Top Ten Songs of the Week 5/4/09
We do this every week. You’ll see this week’s #1 song on our Best 100 songs of 2009 list at the end of December, along with maybe some of the rest of these too. This is strictly for fun – it’s Lucid Culture’s tribute to Kasey Kasem and a way to spread the word about some of the great music out there that’s too edgy for the corporate media and their imitators in the blogosphere. Every link here will take you to the song except for #1 which you’ll have to hear live on the 26th at the Rockwood!
1. Jenifer Jackson – Groundward
Brilliantly gloomy, pensive songcraft: “Yesterday the motion had no meaning, yesterday the seasons were careening…Summer rain is falling.” She’s at the Rockwood on 5/26 at 9.
2. Melissa McClelland – Passenger 24
Fearlessly snide ragtime from this Canadian chanteuse. She’s at Union Hall on 5/27.
3. Ron Miles – Since Forever
Absolutely gorgeous guitar-and-trumpet ballad. He’s at the Jazz Standard 5/26-27.
4. Damian Quinones – Shadow in the Sun
Sounds like the Zombies! He’s at Tillie’s in Ft. Greene on 5/29.
5. Amy Speace – Haven’t Learned a Thing
Pretty devastating breakup song, in the Matt Keating vein. She’s at Symphony Space on 5/7 at 8:30ish.
6. Gaida – Indulgence
Absolutely exquisite Levantine epic by this Syrian-bred chanteuse. She’s at Bowery Poetry Club on 5/15.
7. Erin Regan – Building Jumper
Self-explanatory and solo acoustic – beautiful despite itself. She’s at Sidewalk on 5/12 at 10.
8. Jay Vilnai’s Vampire Suit – Space Oddity
Odd, all right – this is a gypsy Bowie.
9. Bobtown – Take Me Down
Gothic acoustic Americana. O’Death only wish they were this good. They’re at Spikehill at 9 on 5/17.
10. Spanking Charlene – Where Are the Freaks
Damn right, we wanna know. Oh, look, they’re back since all the tourists and trust fund kids got called home to mommy! At Lakeside on 5/16 at 11.
Concert Review: Kirsten Williams at Bar on A, NYC 11/15/07
Kirsten Williams doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a singer-songwriter, a woman with a pretty voice and an acoustic guitar. She doesn’t need to. She makes it seem effortless, with her sweet, absolutely unaffected, slightly Kentucky-accented vocals and fluent, understatedly melodic fretwork. Country radio should seek her out: she’s got the tunes, the voice and – as horribly shallow as this is to admit, it’s inarguably true – the looks. She could be the next Kelly Willis. Which is a good thing. Her songs are terse, catchy and generally driven by disarmingly simple metaphors. Unsurprising, considering that she springs from the same fertile songwriting circle that springboarded the careers of Aimee Van Dyne, Ari Scott and Sharon Goldman, among others. It’s hard to imagine her sounding better than she did tonight.
Tonight onstage it was just her and bass player Andy Mattina, one of the busiest players in town, and for good reason: he’s one of the best players around, and he reaffirmed that. He gives this project a swing and a groove to the point where adding a drummer would be an afterthought. Mattina is well known for having great touch, lending an unexpected range of dynamics to Williams’ generally midtempo, somewhat Americana-inflected major-key pop songs. They opened with a bright, cheery country-pop number possibly called Burn Bright, Mattina taking off and embellishing the end of the tune. They followed with Happy Anyway, with its vivid East Village scenes and an impressively pro-graffiti stance. After that, they played the cleverly metaphorical To Catch a Thief: as the narrator’s cat “lulls itself to sleep with steady, heavy purrs,” she wonders who the thief is, and what’s been stolen from somebody’s heart.
The next song metaphorically examined the end of a relationship from the point of view of a prisoner searching for a way out. The following number was quite a contrast, a catchy, bouncy, 1-4-5 hit called Blue Sky. Other standout tracks Williams and Mattina delivered included the battlescarred Yesterday’s Waves, a metaphorical view of survival in rough emotional waters; the triumphant, upbeat New Lease on Life, and their best song of the night, the richly melodic, anthemic, crescendoing Down to the Road. At the end of the set, the crowd – an interesting mix of neighborhood folk and A-list New York rockers – pleaded for more. But the duo hadn’t played together in awhile and had run out of material.
Afterward we ended up at Banjo Jim’s where the high-energy Austin band the Shotgun Party were playing an upbeat Pete’s Candy Store-style blend of pop and bluegrass. The frontwoman is a cheerleader type who did the cheerleader dance throughout their set and sang cutesy, babyish lyrics in a cutesy, babyish voice, but the trio has a good upright bass player and their violinist Katy Cox was amazing. What she played could be called gypsy bluegrass. Her literally breathtaking solos were jampacked with lightning-fast sixteenth-note runs, bracing double-stops and spiraling swoops to the uppermost registers. As one member of the audience aptly put it, no matter how you felt about the band as a whole, she made them an impossible act to follow. Unsurprisingly, much of the crowd cleared out for Amy Speace, who played afterward.
In an impressive new development, Speace has taken on a strong antiwar and anti-Bush stance. A true democrat would say that having an antiwar and anti-Bush stance is a prerequisite to calling oneself a human being, and that may be true, but we need all the troops we can get, revolutionaries on the front lines no less than a rear guard quietly doing what they can to contribute to the cause. Unthinkable as it might seem at first thought, it’s people like Speace who could exert a lot more influence on the upcoming election than, say, Neil Young.
Now before you throw up and click “home” on your browser, consider that Shakey is pretty much preaching to the converted (other than the contingent of boomers who grew up to him on 70s rock radio and still get a nostalgia fix irrrespective of whatever his politics happen to be at the moment). Speace, on the other hand, doesn’t preach to anyone: it doesn’t seem that her audience is likely to lean very far one way or another, or, for that matter, to have much if any interest in voting at all. She’s just there in the background at that Starbucks in Weekawken, NJ where some bedraggled mortgage broker just might stumble in for his or her sixth HyperVigilLatte of the evening and hear Speace’s sad, plainspoken song about a woman who buries her soldier brother after his body comes home from Iraq. Maybe Speace’s otherwise completely innocuous song might encourage that bedraggled broker, or a couple of them, to actually vote, and make their vote count. And that doesn’t mean voting for Hillary. Neil Young – or Jello Biafra, or whatever Zach de la Rocha’s latest project is – probably won’t bring any upper middleclass, fortysomething Jersey housewives into the fold. But Speace can and probably will. Let’s not be ungrateful for that.
Lucid Culture 