Block Party (here are my photos from that show), and I managed to track down a digital copy of the band’s classic but hard-to-find record Egon Bondy’s Happy Hearts Club Banned. Good luck searching for it online or finding a place to buy it. It’s a cool combination of the Velvet Underground and Frank Zappa — weird, stark and compelling.

To read more about the Plastic People of the Universe, I suggest checking out this article by Richie Unterberger

(Goodman Theatre photo at top by Michael Brosilow)

Posted on

The Vaselines and the 1900s at Metro

The odds are, if you’ve heard of the Vaselines, it’s because Nirvana covered a few of their songs. This Scottish band recorded just one LP and some singles in the late ’80s, broke up, then briefly reformed to open for their fans in Nirvana. They haven’t played together since the early ’90s, and they’d never played a concert in Chicago (for the Midwest, for that matter) until last night (May 16) at Metro. The occasion for their current tour is an excellent new collection of their old songs, Enter the Vaselines, issued this year by Sub Pop. As one of the band’s two singer-guitarists, Frances McKee, noted, it’s an “old-new CD.”

The group is essentially the duo of McKee and Eugene Kelly, though for this show they were backed up by three musicians on loan from other Scottish groups: guitarist Stevie Jackson and bassist Bob Kildea (both from Belle and Sebastian) and drummer Michael McGaughrin (from the 1990s). They were, as McKee joked, “the professionals in this outfit.”

Despite being away for so many years, the Vaselines sounded so fresh. Their songs have some of that Velvet Underground and post-punk feel, but there’s also a sweet pop side to what they do. That attitude also came through in their hilarious stage banter. Well, McKee was hilarious in any case, making bitterly funny remarks about her erstwhile romantic partner, Kelly, who played the part of the straight man in this routine. When Kelly introduced one song by saying, “This is a love song,” she interjected with a smile, “Not any more.” She also accused him of wearing “grumpy pants,” and when audience members called out that they loved Kelly, she tartly noted, “You obviously don’t know him.” After another song, she said, “There’s a message in that song: If you take too many drugs, you’ll end up like Eugene.” She delivered all this verbal abuse with a wry sense of humor (maybe that Scottish accent helps), and he stood there and took it with a slightly chagrined look.

If they still had any actual bitter feelings between them, it didn’t stop them from performing top-notch versions of their old songs, including of course highlights like “Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam,” which Nirvana fans know so well from the MTV Unplugged album. And the Vaselines even played a couple of new songs (one of which was identified simply as “new new song” on the set list), which sounded almost as good as the oldies. Let’s hope we hear more from the Vaselines soon.

To read more about the Vaselines, see the Sub Pop site.
www.myspace.com/thevaselinesband
Photos of the Vaselines.

The opening act was one of my local favorites, the 1900s (not to be confused with the aforementioned Scottish group, the 1990s). They’ve had a couple of members leave the band over the last year, but they had a new drummer and keyboard player in place for last night’s gig, and they also played a few new songs, which sounded promising. I eagerly await their next record.

www.myspace.com/1900s
Photos of the 1900s.

Posted on

The Dears and Great Northern

There was a tornado watch Wednesday night (May 13), with torrential blasts of rain sweeping across the El platform. It was not the most pleasant night to be out and about past 10 p.m., but a hardy band of music fans trekked to the Lakeshore Theater and enjoyed a passionate concert by the Dears. The leader of this Montreal band, Murray Lightburn, sang the first song with a cordless microphone out in the audience, wandering the auditorium and pausing to put his arms around various fans, giving some of them a hug. There was a similar sense of emotion throughout the show, as Lightburn joined with the rest of the band onstage for a set full of soulful tunes. This “school-night” show finally finished around 1:35 a.m., prompting Lightburn to thank the small but appreciative crowd for being so committed. The crowd clapped even more at the end, hoping for a second encore, but it was bedtime.

I missed the first band of the night, the Eulogies, showing up in time to hear the second group on the bill, Great Northern. As on their recent CD, Remind Me Where the Light Is, Great Northern played some big-sounding indie-rock ballads. It’s pleasant enough, but after a few songs, I found myself hoping for something more interesting to happen.

Photos of the Dears and Great Northern.

Posted on

First impressions of new Wilco CD

When bands put out self-titled records in the middle of their careers, what exactly does it mean? Is the band saying that this is the record that defines them more than any other? Or have they just run out of titles? The new Wilco album, coming out June 30, is called Wilco (The Album), which makes it almost seem like a joke. And with that cover photo of a camel, you have to wonder: What exactly is Wilco up to with this record?

It’s streaming now at http://wilcoworld.net/discs/thealbum/, and I just listened to it for the first time. Here are my snap impressions of the songs. My opinions are bound to change as I listen more. I’ve been a fan of Wilco since the beginning, but I was disappointed with the group’s previous record, Sky Blue Sky — not a bad record, but one that simply failed to excite me the way previous releases had. So far, Wilco (The Album) sounds like a stronger effort.

