Lucid Culture

It’s a mystery why more bands don’t make live albums. They’re infinitely cheaper to record, and if the band is really cooking, they make a great inducement to get fans to come out to shows. Of all the bands who really ought to make a live album, it’s especially exciting to see one from Metropolitan Klezmer. This is a terrific recording: happily, there’s very little audience noise. The performance is pretty much what you would expect from a Met Klez show, great fun and a mix of deliriously danceable tunes along with some quieter, more haunting material. For the most part, the songs are a well-chosen representation of the group’s previous recorded material from the last five years.

As befits New York’s best klezmer band, the musicianship is breathtakingly good. Accordionist Ismael Butera (who also plays in the excellent African/Arab band Sounds of Taarab) is a sensationally fast, powerful player. Violinist Michael Hess (who also plays with Butera in that band) makes a good sparring partner, as do trumpeter Pam Fleming (who plays with her own excellent jazz band, Fearless Dreamer, Hazmat Modine and a million other A-list groups), bassist Dave Hofstra (also of Rachelle Garniez’ band) and astonishingly inventive, instantly recognizable drummer Eve Sicular (who also founded the all-female Isle of Klezbos). Clarinetist Deborah Kreisberg, also a terrific songwriter, essentially functions as the lead player here although her bandmates get their share. On this album, singer Deborah Karpel (who has since left the group for a solo career) slinks, seduces and soars with the best of them. Incisively nonconformist Eastern European Jewish party music has seldom sounded this good.

The cd kicks off on a predictably boisterous note with Uncle Moses’ Wedding Dance, from the 1932 Yiddish film, followed by the sultry, swinging Ot Azoy Neyt a Shnayder (That’s the Way a Tailor Sews). The gorgeous, crescendoing Miracle Medley includes a Hasidic Nigunim (chant) about an argumentative Jew who chose God as his sparring partner, with surprising results. Perhaps the single best song on the album is a Kreisberg original, Baltic Blue, a darkly reflective number inspired by her Brooklyn neighborhood. The show concludes with a long, exhilarating romp through a series of Romanian themes and then an equally scorching take on the famous Molly Picon Abi Gezunt theme (from the film Yidl Mitn Fidl), segueing into a captivating, genre-bending original, Klezmerengue. As a bonus, this album ends not with another encore but a darkly beautiful, richly complex vocal number from Isle of Klezbos’ debut album. Most of the 19 tracks on this cd clock in at five minutes or more: is that a bargain or what?

Ironically, Met Klez’s strongest suit is also sometimes their Achilles heel. Since day one this band has been on a ceaseless quest to be Everything Klezmer, and as this album proves, they’ve pretty much succeeded. Frenzied freilachs and langorous laments? Check. Film music? Got it. Cantorial songs? Ja. Antique pop hits? Yes indeedy. But once in awhile Met Klez overreaches, with cringe-inducing results. As blissfully fun as this album is, there was absolutely no need to include that nursery rhyme about the dreydl, or the Broadway song. As hard as the band tries to give them some substance, it doesn’t work because they have nothing to work with. That stuff belongs on a children’s record, if it belongs anywhere at all. Certainly, there’s a klezmer influence in showtunes: for that matter, there are elements of klezmer in practically every pop song written in the first decade of the last century, whether or not those song were written by Jews. That doesn’t mean that all of them deserve to be recorded. Be that as it may, this album is truth in advertising. This is what you get when you buy a Met Klez ticket: a pretty sensational time guaranteed for all. What Met Klez really ought to do is get on a tour with Gogol Bordello or some other popular gypsy rock act, which would win them the young, enthusiastic audience they deserve. Metropolitan Klezmer play a free lunchtime show on May 15 at 1 at Trinity Church, and after that at the 92nd St. Y on May 21 and 22.

“Who are you going to see tonight?” asked the cynical voice at the other end of the line.

“Black Sea Hotel. It’s this a-capella quartet singing Balkan music.”

“Oh, like the Bulgarian Voices. Ee-ya ramalama obama, HEY!”

