My goal for 2019 is to write at least a little something about every show I see, preferably by the next day, we’ll see how it goes. I will compile weekly and post here as-is.
So, in that spirit, this is the thirty-first of hopefully 52 posts…
1Aug19
Both-ends Thursday Queens > Brooklyn twofer last night
Chemical Brothers @ Forest Hills Stadium
I had no plans to hit this show, but got FIF’d a ticket (thanks Adam!) and, what the hell!?, an hour or so later I was parking my car in Forest Hills and walking over to the stadium, settled in towards the back of the floor and a few minutes later the lights went down on what would prove to be a singular experience.
I really don’t know a damn thing about the Chemical Brothers catalog, so I couldn’t speak to the music in any way. But it would turn out that that didn’t really matter much. This show was all about the production and visuals in a way few shows are.
In a way, the whole going-to-a-concert thing was inverted at Forest Hills. What I saw seemed to be dictating what I heard and not the other way around. I found myself wanting to get further from the stage rather than closer, so that I could take in the whole spectacle. I mean, whoah. The show starts and the screen just fills with these digital figures, pink vector drawings of people that seem to be climbing out of the stage, coming through the walls. We’re inside a video game and the effect is more three dimensional than anything I’ve seen that doesn’t require glasses. The lights and lasers and visuals and music are choreographed and connected in such an artful way, so perfectly synchronized, what I’m hearing and what I’m seeing are connected in a very deep way. It’s quite an experience.
The show went along, more or less non-stop, from there. Each “song” was like an immersive short film, with a different color palette and a completely unique motif. I couldn’t possibly recount each of them, but there was a mixture of film — real people doing stuff — and animation, trippy, hallucinogenic imagery that bounced between beautiful and chaotic, anxious and groovy. The way the lights matched the images on the screen was such a mindbender. It all felt like it was all really happening, like I was watching something that was happening live. It all bordered on the too much, but never crossed that line. The show seemed to trend from an anarchy towards order which also felt flipped from what you might expect.
Musically, I had very little sense of up or down, beginning or ending. The songs kind of all ran together and without the visual cues and the repeated mantras that served as the only lyrical anchor, I might not have known that one piece had started or ended. It was all just an excuse to dance and marvel and wrap my eyes and brain around the sights and colors, the lights and lasers and the trippy-as-fuck happenings on the screen behind. There were definitely two guys on stage and they were definitely doing something up there with a bank of synthesizers and whatnot. But I was far away and couldn’t care less how the sounds were being made. It seemed besides the point.
At one point the screen showed these balls bouncing around and then giant balloons were bouncing around the audience and it really was that kind of show, 3-D in the best way possible. Near the end these two giant robots of blue and red were on either side of the stage and laser beams and robots are fucking cool, even if you’re in your 40's.
Forest Hills is a great outdoor venue with a few minor weirdnesses, like, it’s almost impossible to buy a Coca-Cola inside the venue and it’s fairly easy to walk in without a ticket and even easier to get on the floor without a floor ticket (although I had one last night). GA was pretty full last night and it was actually kind of stuffy and warm down there on a hot summer evening and I thought about getting out and going up into the seats of which there were many empty ones, but while getting on the floor is trivial without a floor ticket, getting into the seats without a reserved ticket is anything but. Inside out, man.
Very glad I hit this show.
Kyle Craft @ Baby’s All Right
The show I really wanted to hit was Kyle Craft and for better or worse, it was a pretty late start, so I had no trouble getting to Williamsburg in time from Forest Hills after that brain-beater. I arrived to find that the middle band was still going and it turned out to be a very good one, featuring the drummer and bassist/piano player from Craft’s band (called “Showboat Honey”) and another guitarist. Actually the bass player was the head of this band and he was playing a small acoustic guitar and singing. They go by the name of The Silver Triplets and they kind of do this intergalactic outlaw country thing. Pretty cool.
Craft & Co were slated for an 11:30 start and they hit the stage right at half-past, which was definitely appreciated by me. I continue to be confounded by Baby’s set-times, but I’ll chalk last night up as a win. A couple years ago, Craft had a covers album with some really great selections on there (St. Vincent, Sharon Van Etten, I think it’s all female artists) that I fell in love with and he’s put out two great albums since then including Showboat Honey last month that you really should listen to, it’s pretty great. His set at Newport knocked my socks off which confirmed my attendance at Baby’s last night (and no Krantz made it even easier…).