Track 1: “Wilco (the song)” — The record opens with a nice blast of the rollicking pop sound that Wilco used to have, back in the days of Summerteeth and Being There. The whole idea of doing a song called “Wilco (the song)” seems a little silly, but the track makes a good first impression.

Track 2: “Deeper Down” — This is one of those quiet Wilco songs where Jeff Tweedy sings in a gentle, sensitive tone. The song has some ornate touches, including strings and a harpsichord-like keyboards, but the arrangement feels spare, and the tempo is surprisingly quick.

Track 3: “One Wing” — Some cool guitar work by Nels Cline, a lulling chorus. The blend of Tweedy’s songwriting and the guitar flourishes here feel like a perfected version of what the band was trying to do on the last album, Sky Blue Sky.

Track 4: “Bull Black Nova” — The song starts out all staccato, with Tweedy singing about a car as a piano ticks off repeatedly. There’s something about this that sounds like the 1970s, but then the track veers into some strong guitar soloing — is that a guitar duet between Kline and Tweedy? The song builds into a stranger piece than it seemed at first, like a simple little ditty that’s become an art-rock epic.

Track 5: “You and I” — A classic-sounding Tweedy acoustic ballad. Just a touch of guitar wankery at the end, as the track fades out.

Track 6: “You Never Know” — More of that 1970s feeling, a pop song with a chorus that sounds like something Harry Nilsson might have done, with a touch of George Harrison slide guitar at one point.

Track 7: “Disappeared” — Tweedy softly singing high notes over a subtle arrangement with piano as the lead instrument. The chorus has a wistful air that reminds me of “Jesus Etc.”

Track 8: “Solitaire” Acoustic guitar and space-rock keyboard sounds blend together in a beautiful opening. Tweedy sings an instantly catchy melody with lyrics that are probably going to stick in my mind as well: “Once I thought the world was crazy…”

Track 9: “I’ll Fight” — Starts off like a solo acoustic folk song, but then the band kicks in and Tweedy chants an insistent, simple melody. Feels a bit like an anthem, but it’s tamped down, without the fist-pumping chorus it could have had.

Track 10: “Sonny Feeling” — An upbeat track, with the sort of shifting instrumentation that Wilco’s big ensemble of musicians can pull off like few other bands.

Track 11: “Everlasting Everything” — Tweedy sings, “Everything alive must die…” Touches of George Harrison’s “All Things Must Pass”? This has the feel of a big album-closing ballad. The record ends with just a little bit of psychedelic guitar with that backwards-sounding sound.

Overall, a good first impression. But I doubt if Wilco (The Album) will become the Wilco album that defines the band for me.

Posted on

Rodriguez at Schubas

Detroit singer-songwriter Rodriguez (full name: Sixto Diaz Rodriguez) is one of countless musicians who recorded great songs years and years ago — and then disappeared with a trace. He released just two albums: Cold Fact in 1970 and Coming From Reality in 1972, with psychedelic folk rock reminiscent of Love’s Forever Changes. Those records barely sold any copies in the U.S. and Rodriguez spent the coming years as day laborer in Detroit. Then, somehow, his records caught on in Australia. And then he became a star in South Africa. He’s still largely unknown in his home country, but that’s starting to change, now that the Light in the Attic label has reissued his albums on CD, and Friday (May 8), he came to Chicago to play in front of an enthusiastic and largely young audience at Schubas.

By now, having played to big audiences in South Africa, Rodriguez must be getting used to hearing cheers for his songs. But on Friday he still seemed like someone who’s feeling giddy at finally getting the recognition he sought four decades ago.”I’ve seen lonelier days and lonelier nights,” he said. And when the audience sang along with many of those old Rodriguez songs, the smiling singer almost seemed astonished. “Thanks for knowing the words, too,” he said. “That blows me away. Those are my lines.”

The three musicians playing with Rodriguez appeared to be learning some of the songs as they went along — Rodriguez had to show them the chords for a few songs, and the guitarist was using a cheat sheet with chords — but it sounded beautifully organic and remarkably close to the old recordings. Rodriguez’s voice is still in excellent form, and he has a distinctive way of plucking the chords on his electric-classical guitar. Highlights included his great signature song “Sugar Man,” which you can hear at myspace.com/rodriguezsugarman. The only thing lacking to keep it from being perfect were the strings and reeds heard on the original studio record. Rodriguez closed with a cover of “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” incorporating bits of “Long Tally Sally” and Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues.”

This was one of those special concerts where you get a real sense of the performer’s personality and history.

The opening act was Vampire Hands, a much younger band playing percussion-heavy rock with some psychedelic audio effects. Sort of a weird match with Rodriguez, but in a way it seemed appropriate — two different generations of musicians coming together in front of an audience that seemed to appreciate both.

Photos of Rodriguez and Vampire Hands.

Listen to the Aug. 28, 2008, story about Rodriguez on NPR’s “All Things Considered.”