Anyone who was in college during the early 90s knows the Bulgarian Voices, as they were commonly known (the official name of the band is Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares). They had the second big “world music” album (after The Irresponsible Beat of Soweto or whatever that debacle was called), just as the term, meaning “anything indigenous and not American,” was entering the lexicon. Originally conceived as a propaganda vehicle for a repressive Bulgarian regime, the all-female choir’s great achievement was bringing their eerie, ethereal, sometimes jarring (and, admittedly, easily parodied) arrangements of rural songs from their native land to an international audience. In an interesting coincidence, Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares are playing Symphony Space this month (May 30 at 8, tix $35). Tonight, playing to a packed house in the little back room at Pete’s Candy Store, the New York group Black Sea Hotel delivered a haunting, rousing show, an astonishingly captivating introduction to native Bulgarian vocal music for anyone who might have missed the popular Grammy winners the first time around.

As one of the women in the quartet explained to the audience, pretty much everything they sang tonight was an original arrangement (some of their repertoire is typically sung by larger choirs, or with a band), sometimes interpolating sections they’d worked out themselves within a song’s traditional framework. Even more impressively, the group sings phonetically: their rustically accessorized black outfits may look Balkan, but the group members are all American. Harmonically, this stuff is difficult to sing, especially for ears raised on the major and minor scales of Western music, but Black Sea Hotel pulled it off magnificently. When the music at the front bar wasn’t clashing with the sound from the stage, as it did early on, you could have heard a pin drop. The best two songs of the night were a gently troubled nocturne in 6/8 time, and the last song of the set, a showcase for leaping pyrotechnics and strange guttural trills that stopped something short of being a yodel. The overall effect was as intense as it was hypnotic, despite the ease of the performance and the singers’ casually amusing interplay with the audience.

Black Sea Hotel have an extraordinarily high ceiling: they could undoubtedly sustain themselves touring, playing colleges, “cultural centers” and yuppie folk clubs for $40 a ticket if they wanted to (and also Pete’s Candy Store, one hopes). Perhaps the most telling endorsement of all is that their next gig is at the Bulgarian Embassy (121 East 62nd Street on May 24 at 6:30 PM): since it’s on the band’s myspace, it seems safe to assume that the event is open to the public. 

The former Roulette Sisters frontwoman proved as funny and alluring as a solo act as she was in her sadly missed all-female oldtimey quartet. The rest of the Roulette Sisters are all off doing their own projects (violist Karen Waltuch is a highly regarded avant-garde composer; washboard player Megan Burleyson continues in her husband Dale’s excellent barrelhouse blues band the 4th Street Nite Owls; lead guitarist Meg Reichhardt joined forces with Kurt Hoffman in the lush, romantic Les Chauds Lapins), so it’s fallen to Minch to keep the rustic side of the band going. Last night, effortlessly fingerpicking her vintage steel guitar and accompanied by excellent bassist Andy Cotton (whose terse, thoughtful solos were every bit as captivating as Minch was), she ran through a mix of classic covers as well as originals. “I’ve decided that I write antique songs,” she told the crowd matter-of-factly, an observation that was right on the money. What was most readily apparent about this show was what a good songwriter Minch is, and probably always was, because her earliest songs, on the now out-of-print debut ep she put out back in 2002 when she was still in college were a good barometer of where she would be tonight. Like Bliss Blood, Al Duvall and her other fellow musicians on the New York oldtimey scene, the former Roulette Sisters frontwoman’s originals are indistinguishable from her covers in the sense that they’re period-perfect: Minch not only sounds like she was born eighty years too late, she also looks the part, with her hair in that flapper bob and her antique, ankle-length dress. She didn’t do Georgia Boys (the best song on her first ep) but she did everything else, including a brand-new, gorgeous minor key number that she introduced as a gospel song but really wasn’t.

Several of the other originals were taken from her soon-to-be-released full-length debut Razorburn Blues, (the cd release show is May 27 at Union Hall): highlights were the title track, an entertainingly breathless catalog of indignities, and the gorgeous, 6/8 country song Astroland Tower, a vividly scary account of the old Coney Island amusement park narrated by a woman who just wants to get away from it all. It’s Minch’s Wall of Death, and her casual delivery, singing off-mic as she did all night in the intimate space here, only made the song’s dark undercurrent stronger. Released from the confines of being in a band, Minch has seized the opportunity to diversify her writing while remaining strikingly and charmingly true to the oldtime influences that define her sound.