The show was 90 minutes of rock awesomeness. Craft’s sound is occasionally reminiscent of the Band or White-Album-era Lennon/McCartney, fronted by a Laurel Canyon version of David Bowie… or something like that. It’s very familiar and comfortable, with kick ass songs and a magnetic personality. His current band has a lead guitarist, that bassist that switches off on piano with the piano player (who also plays bass) and then a guy that does a little bit of everything, from organ to synth to extra electric guitar. Every single song they played was a rager, dance-ready, wonderful lyrical storytelling and awesome need-to-hear-that-again melodies. He did a 5-song stretch solo acoustic that was just as good, with fun little stories in between songs (one about the awful woman who took advantage of his grandfather after his grandmother died, one about a woman he met on a bus…) with a cover of Neil Young’s “Out on the Weekend” thrown in there for good measure.
The room was about 1/2 full which felt like the right amount, everyone seriously into it, crowd not thinning at all even as the clock approached 1am on a school night. They closed the show with the second cover, a perfect-choice take on the Rolling Stones’ “Loving Cup.” As many of you know, few better ways to end a show, and they totally nailed it.
Great, great show. Who knows what’ll happen, but with his songwriting talent, his personality and this killer band backing him with a propensity to rock, I’d say Craft’s star is on the rise… hoping to see much more from him in the future. Don’t miss him when he comes back.
3Aug19 Steven Gunn (Hand Habits opened) @ Industry City
It was a gorgeous night for my first visit to Industry City of the summer for a really great bill. On paper, this was a pairing of on-the-rise indie rockers. On the stage, it was a double bill of stealthy guitar mastery. Too bad the place was only like 1/3 full, which is who knows?, but as I often say, rather have a light crowd of people who are really into the show than a full house with half the crowd not into the music at all…
Hand Habits is Meg Duffy who has played guitar in a few bands, most notably for Kevin Morby for a couple years, while also building up her solo stuff. She has a new album out this year which is pretty good, I think. What’s hard to appreciate on the album is how great she is at playing guitar. It’s also kind of hard to appreciate it live, because her songs are very sad and sweet and all kind of sit at the same level, not too high, not too low, but definitely lower than high. If her music were clouds, they’d be sparse, fragmented puffs, non-threatening, maybe not enough to describe the sky as “cloudy” at all, but still pleasant all the same. But then she takes a guitar solo and it’s like waitaminutewaitaminute. And it’s not like she’s shredding these crazy solos (although she can definitely do that, if she wanted to), or playing very long solos at all. Her “solos” as it were, were like 15 or 30 seconds (maybe one broke a minute). But the amount of geewhiz! awesome she somehow packs into those seconds is worth 15 minutes worth of wanking from your normal wanker. Bits of Frisell and Cline and, yes, even Anastasio fluttered around in those seconds, backwards-looping Frisellian samples meet forward-facing licks-of-beauty, creating a spark, a moment of genuine clarity. And then, poof!, gone. Her trio was a solid backing, with John Andrews (one of those guys that seems to be everywhere) on drums. Duffy has a sense of humor that’s both goofy and deadpan which is an interesting mix, like ironic dad jokes or something. Her brother and father were there and she told how her dad always tells her when she’s the opening band she should make sure to tell people who she is, which is like, a huge pet peeve of mine (when opening acts don’t say who they are), so I guess I’m a dad.
That was just a warmup for the guitar greatness in the headlining Steve Gunn set. I checked and this was my 15th time seeing Gunn play his own set and probably another 5 or so times when he’s sat in with someone, so needless to say, I’ve seen a bit of Steve Gunn over the past few years and damn, does he impress every single time. He’s a phenomenal guitar player, but for the past few years he’s toured with a second also-phenomenal guitar player, Jim Elkington (most recently seen in NYC playing with Tortoise, but another guy who’s all over the place). When Jim first joined Steve’s band, I had the thought like why does he need a second lead guitarist, he’s great on his own, but over the years it’s become clear that this is a two-is-better-than-one situation and last night I was totally absorbed in the interplay between the two, coming to the conclusion that they’re one of the best one-two guitar punch playing these days, certainly in anything that you could remotely call “indie rock.” The set opened with “Luciano” off Gunn’s newest album release earlier this year. The song featured a kick-ass lap-steel solo from Elkington, sounding almost Garcia-esque in his near-Earth-orbit playing. It was a total headspinner of a solo, like wow, man good. For the first half of the set, Gunn was on his acoustic guitar and Elkington really took the lead. But what I came to appreciate much more than I recently had is how Gunn doesn’t need to take solos to show his musical prowess. What I realized watching him play is how there are all these great guitar players who play these solo or duo gigs and play these long, elaborate raga-esque things, with complex, layered drones and twisted hallucinogenic finger-picking that goes on and on and on in hypnotic fashion. There are a lot of guys like that. Steve Gunn used to be like that. He still can be at times, but his genius was taking that aspect of his playing and actually crafting songs around it. Like, watching him play last night I realized how he still has this amazing, melodic complexity in his playing, it’s just that it’s just the melody of the song. It’s rather astounding once I wrapped my head around it. It’s like it sounds like indie rock, but he’s actually snuck in some rather deep, heady guitar in there. Every song he played last night was a masterful tapestry of six-string. Genius, indeed.