Posted on

Bowerbirds and La Strada at Schubas


Clearly, most of the crowd at Schubas Monday night (May 4) was there to hear Bowerbirds play songs from their 2007 album Hymns for a Dark Horse. But the crowd was in for a couple of nice surprises: an excellent opening band (La Strada) and a whole batch of new songs by Bowerbirds. As it happens, I have an advance copy of the new Bowerbirds album, Upper Air, which comes out July 7 on the Dead Oceans label, and I’ve been listening to it quite a bit. It’s a really nice record, a more-than-worthy follow-up to that debut record, which garnered some attention two years ago.

The new and old songs all sounded lovely, with Phil Moore plucking and strumming a classical guitar most of the night, giving the songs that particular sound you can only get with nylon strings. Moore’s gentle voice lofted the melodies all night, with a solid assist on harmony vocals from Beth Tacular, whose accordion notes fleshed out the arrangements. The touring drummer and bassist also added some subtle layers to the sound. I got the feeling that the crowd liked the new songs, though it was obvious that people responded a bit more to some of the songs they recognized, such as “Bur Oak.”
www.bowerbirds.org www.myspace.com/bowerbirds

I wonder how many of the people at Schubas knew anything about the opening band, La Strada, or had heard any of their songs before? I suspect that the group, which has just an EP out at this point, was new to most of the audience, but the applause was enthusiastic. A few people even called out for an encore when the set was over. This band played orchestral pop with smart string arrangements featuring cello and violin, plus accordion on about half the songs. La Strada reminded me a bit of the Decemberists, without feeling quite as pretentious as that band can sometimes get. It was pretty and catchy music, played with a lot of spirit. I’m a convert. I bought La Strada’s self-titled EP at the merch table, and it’s sounding good.
www.myspace.com/lastradanyc www.ernestjenning.com/band_lastrada.htm

Photos of Bowerbirds and La Strada.

Posted on

The Books at the MCA

Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art was an ideal location for the concerts Sunday night (May 3) by the Books. This was not so much a concert as it was a multimedia presentation — a live musical performance in synch with short films. And for a show like that to work, you need a nice auditorium with a real movie screen. Nick Zammuto and Paul de Jong sat down in front of the screen and played calming, almost minimalist music, mostly on guitar and cello, while movies and words and creatively reconstructed audio clips unreeled behind them.

Playing a lot of new and recent compositions, the Books were most impressive in how they brought all of these elements together into one seamless whole. The sampled voices and audio mix in perfect time with the live music. This is sound and voice editing in the tradition of records such as Brian Eno and David Byrne’s My Life in the Bush With Ghosts, though the Books do it in a way that sounds less aggressive than many of those earlier efforts. Without all of those audio samples, some of the music that Zammuto and de Jong play would be a little too bland to attract much attention, but it functioned well as one part of the concert’s overall auditory and visual spectacle, which occasionally achieved real genius. The film imagery was often edited with stuttering motions to fit the tempos, often to humorous effect.

My favorite part of the whole show (and, judging from all the laughter, it was a favorite for others) was the song “Cold Freezing Night,” which featured recordings of some young kids making violent threats to one another. At other points, the Books introduced songs with the following descriptions: “This is a piece about the circulatory system.” “This next song is about geese.” “About male geese.”

Another highlight was a cover of Nick Drake’s “Cello Song.” As the concert progressed, it became clear that the sequence of letters showing on the screen in between songs was a coded set list. The Books played two encores, but left that last song — identified only as “n” — unplayed during the 7 p.m. show.

Photos of the Books.

Posted on

Elvis Perkins and Other Lives

Thursday night (April 30), Schubas had a nice double bill, with Elvis Perkins in Dearland as the headliner plus an opening set by the Oklahoma band Other Lives. It was a sold-out show, which led me to wonder why the room was so empty just before the 9 p.m. starting time. Then I heard a cheer coming from the other room and remembered, “Oh, yeah, there’s a Bulls playoff game.” The room did eventually fill up, with a fair amount of people coming in to watch Other Lives even as the Bulls went into triple overtime.

This was my second time seeing Other Lives as an opening act at Schubas. I’d also seen them open last year for the Little Ones. By now, I’ve heard their cool debut record, a self-titled album that came out earlier this year. They remind me a bit of Midlake, with songs that blend a folk-rock sensibility with the intricate and delicate arrangements of art-rock. “End of the Year” is one of the standout tracks on the album, and its shifting tempos and moods sounded dramatic, almost epic, in concert. Adding a classy touch to the set list, Other Lives played a cover of Leonard Cohen’s song “Partisan.”

By the time Elvis Perkins and his backup band (who are collectively billed as Elvis Perkins in Dearland) took the stage, the Bulls had won their game and the room was full. Perkins is essentially a solo performer, but he clearly likes being part of a band and letting the other musicians have some moments in the spotlight. During the course of this show, the band blew on trombones and saxophones, fiddled on violins, switched off on instruments and banged on a bass drum in marching-band style. Perkins is an excellent singer with some strong songs, and he crooned to nice effect Thursday night, doing folksy ballads as well as old-fashioned rockers. The crowd responded most when he finished the encore with “While You Were Sleeping,” the first track on his first album, Ash Wednesday. And then, it actually was time for sleep.

Photos of Elvis Perkins in Dearland and Other Lives.