If yesterday’s Ljova and the Kontraband show was the sonic equivalent of open bar without the hangover, last night’s Ansambl Mastika show at Barbes was an eightball of coke without the OD. Led by a scorchingly fast, incisive clarinetist who goes by the name Greg Squared, the band features the drummer from Slavic Soul Party as well as the bassist and accordionist from Zagnut Orchestar along with trumpet and electric lead guitar. This band is something beyond mesmerizing: ecstatic, powerful and danceable as hell. They seem to pride themselves on their originals, and from what they played tonight, their sprawling, sometimes fifteen-minute excursions through every conceivable gypsyish style could either have been theirs, or they could have been classics from Bulgaria, Turkey, Lebanon or the shtetls of Poland. It was impossible to tell, because they didn’t announce song titles, they just pummeled the audience with one after another. Ansambl Mastika calls their sound “New Balkan Uproar,” which is an understatement. With the electric instruments and the big bass drum in the little back room at Barbes, they were LOUD: of all the gypsy bands in New York, only Gogol Bordello – who have gone more punk rock in the last couple of years – raise the decibel level as high. Although there was obviously a lot of improvisation going on, what Ansambl Mastika was playing was obviously composed through, not just endless jams on the Dorian scale. And the bass player has found a way to play this stuff on a Fender without getting all wanky and fusionish: he plays reggae licks, except without the reggae beat! Along with the occasional big, boomy chord or slide to the top of the fretboard, which only made the songs stronger.

Then the band brought up an all-female vocal quartet who call themselves Black Sea Hotel, and played behind them. With their soaring yet chilling harmonies, swooping and diving all over the place, it was like watching the Voix Bulgares backed by Taraf de Haidoucks except with electric instruments.

To those who might be sick of this page’s constant shilling for a steady stream of New York-area gypsy bands, brace yourself: there’s more to come. Yes, it’s bandwagonesque, but finally there’s a popular scene here with room for pretty much everyone. What punk was to late 70s New York, the gypsy scene is now. Admittedly, just like the golden age of punk rock, most of the crowd seems to be musicians from other bands in the scene. Which actually has an upside: this is all about the music and the fun, not the pose. Nobody onstage tonight was wearing any kind of uniform, i.e. 70s dumpster-diver kitsch or Urban Outfitters. And the crowd was rapt: everybody came to listen, not to bray at each other over the music or huddle over their phones, feverishly texting anyone and everyone whom might conceivably be their next hookup. We’ve needed this for a long, long time.  

Ansambl Mastika don’t have any upcoming gigs listed on their myspace at the moment, but Black Sea Hotel are playing Pete’s at 9:30 on May 12.

A triumphantly invigorating show. It’s always a good sign if a band’s newest songs are their best, which was the case with the Larch tonight, playing the cd release show for their new one Gravity Rocks at Arlene’s. The  most obvious comparison to this long-running Brooklyn band is Squeeze. Even though the two groups don’t have much in common musically – rather than the Beatles, the Larch mine a frequently quirky, early 80s vein, as much Robyn Hitchcock as Elvis Costello - they share a subtle sense of humor. And Larch frontman Ian Roure’s guitar leads are every bit as sizzling as Glenn Tilbrook’s used to be and reputedly still are. Roure made the crowd wait for them – he took all of three all night long, but he made them count. The title track from the new cd, an instrumental, was punctuated by one of them. Their songs are sophisticated yet often ridiculously catchy, such as the brand-new, self-explanatory Cellphone or Schizo and Return of the Chimera, a typically tongue-in-cheek number about genetic engineering, both of which they played tonight.

