The Bush Years Remembered Vividly and Bitterly
Dave Wechsler is the founder and accordionist of the marvelously smart, lush Brooklyn “historical orchestrette” Pinataland. As The Tyranny of Dave (a tongue-in-cheek comment by poet Genya Turovskaya that he ended up adopting for his solo projects), he released a marvelously brooding travelogue of an album, Vacations, in 2007. His new one The Decline of America, Part One: The Bush Years is a personal rather than a political statement, although the sardonic, occasionally bitter tone of these songs echoes that era’s sadness. Much of this is pretty morose, with a sort of Elliott Smith quality, characteristically melodic chamberpop with a few surprises that come as an unexpected and very welcome jolt of adrenaline. Here Wechsler is joined by his Chicago band – bassist Aaron Zemelko, Cameroonian guitarist Didi Afana, and drummer Ben Gray – along with cameos from cellist Serena Jost, chanteuses Robin Aigner and Anna Soltys and guitarist Ross Bonadonna. What’s best is that Wechsler is offering it as a free download at his bandcamp site.
Months after he wrote the pensive, dynamically shifting 6/8 chamber pop ballad America’s Oldest Home, which opens the album, Wechsler decided it was about 9/11: you decide whether or not he was one of those who knew what was coming before it happened. The second track, Greatest Generation has a blithe, Summerteeth-era Wilco swing – it’s a subtle examination of the personal as political in the wake of 9/11, with a lively choir featuring Codapendency’s Tara Shenoy and Athanasia Sawicz along with Carla Budesinsky, Brittany Petersen and Kate Nylander (ex-Wildcats Marching Band), and trumpeter Megan Beugger.
The 6/8 ballad Abraham Man slowly makes its way to a swirling, off-center cauldron of strings and keyboards; the bouncy Too Late offers a tongue-in-cheek yet resonant look at the consequences of the current depression. The similarly upbeat Chicago River Song, sort of an uncredited Pinataland number, features characteristically incisive, nebulously bluesy lead guitar work from Afana plus vivid violin by Claudia Chopek. Every Damn Light, a Hurricane Katrina narrative, ups the ante with more bluesy, echoey guitar and the ex-Wildcats horn section. The real shocker, and the best number here is When All the Stores are Closed, a swinging early 70s psychedelic blues-rock number unlike anything Wechsler’s ever done before, quite a contrast with the next cut, the ornate chamber pop of Fire Drill, which evokes the elegaic understatement of REM’s Find the River.
The fast, blippy keyboard pop of Raise a Glass camouflages its bitter, sardonic edge. Remember the Maine, an Iraq war parable, sways with minor-key bite and some gorgeously plaintive harmonies from Aigner: it wouldn’t be out of place in the Pierre de Gaillande catalog. The album winds up with the ghostly, organ-fueled Call of the Waters and the similarly regret-tinged oldtimey-flavored Americana ballad Wake Up in Brooklyn. Fans of lyrical, smartly melodic rock from Elvis Costello to the aforementioned Elliott Smith will find plenty to enjoy here: if this is any indication, Tyranny of Dave’s planned volume two is something to look forward to.
CD Review: Introducing the Pre-War Ponies
A fixture of the New York music scene, Daria Grace got her start playing bass in recently resuscitated art-rockers Melomane, and was one of the original Moonlighters – fans of that band took to calling her replacement “the new Daria.” But with a voice like hers – a warm, clear, billowy soprano with just the slightest hint of grit that tails off sometimes with a subtle vibrato – there can be only one Daria Grace. While holding down the bass spot in her husband Jack’s terrific country band, she found her way back to oldtime steampunk swing with the Pre-War Ponies. They should be far better-known than they are – this beautifully sunny cd is completely and unselfconsciously romantic and one of the best albums of the year so far. Grace shies away from standards – she’s far more at home with obscure sheet music rescued from junk shops, a reliable source for much of her material. She plays baritone ukelele in this band just as she used to do in the Moonlighters along with rambunctious trombonist J. Walter Hawkes, former Cocktail Angst pianist Jon Dryden and Doug Largent on bass, with fellow New York retro chanteuse Sasha Dobson providing harmonies on one track.
Grace follows the Connee Boswell version of All I Do Is Dream of You, Dryden adding jaunty barrelhouse piano beneath Hawkes’ wry muted trombone accents. It’s something of a shock that at least until now, the swaying, breezy Give Me the Moon Over Brooklyn never became the borough’s official theme (once Marty Markowitz leaves office, the band can approach the new Borough President). Hawkes joins Grace here on uke to up the vintage ambience. Got the South in My Soul – a concert favorite and a Lee Wiley hit from 1932 – features a period-perfect, balmy trombone solo. Two Sleepy People (a Frank Loesser/Hoagy Carmichael hit from 1938) absolutely nails the cozy, endorphin-stoked ambience for two lovers who’ve been out all night and are out of thing to say but not to do with each other.