He also sneaks in some very esoteric stuff, not the normal influences of your typical rocker. “I’m going to play a cover” he says before a Michael Chapman song (“Among the Trees”); this is a song dedicated to filmmaker Agnes Varda (“Vagabond”). About midway through he played “Stonehurst Cowboy” with just the bassist who barely added any accompaniment, proving that Gunn is as compelling and amazing solo as he is with a fantastic backing band. This version was just so killer, perhaps the best song on the album played with such intensity and beauty, Gunn condensing so much guitar into a rather catchy and seemingly-straightforward song. But like so much of his songs, the ridiculous one-of-a-kind melodies, the phrasing, the dreamlike worlds contained in the lyrics, the hypnotic cant of his voice, it was something special. At this point in the set, the script kind of flipped as Gunn played much of the rest on one of a variety of electric guitars. Now Gunn and Elkington were truly enmeshed, not necessarily going back-and-forth or doing competing Duane-vs-Dickey solos, but rather a more artful weaving, a brain-beater tango of two masters, neither of them necessarily leading and/or both of them leading. Rather spectacular. The light pastoral Brit-folk-meets-the-Grateful-Dead spirit of the first half of the show was now gone and the band reached rock-the-fuck-out levels, Gunn going full Ira Kaplan at a couple points, gesticulating around his amplifier or with his pedals while Elkington worked on the crossword-puzzle-clues of the song’s melody, occasionally improvising in the inverted spaces of Gunn’s sonic beating. The set ended with “Way Out Weather,” which is like Gunn’s big gun, I think he’s played it at nearly every show I’ve seen of his, from solo acoustic to full band ragers, and this was as good as any of them, Elkington returning to the steel guitar for the first time since the opening number, the band reaching jam in fine fashion, four dudes playing like they were finishing up a two-week tour on a beautiful night in Brooklyn, the most delicious breeze filling the courtyard as the quartet found that spot.
It wasn’t packed, but everyone there knew they’d seen a good one and responded as such and we got Steve to return for an encore, playing “Morning is Mended” solo, working out some extra juice on his acoustic guitar again, adding in some slide as well, and some distortion, an underrated, thinking-man’s guitar god. So good.
4Aug19
What’s your favorite genre of music? There’s a good chance I saw it during my travels Sunday afternoon > evening.
75 Dollar Bill, Condo Fucks @ Union Pool
This weekend’s version of Union Pool’s free “Summer Thunder” series was a heady double bill that started with “Condo Fucks” which is Yo La Tengo’s just fucking around heavy-rocking all-covers band. I’ve seen YLT plenty of times, but never this alter ego. What a hoot they were. We basically got an hour’s worth of proto-punk and old school rock songs, 3 minute blasts of barely-stable guitar-drums-bass slammers, lined up one after the other after the other, each one a hard slap to the face, leaving a sting on the bare skin and a rush of adrenaline to go with it. Unlike a normal YLT show with a stage filled with different keyboards and set-ups to allow for their wide-ranging sound palette, this was a raw, just-the-basics affair. They rotated the lead vocals and honestly, it didn’t really matter who was singing what. The setlist included songs from the Minutement, The Glands, The Beach Boys, Kinks and The Fugs. Rich Brown (of 75 Dollar Bill) came out to sing “It’s Too Late” by the Kinks which was pretty great and then the set ended with “Frenzy” by the Fugs with Brown, Che Chen (also of 75 Dollar Bill), and a woman all playing horns/saxes to create an extra layer of bomast and chaos. Pretty great stuff.
Can’t say enough good things about the Summer Thunder shows. The style of music changes from week to week, but it’s always pretty good and it’s very much a don’t-matter kind of hang with cheap canned beer, great food from the El Diablo taco truck and even for a show like yesterday where there was a significant crowd, there was still plenty of room to move around, socialize and enjoy the afternoon. It was warm out yesterday, but still felt like a chill, manageable backyard hang. So the setbreak was quite enjoyable and it didn’t feel like too many people left. Also, it should be said that Jeff Conklin DJ’ing before and between sets was killer. Some great deep cut jams I’d never heard before. Two thumbs up.