The evening’s best numbers were a yet unreleased number, Strawberry Coast, with its darkly incisive, minor-key, tango-inflected central hook, and another potently hook-driven number, Accidental Planet, from the new album. Keyboardist Liza Garelik (who also plays with Roure in another rousing, often fiery band, Liza and the WonderWheels) told the crowd how one of the Larch’s songs had become one of the demos that come standard with one manufacturer’s ipod, and how besieged with fan email Roure had become as a result. Ross Bonnadonna’s bass playing was muscular and inventive (a dexterously bluesy lead guitarist and longtime denizen of the Freddy’s Bar scene, he also plays in Paula Carino’s band, whatever their name happens to be this week).

At the end of tonight’s surprisingly short set, the crowd insisted on an encore and the band obliged, Roure finally cutting loose with one of his signature long, screaming, lightning-fast wah-wah solos. Good things are happening with this band, with a couple of recent UK tours and all that fan email. Watch this space.  

[slightly edited repost from the DDDB email list]
In Monday’s NY Daily News, Forest City Ratner released new renderings of Frank Gehry’s designs for three buildings in the Atlantic Yards luxury housing disaster’s Phase 1 (the arena, “Miss Brooklyn” now renamed–simply–Building One, and one other building.) MAS’s “Atlantic Lots” renderings in the Post and the new Gehry designs were the substance of what NoLandGrab.org aptly described as a “Monday Morning Tabloid War“.

Described as “ridiculous,” “ugly,” and “awful” by experts and random New Yorkers, the new red, white and blue building designs have not been well received; the reception has been even worse than that accorded the poorly received earlier redesign released in May 2006. (The new Port Authority chief, Chris Ward, doesn’t like the redesign either.)

Most telling about the floundering state of the project is that though Phase 2 comprises the bulk of the project, the new designs only show Phase 1. Both Phase 2 and the building planned for Site 5 (where the PC Richards and Modell’s on Flatbush currently stand) were left out of the new renderings. Also absent is the existing and surrounding neighborhood — the model floats in a dark, decontextualized void.

The best metaphor for the show Ljova and the Kontraband put on today at Trinity Church would be open bar on top shelf liquor. That obscure vodka you’ve always wanted to try but never did because it was too expensive? Here, have a shot. You want a pint? OK, have a pint. The only difference was that at the end, it was possible to leave unassisted, without the looming inevitability of an allday hangover. This concert was exhilarating, transcendent, a blast. It’s impossible to imagine a better new New York band than these guys.

The idea of blending equal parts classical, jazz and gypsy music might sound impossibly fussy, but this band pulls it off and makes it seem effortless. Led by gregarious, engaging frontman/violist Lev “Ljova” Zhurbin, the quartet also featured subtly virtuosic percussionist Mathias Kunzli as well as supersonically fast accordionist Patrick Farrell and jazz bassist Mike Savino. In an exuberant show that went on for well over their allotted hour onstage, the group blended fiery gypsy dances, rustically melancholy songs without words, intricately and imaginatively arranged jazz and potently crescendoing classical melodies, often in the same song. Zhurbin proved equally at home with pretty much anything that can be played on the viola, from sizzling, Vivaldiesque runs to strange, ambient atmospherics. Kunzli alternated mostly between his hand-held dumbek and the drum box on which he perched and played with his hands, effectively mimicking the sound of a full kit. Farrell unleashed an onslaught of cascades that grew from a few tastefully placed rivulets to full-blown tsunamis and all points in between. Savino played virtuosically and cerebrally (which sometimes seemed at odds with the material’s emotional sensibility), using a punchy, staccato tone common in 70s fusion jazz bass.

Because Zhurbin gets a lot of work writing film scores, many of his compositions have a narrative feel, winding up in a place altogether different from where they start. There was great humor in several of them, particularly Love Potion, Expired which featured an extended, “uh-oh” solo on kazoo from Kunzli at the point where the song reached its expiration date. Zhurbin’s titles and themes frequently proved counterintuitive. The pastorale which opened the show was a darkly lingering lament; Szeki, influenced by Transylvania folk music was an ethereal, Jean Luc Ponty-esque soundscape; Ori’s Fearful Symmetry (a movie scene, perhaps?) was anything but symmetrical, a whirlwind tour through a casbah of the mind.

