Tag: neil young
Debra Devi's Latest Album: A Feast of Psychedelic Guitar
Psychedelic guitarslinger Debra Devi opens her new album, A Zillion Stars Overhead – streaming at Spotify – with When It Comes Down, her John Coltrane Stereo Blues. If you're a Steve Wynn fan, you get the reference: it might not be her signature song, but it's the big epic jam that everybody screams for at the end of the encores.
This one's the most epic she's released yet (although we can hope for a concert version someday). Devi's multitracks, from gentle acoustic phrases to sunbaked scream, shift through the mix over the slinky rhythm section of bassist Jorgen Carlsson and drummer John Hummel, with a stampeding doublespeed interlude.
She redeems her cover of Neil Young's The Needle and the Damage Done not only with her honeyed, bruised vocals but also by speeding the song up and giving it a plaintive slide guitar solo: freed from its hippie-rock associations, you really hear the cautionary tale.
Just when you think Stay is a twinkly stadium rock anthem, Devi hits her distortion pedal. Damn, this woman shreds. The album also includes an edited version of When It Comes Down as well as Canna Indica, an echoey riff-fest: now what could that one possibly be about?
Devi's playing a rare solo gig on 6 PM on Aug 29 at Molly's House Concerts in Linden, NJ. Cover is $25; email for location/deets and to reserve your spot in the outdoor garden
Purist, Eclectic Psychedelic Tunesmithing and Subtle Humor on Lorraine Leckie's New Album
Lorraine Leckie has been one of the few musicians to survive the devastation of the incredibly fertile rock scene that flourished in New York as late as the mid-zeros. It was a top-down assault on artistic communities. Encouraged by tax breaks, opportunitistic developers took the wrecking ball to working-class housing everywhere, and it wasn't long before the giant sucking sound of an artistic brain- drain out of town ensued. Yet even under those dire circumstances, Leckie's following grew, and the gigs got better and better, probably because she was one of the few still representing a gritty, punk-influenced Lower East Side sound.
But thta's hardly the only sound she's mined since then: her albums range from delicate, rainy-day acoustic songs, to icy, gothic Mitteleuropean art-rock and snarling Americana. Her latest album, Razor Wing Butterfly – streaming at Bandcamp – is her most psychedelic release to date.
Leckie's skeletal, fingerpicked Telecaster explodes into a roar on the chorus in the opening track, Only Darkness, a parallel tale of a couple of noir archetypes seemingly doomed to their own separate worlds. Lead guitarist Hugh Pool channels dirty, evil, Crazy Horse Neil Young, violinist Pavel Cingl adding elegant washes and accents over the chugging rhythm section of Charles DeChants and drummer Keith Robinson
They follow the strutting, Stonesy Under the Vampire Moon with It Ain't the Blues, which Pool introduces with a creepy approximation of a music box. There's clever irony in the title because this is a blues – a vindictive, rampaging one.
Bristling with richly textured guitar multitracks, Genius in the Crowd is a shout-out to Leckie's psychedelic rock pal Anton Newcomb of Brian Jonestown Massacre, her tender lyric contrasting with the guitar fury – and an interlude that's too funny to give away.
Crickets, a stark, open-tuned acoustic ballad, has Britfolk tinges: it could be a John Renbourn or June Tabor song from the 60s spiced with spare electronic keys. The album's funniest track is Mars Bar Baby, a tourists-eye view of one of New York's most legendary dive bars. Again, the joke is too good to give away: if you know the old swing tune Moon Over Brooklyn, you'll get it.
The Other Woman Is the Wind was inspired by a conversation Leckie had with a biker at the Sturgis motorcycle festival, a slow, swaying, Molly Hatchet-ish account of a guy addicted to the thrill of the raod.
Leckie follows with the album's two best cuts, each of them a protest song. She wrote America Weeping in a rehearsal room with the band in the wake of the fateful 2016 Presidential election. It's both a requiem for Leonard Cohen (a huge influence, who had died the night before) and an anguished cauldron of guitars. The title track perfectly captures the fury in the streets this summer, a growling yet hopeful anthem, Cingl contributing a tantalizingly brief, slashing coda.
Leckie switches to piano, slightly out of tune and awash in reverb, to wind up the album counterintuitively with the pensive vignette Why Oh Why. This album is probably the best introduction to Leckie's music that exists so far. And for anyone who's followed her regular Manhattan weekend residencies over the years, friom Banjo Jim's, to Zirzamin and afterward, Leckie's already substantial back catalog is dwarfed by the vast amount of material she's written but hasn't yet recorded: it's reason to look forward to whatever this defiantly multistylistic tunesmith decides to put out next.
Allegra Levy Brings Her Nocturnal Reinventions to Birdland
Allegra Levy is the rare more-or-less straight-ahead jazz singer who writes her own material. It's very good. Her latest album Looking at the Moon – streaming at youtube – is a departure for her, both musically and contentwise. It's all covers, and the arrangements are especially intimate. What's consistent with her previous albums is that this is a song cycle. It's a bunch of tunes about the moon, and Levy's vocals match the eclecticism of the selections. She's playing Birdland tomorrow night, May 15 at 7 PM; you can get in for twenty bucks, a real steal at that joint.