The band recasts Heart and Soul, the lone standard here, as a brisk 1920s style proto-swing strut. The darkly tender Under the Russian Moon, floating on the waves of Dryden’s accordion, is the most delightful obscurity of the whole bunch. The album winds up tantalizingly with The Gentleman Just Wouldn’t Say Goodnight, another junk shop find that Grace credits as “one of the most beautiful songs that nobody has ever heard of.” Grace weaves through its tasty major/minor changes with a wistful, late-night feel that is pure soul. With the Jack Grace Band’s killer new cd hot off the press, that group has been gigging up a storm lately; the Pre-War Ponies’ next scheduled gig is at Rodeo Bar on July 26.
CD Review: The Snow – I Die Every Night
Here we are in March with the first classic album of 2010 (this one actually came out in mid-January). The Snow’s debut album True Dirt was good: this is a lushly arranged, thoughtful, funny, richly lyrical art-rock masterpiece. Bandleader Pierre de Gaillande has been writing good, frequently great songs for several years, throughout his days with Melomane, Sea Foxx and numerous other side projects (like his English-language Georges Brassens cover band Bad Reputation), but this is the strongest effort he’s been a part of yet. Putting keyboardist/chanteuse Hilary Downes out in front of the group was a genius move, even if it was only logical. She’s a torch singer straight out of the Chris Connor/June Christy mold (or a darker Nellie McKay) with an alternately coy and murderous way of sliding up to a note and nailing it. She also contributes half of the songs on the album, alternating with Gaillande from track to track, with an additional number, a rueful tango, written by multi-reed virtuoso David Spinley. The rhythm section of Christian Bongers (ex-Botanica) on bass and Jeffrey Schaeffer on drums slink through the shadows as the clarinet or saxes soar above the swirl of layers and layers of keyboards and the occasional snarl and clang of the guitar. There are other bands who leap from genre to genre as avidly as the Snow do here, but few who have such obvious fun doing it.
The opening track is Albatross, an ironically straightforward, metaphorically loaded ballad by Downes that makes stately art-rock out of a Gaillande garage guitar riff. Handle Your Weapon, by Gaillande, throws out a lifeline to a possible would-be suicide miles from civilization in a symbolic middle of nowhere, swinging along on the pulse of Downes’ electric piano. By contrast, The Silent Parade – sort of a signature song for the band – delivers the understated, menacing majesty of the snowstorm to end all snowstorms, the last way anyone would expect the world to end at this point in history. The warmly torchy, soul-inflected Fool’s Gold could be a requiem for a relationship – or for the promise that indie rock seemed it might deliver on for a moment but never did.
Undertow is a tongue-in-cheek clinic in jazzy syncopation, a showcase for Downes’ darkly allusive lyrical wit, matched by Gaillande on the wryly swinging, Gainsbourg-esque Reptile, a hot-blooded creature’s lament. The most menacing cut on the album is the hypnotic, woozy 6/8 masquerade-ball themed Slow Orbit. The album winds up with Downes’ understatedly bitter, minor-key chamber-rock ballad Shadows and Ghosts and Gailllande’s hypnotic, aptly titled psychedelic anthem Life Is Long and Strange, far more subtle than it might seem. Live, the band surprisingly manage to capture most of the atmospherics of their studio work; watch this space for NYC dates.
Song of the Day 10/22/08
Every day we add a new song to the alltime top 666 (above, to your right), counting them down all the way to #1. Today’s song is #643:
Melomane – O Mighty Orb
Arguably this is the New York art-rockers’ most savagely beautiful, majestic epic – and they have many. The centerpiece to their brand-new cd Look Out! it’s the most successful number in frontman Pierre de Gaillande’s ongoing “disaster song cycle,” this one about death via global warming. The satirical false ending adds characteristic black humor.
Song of the Day 10/20/08
Counting them down from #666 all the way to the best one ever. The whole list, getting a little bit bigger every day, is at the top of the page. Today’s song is #645:
Melomane – The Ballot Is the Bullet
The zeros’ counterpart to #655 (Reagan Country by Shattered Faith), this one a dark, sobering minor-key art-rock anthem with a great organ solo and equally homicidal intent (the lyric sheet reads “assassinate the precedent,” but that’s not how the vocals go). Someday soon (1/20/09) this will be a period piece, a brave statement in the face of fascism. In the meantime, we can always hope for a miracle. From the 2007 cd Glaciers.
Song of the Day 10/6/08
The countdown continues all the way to #1 (the full list is at the top of the page). Here’s #659:
Melomane – Going Places
For a band who traffic in lushly orchestrated, majestically epic art-rock, this New York crew sure are funny. This is a nasty slap upside the head of a trendoid about to emerge from his luxury condo for a night on the town: “You have the most exquisite bedhead to go with your sleepy mind,” frontman Pierre de Gaillande taunts. Unreleased and probably for that reason unavailable on the various sites where you get stuff, although there are live bootleg versions kicking around. A big audience hit, the band frequently plays it live.
Concert Review: Melomane at Union Hall, Brooklyn NY 4/25/08
While Lucid Culture takes pride in spreading the word about the best under-the-radar happenings around town, it’s always fun to revisit the A-list, to catch a show by one of New York’s most exciting, popular acts. Tonight’s show strikingly reaffirmed what a great band Melomane is, not just one of the best in New York, but in the entire world. And also a reminder of how much fun and visually entertaining their live show is, with everyone trading off licks, throwing in silly quotes from pop songs, orchestrating a little mayhem into their impeccably crafted tunes. And tonight they did it mostly with songs about the end of the world. The only bad thing about this show was that it ended: they called it a night after fifty minutes onstage, perhaps because their sizzling new three-piece horn section doesn’t know any more songs.