A Savino composition, How Easily I Get Lost began with a circular motif with something of a generic Afropop feel. But as it made its way through the other members of the group, the band took turns playing its chordal underpinning or playing melody against it, which was great fun to watch. Farrell’s Walking on Willoughby had his bandmates hustling and bustling through downtown Brooklyn while the bass beat a steady path through the crowd.

Zhurbin then invited his wife, Romashka frontwoman Inna Barmash up to sing a couple of numbers, the first a nostalgic tune with lyrics taken from a poem from the late 1800s. It started out with a sentimental melody nicked from Those Were the Days, but by the end, the band had brought the volume up to a scream while Barmash went deep into her lower register for every ounce of anguish and longing she could muster. It was perhaps the highlight of the show. She then did a traditional Russian folk song whose lyrics, she explained, went something along the lines of “I want to hurt/I want to love/I want to party.” The chemistry between the couple was obvious: party animals, both of them, or so it seemed.

By the time the band finally wrapped up the show, with yet another jazz-inflected gypsy romp, the crowd roared for more, but time was up. In case you were one of lucky ones there today – or if you wish you were – Ljova and the Kontraband are playing Drom this Saturday at 8. You would be crazy to miss them.

This is a story that’s been told many times over, one that will be familiar to anyone who stuck it out through the Greeks and Romans and then the Old Masters and made it to Art History 102: how two rival art critics, Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg not only made abstract expressionism a household word, but actually shaped the movement. To 21st century eyes, the idea of an art critic for a highbrow magazine like the Partisan Review having any influence whatsoever outside of the ivory tower of academia seems particularly quaint. Here at this site, we would be perfectly happy to get just a handful of people off the couch and away from the tv long enough to discover that there actually is such a thing as art. Yet as often as this story has been told, it’s hard to imagine it being told better than the current exhibit at the Jewish Museum that runs through September 21. It’s a quick, breezy show, one that won’t take longer than half an hour unless you are a passionate devotee of the style or the era, and in that case it could keep you rapt for the better part of an afternoon.

Pretty much everything on display here is either iconic or well-known: there are no Pollocks retrieved from anyone’s crumbling Long Island storage space. But the context here is remarkable and smartly curated, including correspondence, posters, media reportage and even a video of the infamous 1950s tv clip showing the chimpanzee J. Fred Muggs demonstrating impressive brush technique as he creates “modern art.” In an unpublished letter, Clyfford Still articulates through clenched teeth how wrongheaded a reviewer is. And the curators have done a good job underscoring how oblivious Greenberg, Rosenberg and their contemporaries were to pretty much any art other than painting (sculpture especially), and how they turned a blind eye to work by women and minorities.  

As can be expected, the big star here is De Kooning, particularly his famous Gotham News with its bright, urban colors over collage. Pollock is represented most strikingly by the familiar Convergence, vigorous even by his standards. Along with a handful of somewhat psychedelic, cartoonish Arshile Gorky works, there’s also a selection of sculpture. Perhaps the most striking piece of all is a work by Still, first described by the artist as a self-portrait, although he later retracted that title. Which is strange, because it’s so obviously self-referential, and self-obsessed, two qualities which perhaps best describe the whole of abstract expressionism. Yet there is nothing whatsoever maudlin about this almost pitiful stick figure against a black background, a tiny flame burning in its head, illuminating a big yellow box with clumsily outstretched arms.

A great deal of the exhibit, either directly or indirectly, relates to the two critics, whose rivalry grew as their tastes diverged. Greenberg comes across as a trendoid (and rightfully so!), jumping from one bandwagon to the next when he felt the slightest push of grass under his feet. Rosenberg, on the other hand, stands the test of time well. Focused (some might say obsessed) on how the experience of painting itself relates to art, he championed hard work and substance over fleeting fame. The two also differed on how they viewed their heritage: a passage from a Greenberg article stuffily relates an unease with what he felt were the stifling confines of American Jewish life. Rosenberg, on the other hand, embraced his Jewishness with characteristically ebullient wit. When met with the question, is there such a thing as Jewish art, he responded that a gentile would say, “Yes, there is Jewish art, and no, there is no Jewish art.” A Jew, on the other hand, would respond by asking, “What is the nature of Jewish art?” If Rosenberg is to be taken on face value, it comes as no surprise to learn from this exhibit that the greatest institutional exponents of abstract expressionism – many of whose foremost artists were Jews – were not museums, galleries or foundations, but synagogues, especially in New York and the surrounding area which continue to exhibit important works of art. Many similarly illuminating discoveries await the museumgoer who has a little time and an interest in this often mischaracterized and misunderstood period in American art history.