The final set was 75 Dollar Bill, a band I’ve already seen twice before in a little more than a month. In a way, all 3 sets, including yesterday’s, were pretty similar, because the band has a very distinctive sound and energy to their music. It’s hard for 75 Dollar Bill not to sound like 75 Dollar Bill, of course, they’re not going to become a punk-covers band. That being said the three shows couldn’t be more different. In my review of their last gig, the unique set at the museum in Long Island City, I spent a lot of time thinking about the context of a show, the when and where and to whom’s of a concert and what kind of difference it makes. This felt like foreshadowing, 75 Dollar Bill going from a small theater in Downtown Brooklyn to a museum in Queens to, yesterday, a backyard boozy hang in Williamsburg. Like their album release show at Roulette back in early July, yesterday the duo of 75 Dollar Bill was boosted by a handful of other musicians who appear on their album — a bassist, a second guitarist, a viola player and that saxophone player who joined YLT at the end. They ran through a signifiant portion of the album and so the show felt more centered around song-like themes than their typical sonic mantra thing… although just a little bit. It still was long stretches of trancelike drones. The musical space between the baritone saxophone and viola seemed to create some extra hypnotic vibrations. Brown’s rhythms seemed to take on a tribal air in the outdoor space.
75 Dollar Bill is not for everyone, but if you submit, it will consume you for a full spiritual experience. You don’t count individual raindrops, but if you leave a barrel out in the rain, you will collect a volume of water. Similarly, indivudual notes from 75 Dollar Bill are inconsequential, but if you open yourself up to it, you will get filled up with the music. I’m definitely ready for another one soon.
Afroskull @ Travers Park
It’s rather remarkable, but at this point there were actually several options on where to go next? I mean, it’s Sunday afternoon in the middle of the summer and there are 3 or 4 free livemusic options. Pretty great. After some quick consideration, we were off to Jackson Heights. The next stop was at Travers Park for a neighborhood show which was taking place on a handball court (?) at the edge of the park. Amazingly/sadly I had never seen Afroskull before and ain’t it a shame. As they said, they formed over 20 years ago and have gigged regularly off and on since then, but not so much anymore. You would never have been able to tell that, though, because they were on point, raging through some awesome rocking funk originals. I guess “funk” doesn’t quite do justice to the set, their pieces are groovy as fuck, but rather than find a pocket and sit there to get the crowd moving, they danced through multiple sections, like orchestral compositions, but each “movement” containing its own heavy grooves. Then things would rock out in an almost math-y metal vein. Was all pretty sweet and made the band’s tight delivery all the more impressive. Afroskull is drums, bass, guitar, keys, percussion and a three-man horn section and they all made their presence felt.
What made the show a real treat, though, was the crowd. I mean, Queens diversity was on full display. If you took the range of ages from newborn to 80 years old and sliced into 5-year chunks, probably each one of those ranges was represented in the audience, and an almost equally wide variety of races. I mean, there was a woman knititng at this show and little kids dancing, a dude in a wheelchair and some residents up and dancing in the back. It was impossible not to smile.
The set closed with two covers, Santana’s Soul Sacrifice and a classic Meters instrumental the name of which I couldn’t tell you offhand. But they killed ’em both and that pretty much sums up their sound pretty good.
Michael Daves, Tony Trischka, Bruce Molsky @ Jalopy
At this point I’d seen some straight-rocking, some experimental tribal ambient and some bouncing funk. The natural move here was obviously to catch some bluegrass and, lucky us, there was an A+ bluegrass show that fit right in with the day’s itinerary. A little traffic on the BQE was no problem, we walked into Jalopy in Carroll Gardens around 7:45 for the first of 4 Michael Daves August resideny shows there, scheduled at 7:30. Our group got literally the last three tickets, found out the song already in progress was the first of the set and ain’t that the way to be?
Yes, there is great bluegrass in NYC and Jalopy is a great place to see a show like this. The brick church-like interior, decorated with record covers and old radios and instruments and a host of whimsical doodads makes it feel like you’ve left Brooklyn altogether and the music you hear there will undoubtedly complete the scene. Every time I see Michael Daves I remember Chris Thile singing his praises as the father of the NYC bluegrass scene (or something like that). This residency has different guests each week and the first one was a doozie with banjo master Tony Trischka and fiddler Bruce Molsky forming a perfect trio with Daves. The three worked the one-microphone thing like the pros they are, working through bluegrass tunes both standard and obscure, most with vocals, led by either Daves or Molsky, a few instrumentals, led mostly by Trischka and Molsky. The three really showed their pros-pros chops, weaving in and out, choreographing their solos and comping expertly.
