Song of the Day 6/12/10

Every day, our best 666 songs of alltime countdown continues every day, all the way to #1. Then we’ll start with the 666 best albums of alltime). Saturday’s song is #47:

The Walkabouts – Firetrap

Pacific Northwest gothic at its finest: the narrator returns to avenge a dead family member. Centerpiece of the band’s best album, 1994’s Setting the Woods on Fire, one of the ten best albums ever made: “Not only you can burn!” Lots of torrents for this long out-of-print cd out there – can anybody find a stream? Do we have to finally get the necessary equipment and post this one ourselves?

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Concert Review: Kerry Kennedy at the Delancey, NYC 7/20/09

Faced with a laughably absurd amount of work catching up here in the wake of last week’s computer meltdown, Kerry Kennedy’s gig Monday night at Small Beast at the Delancey wasn’t the most disciplined choice of show to go see and write about afterward. She’s been reviewed here very favorably before, and given how ecstatic a response a shockingly big Monday night crowd gave her, she probably doesn’t need any more press. But this was transcendent. In the same spirit if not quite the same style as Neko Case, she’s taken a very stylized genre – twangy, noir, David Lynchian southwestern gothic rock- and puts a uniquely intense yet completely unselfconscious stamp on it. A lesser artist would put his or her personality centerstage; not Kennedy.

She’s a young woman with an old voice. But it’s her voice, not Nina Simone’s or Marlene Dietrich’s, two artists whose worn-down yet electric charisma resemble hers so closely. Kennedy has the added advantage of not only being a first-class songwriter but also a collector of great songs – in her case, she’s been going deep into the James Jackson Toth catalog with astonishingly powerful results. The towering, anguished 6/8 anthem More From the Mountain (see the top of Kennedy’s myspace page) grew with Walkabouts-class power to landslide-inducing volume, lead guitarist Nathan Halpern hacking volcanic torrents of sound from the chords and hurling them down the slope. By contast, the pensive ballad Sons of Sons took a melody very reminiscent of the Jesus & Mary Chain’s Happy When It Rains deep into noir territory, stalking along on a suspenseful, staggered beat. Singing with her eyes closed and backed by Small Beast impresario and Botanica mastermind Paul Wallfisch on piano, she took the Little Annie noir cabaret angsthem Because You’re Gone pitch black, quietly, drummer Heather Wagner driving the dirge with the subtlest, wispiest accents.

The rest of the show ranged from a fast, eventually explosive rocker built around a catchy two-chord riff, a swinging, swaying, apprehensive version of the big audience hit Wishing Well, a mighty, Orbisonesque ballad and a co-write with Toth, Dive, a bitter and brutal kiss-off ballad that only gets better every time she plays it. Throughout the set, Kennedy struck a casual, resolute stance, swaying slowly, expertly working the darkest corners of the lyrics with a breathy delivery that ranged from exasperation to exhaustion to inextinguishable rage, all the while staying in a zone. At times it seemed like she’d almost gone into a trance, taking the audience with her – after she’d end a song, there would be silence for a few seconds before the crowd would start to burst into applause. Here in the blogosphere, it’s considered gauche to review the same artist again and again, but there’s simply no denying how good this show was. Every year, we put up a Top 20 NYC shows of the year list and while there’s no way we’ll be able to call this year’s anything remotely definitive, this one will be on it.

Concert Review: The Dixie Bee-Liners at Joe’s Pub, NYC 10/27/07

Pinecastle Records’ latest signees played to a full house and dazzled with a passionate, frequently blistering performance. In this era of free music all over the internet, it would be a little extreme to declare them the next million-selling Americana act. But dollars to donuts they’ll be the most downloaded, after word about them gets out: Dixie Chicks, look out, you have competition (that’s a compliment). This was a homecoming of sorts for the Dixie Bee-Liners’ two songwriters and lead singers, mandolinist Buddy Woodward and guitarist Brandi Hart.

They’ve added bandmates from their new home state of Virginia, the most impressive one being a terrific dobro player, in addition to a banjoist with a striking likeness to character actor Ray Wise (it was hard to resist hollering from the audience, “Did you really kill Laura Palmer?”) and a violin player who ably supplied high harmonies to Hart’s soaring, full-throated vocals. After opening with a fast, furious instrumental, they followed with Hart’s sly, innuendo-laden trucker anthem Davy, which began life as a throwaway but has since become a big crowd-pleaser. The followed that with a gorgeously sad new one about a soldier killed in battle. It was hard to tell whether the song is a Civil War parable for Iraq, or simply nonspecific, but either way it was heartwrenching to hear Hart sing about how “then the boy was dragged away.”

After another sizzling instrumental, this one driven by the banjo player, they launched into the first single from their forthcoming album, a rousing driving tune called Down On The Crooked Road, set along the 253-mile heritage trail in Virginia that runs through the soil that gave birth to the Stanley Brothers, among a lengthy catalog of bluegrass legends. Then Woodward took over lead vocals and delivered a superbly rousing take of his Civil War anthem Grumble Jones, about a great Confederate general who got his name from his “potty mouth,” as Woodward put it. They followed that with Hart’s classic, haunting Lost in the Silence, a very darkly rustic chronicle of love gone forever, picked up the pace once again with a real fast one (a cover?) and then the show was over. The audience didn’t know what hit them, and before anyone knew it the entire club staff was lugging all the chairs out of the main space and kicking the audience (and band) out into the lobby in order to prepare for some “private party.”

This band is going places. Blessed with not one but two first-class songwriters, each with a uniquely individual voice (tonight Hart played femme fatale to Woodward’s encyclopedically gifted class clown) as well as uniquely individual vocal styles. Since leaving New York, the Dixie Bee-Liners have broadened their stylistical palette beyond the Bible Belt noir that made them so popular while they were here in town, without losing any of their striking intelligence, wit and purist musicality. One hopes they’ll be back on a night when there isn’t a private party scheduled afterward that wipes out what was probably half their set list.

