Concert Review: Paula Carino and the Larch at Parkside, NYC 5/22/10

Paula Carino didn’t waste any time dedicating her set to Love Camp 7 and Erica Smith drummer Dave Campbell, whose unexpected death last Wednesday stunned the New York music scene – especially the crew who had come out to the Parkside fresh from a whiskey-fueled memorial get-together a few blocks away. Trying to play a show under these kind of circumstances can be a recipe for disaster – like pretty much everybody else, Carino was a friend of Campbell’s – yet she pulled herself together, delivering a calm, reassuring presence which by the end of her set had brought most of the crowd out of their shells. Which is something the gregarious Campbell would have wanted, being a fan of Carino’s catchy, lyrically dazzling janglerock songs.

Mixing cuts from her devastatingly good new album Open on Sunday with a handful of crowd-pleasers from years past, the high point of the set was the well-chosen Great Depression, a minefield of metaphors set to a characteristically propulsive, apprehensive minor-key melody anchored by a nasty descending progression from lead guitarist Ross Bonadonna. She resurrected a casually snarling old one from the 90s: “I’ve got nine mile legs to get away from you.” Another oldie, Discovering Fire was as tricky and vertiginous as always; on a warm, soaring version of Paleoclimatology, another metaphor-fest, she seemed to make up a new vocal line as she went along. She also did an unfamiliar but ridiculously catchy one that sounded straight out of the Liza Garelik Roure catalog and a brand-new riff-rocker pushed along with gusto from bassist Andy Mattina and drummer Tom Pope.

The Larch were celebrating the release of their latest album Larix Americana, which if this set is any indication, is also one of the year’s best. This clever, witty, 80s-inspired quartet has been a good band for a long time – they are a great one now. Frontman/lead guitarist Ian Roure was on fire, blasting through one supersonic yet remarkably terse solo after another. He’d give it maybe half a verse and then back away, leaving the crowd – particularly the guys on the bleachers in the back – hungry for more. With his wife Liza providing sultry harmonies along with alternately chirpy and atmospheric keyboards, Bonadonna on melodic and propulsive bass and Pope up there for another go-round behind the kit, they blasted through one psychedelic new wave rocker after another. The strikingly assaultive In the Name Of…, with its reverb-drenched acid wash of an outro, might have been the most arresting performance of the entire evening. The funnier, more sardonic numbers – a couple of them about “bad dayjobs,” as Roure put it – hit the spot, particularly the Elvis Costello-inflected Logical Enough, as well as the tongue-in-cheek Inside Hugh, another track from the new album. The rest of the set accentuated the diversity this band is capable of, from the ridiculously hummable, instant hitworthiness of The Strawberry Coast – a summer vacation classic if there ever was one – to the understated scorch of With Love from Region One (a DVD reference and a somewhat sideways but spot-on tribute to all good things American). Speaking of DVDs, somebody videoed this show – the band ought to make one out of it.

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Concert Review: Ian Roure and Liza Garelik and the Larch at Parkside Lounge, NYC 9/4/09

Ian Roure and Liza Garelik are the guitarist and keyboardist in the Larch. They’re also the lead guitarist and frontwoman of Liza & the WonderWheels. His songs are catchy and witty – at the top of his game, he sounds like a ballsier Elvis Costello. Her songs are more riff-oriented but also often hypnotic and psychedelic: her band likes to stretch out. Friday night, most likely because the WonderWheels’ first-rate rhythm section wasn’t available, the two opened the night as a duo playing that band’s songs. Roure and Garelik are a couple, soon to be married and the chemistry extends to the music as well, the two sharing a passion for quirky new wave era pop as well as psychedelia. Those who play together don’t always stay together but a look at how these two play off each other is an auspicious reminder that this particular union is a good one. Their chemistry onstage was electric but playful, the fun the two were having translating viscerally to the crowd. Even with just the two voices and guitars, the tunes were tight and swinging and Roure’s lead guitar was pure magic, alternating between carefree, precise accents and a few of the wild, Richard Lloyd-inflected runs he’s known for. This time out he held back just the right amount so as not to overwhelm the songs. Garelik took advantage of the space to add her best glam-goddess vocals, soaring or cajoling with a devious wink and a triumphant grin. The set included both crowd-pleasers like the anthemic Meet the Animal and Midnight Lightning as well as some excellent new material, including the best song of the night, a long, uncharacteristically haunting, anthemic minor-key masterpiece possibly titled Go Up. It wouldn’t be out of place in the Penelope Houston catalog.