The biggest shocker on the album turns out to be the best track: Nick Drake's iconic Pink Moon reinvented as a duet with Tim Norton's balletesque bass. The lingering dread in Levy's delivery is only slightly more direct than the original. And Neil Young's Harvest Moon turns out to be an apt vehicle for Levy's minutely nuanced, somewhat misty vocals: this is her most Karrin Allyson-esque record. The comet trail from guitarist Alex Goodman as Levy eases into the third verse is sublime. Beyond those two numbers, most of the songs are familiar standards, although Levy's approach is hardly conventional.
Her longtime collaborator, the brilliant pianist Carmen Staaf edges toward phantasmagoria with her steady, roller rink-tinged piano throughout their take of Moon River, the nocturnal suspense enhanced by the absence of drums: that's just Norton in back. I've Got the Sun in the Morning (And the Moon at Night) is a tentatively content quartet piece, Goodman adding a purist solo after a jaunty, bluesy one from Staaf.
Blue Moon gets a playful, rather pointillistic treatment that brings to mind Sofia Rei, especially as the band edge their way toward bossa nova. The mutedly dancing Vegas noir of Moon Ray looks back to the Nancy King version, while Moonlight in Vermont sounds nothing like Margaret Whiting: that one's a hushed, spare duet with Goodman.
A low-key Moonglow is the least individualistic of the tracks here, although Norton's minimalistic solo is tasty. By contrast, Levy really nails the coy humor in Polka Dots and Moonbeams: it's a treat to hear Staaf's starry righthand throughout the album, particularly on this track. No Moon at All has simmer, and distant unease, and sotto-voce joy: it brings to mind Champian Fulton in a rare hushed moment.
It's Only a Paper Moon is the album's funniest track: it's an unusually fast song for the somewhat ironically named bandleader. And I'll Be Seeing You is on the record since the last line begins with "I'll be looking at the moon" – and because Steeplechase Records honcho Nils Winther wanted it. The only miss here is an attempt to salvage a morbidly cloying AM radio hit by a 70s folksinger who went by Yusuf Islam for a time, and supported the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. A fascist nutjob by any other name is still a fascist nutjob.
Father John Misty's First Live Album Is As Bleakly Funny As You Could Want
Said it before, time to say it again: more artists should make live albums. Studio, schmudio! If you're Father John Misty, all you need is a mic, a guitar and a DI straight into the board. Rip the file to a thumb drive: instant album! Cost? Nothing. His vocals, guitar, uneasy tunes, gallows humor and withering cynicism are in first-class shape on his new album Live at Third Man Records, which strangely hasn't hit Spotify yet, although it is available on vinyl. It's today's Halloween month installment
The first track is an aching take of I Love You Honeybear:
…on the Rorschach sheets where we make love…
You're the one i want to go down with…
Unless we're getting high on a mattress while the global market crashes
Meanwhile, the "misanthropes next door" are terrified that their neighbors are about to sire a Damien.
The surreal early Dylan influence – on the music and the lyrics, fortuituously, but not the vocals – really comes out in the solo acoustic take of I'm Writing a Novel. In the good Father's alternate universe, Sartre and Heidegger join him in his trailer to share a pot of opium tea.
Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings is pretty much what any decent tunesmith might write after "Retracing the expanse of your American back with Adderall and weed in my veins," as he relates to the nameless girl.
Chateau Lobby 4 (In C for 2 Virgins) is even more twistedly funny, newlyweds in a wee hours scenario: "So bourgeoisie to keep waiting, date for 21 years seems pretty civilian," the guy tells his bride who "left early to go cheat your way through film school."
This take of So I'm Growing Old on Magic Mountain is could be the great lost mid-70s co-write between Leonard Cohen and Neil Young. Everybody stays silent til the end through the endless deadpan litany of evils in Holy Shit:
Age-old gender roles
The golden era of tv
Eunuch sluts
Consumer slaves
A rose by another other name…
This intimate set closes with a concise version of Everyman Needs a Companion: Father John's riffing on a bromance between Jesus and John the Baptist is pretty classic. The next Father John Misty show is in the UK at Portsmouth Guildhall in Portsmouth on Oct 28 at around 7:30 PM; cover is £29.25.
State-of-the-Art Americana Jamband Rock to Close Out This Year's Lincoln Center Out of Doors Festival
Margo Price dropped a bombshell at Lincoln Center a couple nights ago. Taking her only turn of the evening at the piano for the Lennonesque ballad All American Made, she recalled how by 1987, the world had discovered that "Reagan was selling weapons to the leaders of Iran." To any student of American history, the October Surprise and the Iran-Contra affair are old news. But for a self-described Midwest farmer's daughter to mention the ugly truth about that President – who despite every shred of evidence remains a hero throughout parts of that world – it was a radical move.
As the song goes, it wasn't the first time something like that has happened, and it won't be the last. And the current blitzkrieg against immigrants makes her want to run for the border. That was Price's only unvarnished political song in a set of high quality, deep-fried southern jamband rock. Unsurprisingly, it was also the number that drew the loudest roars of appreciation from a crowd who'd braved the threat of a torrential downpour to come out to see her.