Concert Review: Erica Smith & the 99 Cent Dreams at Banjo Jim’s, NYC 7/9/07

The blonde bombshell – sort of New York’s answer to Neko Case, a master of every retro style she’s ever touched – has really come into her own as a frontwoman and bandleader. Tonight Erica Smith owned this place, every square inch (it’s cozy), blazing through a largely upbeat set of mostly unreleased material. They opened with the beautifully evocative, windswept cityscape 31st Avenue (the opening track on her last album Friend or Foe), lead guitarist Dann Baker taking a gorgeous bent-note solo like the one in Blindspot by That Petrol Emotion (does anyone remember That Petrol Emotion? Dollars to donuts Baker does). They followed that with the unreleased Easy Now, a tasty upbeat Merseybeat melody set to a swinging country groove. The next song, a funk number propelled by a fast, growling bass hook stolen straight out of the Duck Dunn catalog, showed Smith at the peak of her powers as white soul sister, circa 1966 maybe. At the end, the band went into a wild noise jam as drummer Dave Campbell (who,with Baker, propels psychedelic rockers Love Camp 7) went looking for the second stone from the sun, but it was clearly Smith’s soaring soprano that left the crowd silent for several seconds after the song was over.

The next tune was also a new one, an impossibly catchy, bouncy 60s-style Britpop hit possibly titled Firefly, guitars and bass weaving and bobbing, alternating between punchy staccato and smooth legato lines. Smith and band like obscure covers, and tonight they mined the 80s LA new wave scene for Where and When by Blow This Nightclub (who were fronted by filmmaker Dan Sallitt), opening the song with pounding chords and a bassline nicked from the Cure’s Killing an Arab. Then they brought it down with a sultry bossa nova song, picked up the pace again with the scorching, unreleased Neil Young-inflected rocker Jesus’ Clown, kept it up with a practically heavy metal cover of Judy Henske’s Snowblind (with a strikingly quiet, artful solo from Campbell), took it back down with the obscure Livia Hoffman gem Valentine (completely redone as a smoldering torch song, something Smith does extraodinarily well) and closed with the old Sinatra standard One For My Baby. Not as good as the Iggy Pop version, but not bad either.

Cangelosi Cards (the Cangelosi Cards? a reference to the diminutive former Mets outfielder, maybe?) followed, an aptly chosen oldtimey quartet: vocals, guitar, harmonica and upright bass, playing blues and pop hits from the 20s and 30s. The musicians have the songs down cold and the petite, retro-garbed singer showed off a spectacular, girlish upper register that seems to owe a lot to Blossom Dearie. “It’s easy to like this band,” remarked one of the musicians who had just played, and he was right.

CD Review: Matt Keating – Summer Tonight

Nashville gothic from one of the world’s foremost under-the-radar rockers. Typical NYC story: big in Europe, gets rave reviews (usually something akin to “if Elvis Costello still rocked, he’d be Matt Keating“) but in the US he’s still a cult artist with a small if devoted fan base. This album should change that. Well-conceived, well-executed and particularly well-timed, this could be the stealth weapon that puts him all over NPR and gets some big Hollywood movie placements. It’s a hard turn right into Americana, done with good taste and a genuine appreciation for Carter Family meets the Velvet Underground but there’s way more A.P. and Mother Maybelle in here than there is Lou and crew. Crisp fingerstyle acoustic guitar, banjo, upright bass, pedal steel and harmonica serve as the instrumentation. Aptly titled, it’s an album of nocturnes, the perfect backdrop to a murder conspiracy worked out at dusk in midsummer over half-warm bloody marys on a picnic table just off the highway somewhere on the way to Milledgeville.

Curiously, while menace has been Keating’s stock in trade throughout his career, there’s less of it here than on his other albums. The album’s opening track, Who Knew, and then its title track, both feature Keating’s wife, the terrifically talented Emily Spray (who wrote Union Square for Laura Cantrell). Her honeyed, rockabilly-inflected vocals add warmth and depth to the surprisingly upbeat feel of these songs. Trouble returns in a hurry, though, with Waiting for Memories, an achingly bitter midtempo hit that longs for amnesia – or anything that will bring it on – to erase the pain of the past. The album’s high point, No Further South is arguably the best 9/11 eulogy written by any songwriter up to this point. Over a haunting, minor key acoustic guitar melody, Keating perfectly evokes the dread and the surreal feel of the days after the towers were detonated: “Wrote your name in the ashes on that uptown bus/In my nose and my lashes, God have mercy on us.”

Though replete with fire-and-brimstone Biblical imagery, the rest of the album is surprisingly upbeat and hopeful: Keating seems to have made an uneasy truce with the demons which rear their heads throughout his back catalog. The gorgeously rustic Down There, the straight-ahead country ballad Wish I Was Gold (which sounds like a Dolly Parton classic from 1970) and the resigned, contemplative Lord Jesus could all be Sirius radio hits in on their Americana, country and AAA channels (and would all have been big AM hits if this was 1976  – and that’s a compliment). There’s also a bonus cut featuring a duet with Patty Griffin which is the best thing she’s done in years. Highly recommended for fans of Americana-inflected songwriters like Ron Sexsmith and Rhett Miller as wellas fans of potent lyricists like Graham Parker, Richard Thompson and the aforementioned Mr. Costello. And the Carter Family and maybe even the Velvets. Albums are available in stores, at shows and online. For those who might fear that Keating might have gone soft with this one, fear not: his next album will be a rock record and if the tracks he’s played live are any indication, it’ll be as dark as anything else he’s done.