Then they brought up the Larch’s rhythm section and did a fiery set of Roure’s songs, a real thrill ride with all the guitar solos. Like so many New York bands, the Larch are far better known in Europe than they are here: they tour regularly and have some high-profile licensing deals there. Which makes sense, considering that Roure’s wryly cosmopolitan lyricism was honed growing up in the UK – although you’d think that in an ostensibly cosmopolitan town like New York, there’d be more of a place for them. The crowd, many of them A-list musicians themselves, was very into it as Roure led the crew through the tongue-in-cheek genetic engineering cautionary tale Return of the Chimera (which has an equally tongue-in-cheek video), the amusingly caustic Celebrity Gawker and a cleverly sardonic new one, Return of the Long Tail, an anthem for the current depression. Garelik added crystalline harmonies and quirky 80s organ as the rhythm section bounced along, bassist Ross Bonnadonna doing his own impressive version of a vigorously melodic Bruce Thomas style. Then Roure would hit the chorus box or the wah-wah pedal and take the songs to another galaxy.

Four Headliners for the Price of a Beer at the Parkside 11/28/07

It was Freddy’s Bar night at the Parkside. Since Freddy’s is doomed – failing an intervention from some deus ex machina, the encroaching Atlantic Yards luxury condominium/arena monstrosity is scheduled to engulf and demolish the building that houses the venue– several of the bands from what’s left of the scene there have started playing other places. This is the latest. One of the ways you can tell if a scene is real is if bands share musicians, and this crew takes that concept to an extreme. Lead guitarist Ross Bonnadonna played with Paula Carino, Tom Warnick and John Sharples. Sharples himself drummed for Warnick and then fronted his own band at the end of the night. Bassist Andy Mattina also did double duty with Carino and Sharples.

Carino has made a name for herself by writing heartwrenchingly lyrical janglerock songs, but tonight was her fun set. She has a thing for weird time signatures and did four of them in a row: the caustic Rough Guide to You (“Just take me home,” the narrator sighs at the end, exasperated); the crunchy Discovering Fire; the hilariously punk Old People (“Old people must go/Set them all on an ice floe/Make room for the new old people”) and the quirk-rock hit Robots Helping Robots. She and band burned through the rockabilly-inflected yet mournful Saying Grace Before the Movie, a potently metaphorical tale of a woman alone in a theatre in a No Exit situation, knowing the villain always returns. They dusted off her classic, victorious Venus Records (“You’re my alltime favorite lucky find”) and encored with the scorching Coming To Your Senses, one of her most slashing numbers. The crowd was ecstatic: for once, the sound here was excellent, Carino’s vocals like velvet cake with creme de menthe icing. She would prove a very hard act to follow.

But Tom Warnick was up to the challenge. He’s simply one of the most dynamic, effortlessly hilarious frontmen in all of rock. Marcellus Hall is a good comparison: both like their retro styles, have a great sense of melody and an equally sharp sense of humor. Waving a hammer at the audience and pounding his keyboard with it – from the back of the room, it looked like the real thing, not a prop – he gave his completely off-the-wall, stream-of-consciousness songs just enough menace to give the crowd pause. Warnick does the evil-eye thing as well as Johnny Rotten in his prime: it’s never certain whether he’s just goofing around or whether he really means it, and he clearly gets a charge out of messing with his bandmates just as much as he messes with the audience. His best song was a very funny chronicle about playing a gig later on a Monday night at a club where the promoter expected him and the band to bring at least forty people. He closed the song with a brief quote from the Mission Impossible theme.

He and band also ran through the fast, noir City of Women, which dates back to his days as a guitarist, along with a gut-bustingly funny, twisted travelogue through the south and back: “You always hit the bullseye when I go in the donkey tank,” he mused. Since it was Randy Newman’s birthday – “If it wasn’t for Randy Newman I wouldn’t have written a lot of these songs – it’s true,” Warnick told the crowd – they did one of his songs, a 6/8 number where the narrator gets “some whiskey from a barman, some cocaine from a friend” and sinks into something approaching wry despondency.