The Jewish Museum is located at 1109 5th Ave at 92nd St., enter on the street just east of the avenue. Museum hours are Saturday – Wednesday, 11:00 AM - 5:45 PM, Thursday 11:00 AM - 8:00 PM, closed Fridays and holidays. The exhibit runs through September 21.

Tashi were one of the first classical groups of the 70s to achieve rockstar status, and in those days they played it for all it was worth, dressing casually onstage, deliberately attracting younger audiences and pioneering all kinds of new music. Sunday at Town Hall, the quartet – pianist Peter Serkin, clarinetist Richard Stoltzman, cellist Fred Sherry and violinist Ida Kafavian – reminded why they achieved such popularity, and proved none the worse for a 35-year hiatus between gigs together: in fact, their performance was one of the landmark musical events of 2008. Tashi first came together specifically to perform Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, so it was particularly appropriate that they’d reunite this year for the Messiaen centenary.

They opened with two Renaissance works “recomposed” for them by contemporary composer Charles Wuorinen: Ave Maria, Virgo Serena by Josquin des Prez and Christes Crosse by Thomas Morley. The melodies were nothing special, generic pre-baroque call-and-response, but the textures of the instruments, particularly the clarinet and piano, were fascinating: such arrangements did not exist in early music. The next work was a striking departure, Toru Takemitsu’s Quatrain II, another piece written especially for the group, and highly influenced by Messiaen as well as Mingus. A strangely captivating, mysterious work punctuated by jarring percussive strokes and some spectacularly impressive, shakuhachi-esque, deep tones from Stoltzman, it boldly foreshadowed what was to come.

After an intermission, Tashi played the piece which had served as their original impetus, the terrifying, rivetingly intense Quartet for the End of Time. Composed in a Nazi POW camp, Messiaen wrote it for piano, clarinet, cello and violin out of necessity: those were the instruments that he and his three fellow musicians in the camp happened to play. Each of the eight sections of the suite has a liturgical title (Messiaen was a devout Catholic), but it’s essentially a cry out for rescue, as well as a fiercely victorious, vindictive response to imprisonment under the Nazis. This pantheonic but under-performed work (there aren’t many working quartets around to play it) was Tashi’s signature piece, as much a show-stopper tonight as it reputedly was three and a half decades ago. When Stoltzman - the Manny Ramirez of the clarinet – launched into a long, laborous solo passage, the anguish and longing was absolutely visceral. Serkin was nothing short of extraordinary: one of the world’s elite pianists, his touch on the keyboard was astonishing, evincing the subtlest dynamics with minutely differing amounts of sustain creating an effect that was practically vibrato. Kafavian and Sherry kept the embers of hope glowing with their eerie washes of sound.

The group shone most brightly on Messiaen’s two long, stately yet unpredictable crescendos, the first a melody familiar to rock audiences from King Crimson’s Starless and Bible Black (Robert Fripp a Messiaen fan? Who knew?). As the piece wound up, Kafavian’s sudden, violent cadenza tore through whatever was left of the Nazi shackles as Serkin gradually brought his eerily glimmering chords down to pianissimo at the end. After what seemed thirty seconds of absolute silence, the audience exploded in applause, calling the musicians back for three standing ovations and probably hoping for more. But anything else would have been anticlimactic. Let’s hope that this isn’t the last time the group reunites. Athough if this is it for Tashi, they  couldn’t have gone out on a more powerful note.