Forget the Melomane you might have known when they first started out, the artsy, Mediterranean-inflected, somewhat Roxy Music-ish pop band they were around the turn of the century. This band is a whole lot darker, a LOT louder, more powerful than ever. They hit the ground running with the title track from their second album Solresol, a scorching, fast minor-key anthem that takes flight on one of frontman Pierre de Gaillande’s signature eerie guitar hooks, anchored by multi-instrumentalist Quentin Jennings’ ominous organ. Then they took a lengthy excursion through Gaillande’s ongoing “disaster song cycle,” including new songs about apocalypse by never-ending solar eclipse, flood, volcanic eruption, collision with an asteroid and more. The volcano song, Vesuvius was a gleefully morbid, cabaret-inflected number. Their sky-is-falling song caught the audience completely off-guard with two dramatic, false endings to its incongruously Stonesy boogie blues outro, capped by a dark minor chord that rang out majestically at the end. Two more of the end-of-the-world songs were blackly humorous, slow 6/8 numbers. In the country band that shares with her husband Jack, bassist Daria Grace is all about the swing and the sway: in this unit, she gets to play a lot of melody, including one gripping, soaring solo, a lot of slides and chords for extra impact. The horn section, whose name is still up in the air – the Brassholes? The Brass-ieres? The band can’t decide – gave the crescendos extra fire and bite. They also played what was ironically the first song Paris-born Gaillande ever wrote in French – an amusing tune about the relationship between a cigarette and a match – bouncing along on Grace’s Motown bassline. They closed with the weird, multi-part, Skyhooks soundalike This Is Skyhorse from their most recent and best album, Glaciers, one of our picks for ten best albums of 2007. Melomane plays June 13 at BAM Café: if you like sweepingly orchestrated art-rock, or just plain good fun, you would be crazy to miss this show.
The Sound of the City
Saturday night’s show at Pete’s Candy Store was a quintessential New York experience, two solid hours of urbane, cosmopolitan tunesmithing. The Sweet Bitters opened, Sharon Goldman and Nina Schmir taking turns playing guitar and singing lead, Schmir doubling effortlessly on piano, each singing harmony on the other’s songs. Goldman’s been a star in the under-the-radar New York songwriter community for awhile now, but Schmir was the real surprise tonight. Two years ago, the former backup singer from Aimee Van Dyne’s band was out of music completely; tonight, she held the crowd in the palm of her hand. Combining these two talents was something of a stroke of genius: both have a way with catchy hooks and eloquently witty lyrics which are often downright hilarious.
They opened with a Goldman song, Clocks Fall Back, the gorgeous opening track on the new Sweet Bitters ep with its rich harmonies and evocative rush-hour lyric. Schmir followed with the subtly satirical Rich Little Poor Girl, its sarcasm ever more apt as the New York that she and Goldman represent slides further into suburban torpor.
“I was an 80s girl before I turned into a folkie,” Goldman laughed as she launched into a stripped-down cover of In Between Days by the Cure. What a revelation that was: like Melomane frontman Pierre de Gaillande’s version of Overkill by Men at Work, or Ward White’s cover of Abba’s Dancing Queen, Goldman reached down deep into the song and pulled out a wellspring of emotion that she sent flying over Schmir’s pointillistic piano work. In their hands, what could have been schlock was anything but. The rest of the show was all originals, reaffirming the two womens’ singular sense of purpose: to cram as many catchy hooks into the set as time would permit.
“Now we’re going to play a Roches song that’s not by the Roches,” Goldman deadpanned at the end of the show, and the two women ran through a spot-on parody, a chipper, cheery summer camp singalong about little aliens taking over the world. Sleepy little aliens, as it turns out. It wouldn’t be fair to give away the rest of the joke.
Alice Lee was next on the bill, one of the best songwriters in New York before she was priced out of town like so many others. Soul music is her reference point – her 2004 album Lovers and Losers is one of the best in that style to be released in the last several years – but she’s always had a fondness for Brazilian sounds. She’s been living in Guatemala recently, and going deep into all kinds of tropicalia. Despite some technical difficulties (for some reason, it was impossible to get her acoustic guitar in the sound mix), she kept the crowd riveted throughout her hourlong set. Like the duo on the bill before her, Lee also has a devilish sense of humor, but her songwriting is stormy, passionate, frequently exasperated. She doesn’t suffer fools gladly. Using a variety of guitar tunings and singing in four languages, she played a mix of mostly new material along with covers from Brazil and elsewhere south of the border. The best songs on the bill were an audience request, the absolutely brilliant, Nina Simone-inflected Where Are You My Love, and a slow, pensive new one in 6/8 time. Yet another reminder that we shouldn’t take people like Alice Lee for granted: if you haven’t seen your favorite singer or band in awhile, maybe you should while you still can.