My original plan for the day didn’t include this stop, but, man, did it hit the spot and man, did it make me pause, mid-set and think about this amazing city, all the secrets and treasures waiting under any stone you care to flip over, how in New York “livemusic” is so much more than just this show or that, but a culture that’s as wide and encompassing as you want it to be. To spontaneously just be like let’s go see some bluegrass and end up a short while later in front of Michael Daves playing some soul-stirring, heart-filling bluegrass with some aw-shucks, these-are-my-friends legit legends playing in a space like Jalopy, there’s nothing like it.
Exo Tech @ Sultan Room
And there is nothing like the Sultan Room. I left the house knowing I would end up in Bushwick for another trip to this venue. If walking into Jalopy is like walking into a bluegrass revival in Appalachia somewhere, walking into the Sultan Room is like walking into… well, I don’t know what it’s like. Like a scene in a James Bond movie, the place where “the drop” is gonna happen, a psychedelic dreamworld of visual delights and a vibe so strong you can practically smell it. I want to write paragraphs about this room every time I go there, which I hope will be often, but I will spare you.
The Sunday night special there was Exo Tech, a recurring series led by Sophia Brous. I don’t know how to describe the collective, in part because I don’t know if I understand it myself. But it’s large-ensemble improvisation which shares many of the same energy of so much of the experimental music scene in the city. But none of those shows are led by a vocalist, which is what Brous is. This changes things signficantly, it’s almost like the band is creating real-time dance/pop music. The players change each time (this was my 3rd or 4th Exo Tech show, all in a different space), but the “family” feels pretty consistent. Last night it included Jeremy Gustin on drums, Spencer Zahn on bass, Dave Harrington on guitar, Kenny Wolleson and some other dude on percussion, Kimbra on vocals (and synth), Benjamin Lazar Davis on bass and synths, Zeena Parkins on harp and Yuka Honda on synth. Did I get everyone? Maybe. There were like 11 people on stage (for a show that cost $12, btw. Like a buck per musician). I guess I forgot Cleek Schrey who plays something called a “hardinger fiddle” which sounds made up and looks like it might be something he invented, but sounded pretty good in this mix.
At any time there may have been multiple basses or vocalists or synths or drummers, and, sure, it’s a little messy, but it’s also a total groove machine. These are musicians who know how to listen, how to lead, how to follow, how to walk around a dark room and find the hands of their friends so that no matter how convoluted things got, within seconds the 11-strong collective were all holding hands with each other, a single unit, moving comfortably around in the dark. I’ve sung the praises of the Zahn/Gustin/Harrington nucleus before and last night I was again drawn to the foundation those three were creating… especially Spencer and Jeremy, making sure that at each moment, no matter how far things got out there, that there was a groove, an anchor, a semblence of a path through the knotty forest of sound for the rest of the musicians to navigate.
I’m not sure how it works, but Brous makes all this improvising feel like songs, because she’s like, you know, singing lyrics. Does she make these up on the spot? Does she write things out beforehand and bring them to these shows? Are they real songs or what? I honestly have no idea, but it sounds great and elevates these jam sessions above the typical fling-shit-at-the-wall jam sessions. She’s one of those bandleader personalities that moves the band around without ever seeming like she’s actively trying to take control.
Last night’s set (I only stayed for the first set) was rather glorious, if it had all been planned out or if it was all just without-a-net’d, there was a flow to each “piece” and each section and the whole set that was constantly engaging and, most importantly, groovy as fuck. It’s always great to see Harrington, sure to see him lead a band and take a shitload of mindbending solos, but it’s also great to see him in a “supporting” role in a big ensemble like this, to find a seam in the proceedings and fill it with a well-timed solo or just effects-laden sounds. But really there were no “leads” in this group, everyone added their little bits and they all added up to something rather grandiose, perfectly matched to the space and the spirals of color on the backdrop behind the band. There are few corners in the Sultan Room, more slow curves, circles and ovals, a space well-suited for music like this.
I wasn’t all that tired despite the long afternoon and evening, except for my feet which had held me up for 5 very different shows in 4 very different venues in 4 very different neighborhoods with an impossibly varied energy in each. It’s hard to imagine a place containing so much like New York does. Rock and Americana and jazz and pop and funk and shit that has no name, experimental jams for the brain and the body. You want it, you got it. Best city ever. I had my fill, I went home happy, ready to do it again very soon.