The Dixie Bee-Liners’ brand-new album on Pinecastle Records is titled Ripe, which is something of an understatement: this band has been overdue to break through for what feels like a long time. Formed in New York about five years ago by a couple of Bible Belt expats, multi-instrumentalist Buddy Woodward and guitarist/frontwoman Brandi Hart, it wasn’t long before they were the most exciting Americana act in town (for the uninitiated, New York has a vital, thriving country/bluegrass scene far more traditionally-oriented than anything coming out of Nashville these days). Yet Woodward and Hart felt they were spinning their wheels, so they left. True story: for the Dixie Bee-Liners’ farewell show, they approached one of the so-called prestige venues in town, where they were told that they’d be welcome - if they moved away and then came back. But as long as they were a New York band, there was no place for them. 

Well, what goes around comes around: their first time back, they took the club up on that offer and promptly sold the place out. In the meantime, they’d signed to Pinecastle and were in the process of putting the finishing touches on this album, their third official release. While the instrumentation on this cd is traditional – guitar, dobro, banjo, fiddle, mandolin and upright bass – the songwriting is astonishingly sophisticated and innovative. Woodward and Hart, clearly proud of their Southern lineage, harken back to the pre-rock era, when perhaps the smartest songwriting in all of American music was emanating not from Tin Pan Alley but from the South. Both share an intensely literate way with lyrics; musically, Woodward’s tunes lean more to the upbeat, amusing side, contrasting with Hart’s haunting, frequently minor-key style. Call it Bible Belt Noir, if you will: the band does. If this is the future of bluegrass, we’ve got a lot to look forward to.

The album kicks off with Down on the Crooked Road, guitar and banjo delivering a stinging slap – wake up! It’s a rousing call to catch the road running through the historic part of southern Virginia which still remains home to the descendants of some of the alltime great bluegrass pioneers. The next track is a dark, stately country gospel track, Lord Lay Down My Ball and Chain, settting the tone for an even more hypnotic, traditionally styled tune, Yellow-Haired Girl. After that, The Bugs in the Basement begins with an eerie wash of strings and banjo in the distance, ominous but ending on a triumphant note. I’ve got a firefly! Hart exclaims. Dixie Grey to Black, one of the album’s most riveting, lyrically potent numbers is told from the point of view of  a Civil War mother grieving for her son, executed for desertion:

Who could blame a child who wants to run

I raised him not to pull that Dixie gun

Old Kentucky, still a Union state

Choking on its bitterness and hate…

And my only boy died

To satisfy that Southern pride

Never gonna get my little boy back

Turn that Dixie grey to black

Like several of the songs on this album, there are multiple shades of meaning here: this song could just as easily apply to a war much closer to our era. The rest of the album alternates between fiery and fun, and dark as a coalmine. Woodward’s song Grumble Jones is something that could become a signature piece, a devilishly funny portrait of a real-life Confederate general with a real potty mouth. Lost in the Silence, a big audience hit written by Hart, is a devastatingly disquieting tale of heartbreak. She’s My Angel is a  wistful showcase for Hart’s brilliant vocals, which manage to be heartwrenching without crossing over the line into schmaltz: “She dreams all day and sleeps all night,” the song’s narrator sings of a little girl who’s grown up in what seems like a flash. Old Charlie Cross is a boisterous, backhanded tribute to a smalltime scam artist:

Wine is quick, the moonshine’s quicker…

He’s got more tricks than a circus pony

A lot of hot air and cold baloney

The cd winds up with the title track, which is something of a departure for the band, a darkly hypnotic, seductive narrative that wouldn’t be out of place on a vintage Richard & Linda Thompson album. Or something by Neko Case or Little Pink, for that matter.

Producer Bill Vorndick’s smart, imaginative engineering has all the instruments here sounding like a vinyl record, warm, tight and together rather than like just a bunch of overdubs. The new Southern additions to the band: fiddler/harmony singer Rachel Renee Johnson, lead guitarist Jonathan Maness, bassist Jeremy Darrow and British expat banjo player Sam Morrow bring the mayhem typical of the band’s live shows to new levels. And Hart’s mandrake-root soprano has never cast a more potent spell. CDs are available at better record stores, at shows and online. The Dixie Bee-Liners are currently on tour, with no New York dates scheduled for the next month: watch this space for updates.