After Carino and Warnick, the Erica Smith Jazz Odyssey (as Carino playfully called them) should have been anticlimactic to the extreme. But Smith, radiant in a shimmery black dress, grabbed the crowd and they latched on for the ride. She and the band may play mostly rock, but jazz and soul is where her heart and especially her voice are at, and the band gamely played along while she delivered a goosebump-inducing Cry Me a River along with sultry versions of The Very Thought of You, Ain’t Misbehaving and One for My Baby. They also ran through several of her originals, ranging from the bossa nova soul of the soon-to-be-released Tonight, the backbeat-driven 31st Avenue and a practically heavy metal cover of the obscure Judy Henske classic Snowblind (the title of the band’s forthcoming album).

The evening closed with John Sharples, who as he told the audience is “the anti-songwriter” since he doesn’t write his own stuff, opting to cover his friends’ songs. Good taste is his trademark, as he and the band (with Smith playing rhythm guitar and singing harmonies) launched into the excellent, tongue-in-cheek Blow This Nightclub hit When Amy Says, along with a surprisingly good, bluesy, minor-key Dan Killian song and eventually something that sounded like Minor Threat at halfspeed which Smith sat out (just as well, considering how much louder Sharples was than any of the other bands: he’s pretty punk rock). They closed with Smith bringing down the house as usual with a blazing, passionate cover of the old Beatles tune I’ve Got a Feeling. What a treat for everyone who filled the back room here on a weeknight: four headline-quality acts for the price of a beer, arguably the best lineup in any club this year all year.

Concert Review: Love Camp 7 at Parkside Lounge, NYC 6/2/07

The house was full by the time the band went on. There were a couple of tables full of yuppie puppies from Westchester or Connecticut, loud and oblivious as if they were on lunch break at middle school (even if that was ten years ago for them). It took Love Camp 7 about five minutes to clear them out of the room, opening up some space for the cool kids to sit. Love Camp 7 played interludes all night, an endless series of hooks, riffs and intricate guitar figures that rushed by, a whirlwind of beautiful, jangling, twanging, wailing melody. Their songs don’t follow any predictable pattern. Each is a winding back street through a casbah of the mind where every turn could be a dead end but always leads somewhere unexpected. Yet the songs are anything but random. Love Camp’s not-so-secret weapon, in full force tonight, is drummer Dave Campbell, one of the two or three finest in all of rock. He led his bandmates, redoubtable bassist Bruce Hathaway and frontman/guitarist Dann Baker (who also plays with Campbell in Erica Smith’s band the 99 Cent Dreams) through one tricky change after another, through minefields of weird time signatures and abrupt endings. In the end, everybody emerged exhausted but unscathed.

They opened with a couple of jangly numbers, the second being the tongue-in-cheek The Angry Driver with its wickedly catchy, recurrent chorus. They then followed with a few cuts from their forthcoming Beatles album. Each of these songs takes its title from a Beatles record. Like the Rutles or XTC on their Dukes of Stratosphear albums, Love Camp 7 expertly blends in licks and melodies that are either stolen directly from the Fab Four, or bear a very close resemblance. The result works as both homage and satire. While the song cycle begins with Meet the Beatles – which they played tonight, the closest thing to an actual period piece among the songs – the compositions bear a much closer resemblance to the most intricate, psychedelic stuff from the White Album or Abbey Road than any of the Beatles’ early hits.

Revolver began with the chorus, eventually broke down into an interlude and then reverted back. Magical Mystery Tour was set to an odd time signature, with a doublespeed break after the chorus and then a passage right out of I Am the Walrus. The Beatles’ Second Album was the closest thing to a narrative, a wry, invented reminiscence of the era when the record came out.

The rest of the set blended gorgeous, jangling psychedelia with strange, sometimes atonal stop-and-start numbers. Second guitarist Steve Antonakos used one of them to sneak in some completely over the top, Eddie Van Halen-style tapping which was very funny. They encored with the only song from their new, career-best album Sometimes Always Never that they played tonight, Naming Names. Campbell and Baker traded off vocals on this acerbic namecheck of some of the unexpected culprits who narced on their colleagues during the McCarthy hearings. From just this set, it seems as if Love Camp 7 has at least two killer albums worth of material ready for release: a very auspicious event.