Price's music seems to be contrived to appeal to every single potential audience member on the summer festival circuit. As a fierce frontwoman with a big wail that with a few nuanced tweaks works equally well in classic honkytonk, 60s soul and bluesy rock, Price delivers for the ladies. The six hairy dudes working up a sweat behind her seem like they'd be just as much at home in many other styles beyond choogilng four-on-the-floor rock. The best and most epic of the big psychedelic numbers, Cocaine Cowboy, featured long interludes for Jamie Davis' stinging electric blues guitar, Luke Schneider's searing, noisy pedal steel and the night's most nebulous break, where keyboardist Micah Hulscher abandoned his judicious Rhodes chords for swirls and dips of string synth straight out of the early Genesis playbook – to the point where band members were exchanging "where the hell are we" grins with each other.
Price went behind a second drumkit for that one. She knows what she's doing back there, and she flurried up a storm when she played acoustic guitar – which she did throughout the majority of a long set. She stayed behind that kit for the song after that, a wryly undulating take of the Grateful Dead's Casey Jones, which the band ended with an irresistibly amusing stampede out. It never hurts to know your subject matter.
The rest of the show ranged from careening electric honkytonk numbers like Paper Cowboy and Put a Hurting on the Bottle – with spot-on detours into George Jones and Willie Nelson classics – along with a defiant,snarlingly amped oldschool C&W breakup ballad. The covers were a mixed bag: the band found soul-infused redemption for Tom Petty but could not do the same for Melanie Safka or Dolly Parton's disco era. Throughout the night, individual band members kept solos short and sweet, often trading off, up to mighty peaks or descents toward suspense. Most of the crowd who'd stuck around gathered down at the front; at the end of the show, Price rewarded them by flinging roses from a big bouquet into the crowd, one by one.
Lukas Nelson & Promise of the Real were a hard act to follow. It's hardly an overstatement to rank Nelson alongside fellow Texas blues greats like Stevie Ray Vaughn and Freddie King. Yet Nelson kept his guitar solos much more concise than either of those two hotheads – maybe because he'd learned that trick playing with another great Texas guitarslinger, his dad Willie. This band is excellent: bassist Corey McCormick was a spring-loaded presence throughout the set and made his one long solo count, hard. Drummer Anthony LoGerfo swung like crazy alongside conguero Tato Melgar, and organist/pianist Jesse Siebenberg doubled on second guitar and lapsteel as well.
They opened with the spaciest number of the night, a multi-part epic about aliens that veered from post Neil Young electric intensity to echoes of Pink Floyd during a long, starry interlude. From there they blended oldschool soul, Texas shuffles and stark red dirt folk with a surreal humor that brought to mind Nelson's famous dad as much as the vocals did. Yet Lukas Nelson's voice is a lot bigger, even if he has that signature twang.
They brought the lights down for a pensive, solo acoustic take of Just Outside of Austin?and then what seemed like a rewrite of Gentle on My Mind – the younger Nelson clearly has just as much of a thing for classic Nashville songwriting as his dad. After a slight return to Led Zep-influenced riff-rock, Nelson encored with a brand-new acoustic number where he resolved to "turn off the news and build a garden." Clearly, Price wasn't the only populist on this bill.
Lincoln Center Out of Doors may be done for 2018, but there's the annual Brooklyn Americana Festival, taking place all over Dumbo Sept 20-23, to look forward to.
Another Clinic in Searing Lead Guitar and a Williamsburg Show From the Great Eric Ambel
Eric Ambel is an artist who ought to be playing record stores – because he makes vinyl records. Spectacularly good ones. His most recent studio album, Lakeside, sent a ferocious, guitar-fueled shout out to his beloved East Village club, Lakeside Lounge, forced out of business in 2014 in a blitzkrieg of gentrification. His latest record, Roscoe Live, Vol. 1 – streaming at Bandcamp – captures him in his element, onstage at a summer festival in upstate New York in 2016. The backing band is obviously psyched for this gig: alongside Ambel, there's Spanking Charlene's Mo Goldner on rhythm guitar, Ambel's old Yayhoos bandmate Keith Christopher on bass and Phil Cimino on drums. Ambel's playing an unlikely early weekday show tomorrow, Feb 6 at 8:30 PM at Rough Trade; cover is $10.
Ambel has a vast bag of hot licks, but most of them are his own. If you asked him to play like Neil Young, or Buck Owens, or Ron Asheton, or David Rawlings, he would, but he'd rather be himself. And although he's a connoisseur of every possible sound you can get out of a guitar amp, he's got a noisy side too. There's pretty much all of that on the live record.
Just the way that he edges his way into the set's opening number, jabbing around the harmonies of the first chord of the brisk shuffle Girl That I Ain't Got is typical. As are the nasty, string-stretching first solo and a tantalizingly slashing second one. Here Come My Love, by his Del-Lords bandmate Scott Kempner, comes across as an amped up Jimmy Reed number. The blend of the two guitars is especially tasty; Ambel's solo out is unexpectedly carefree and chill.
Hey Mr. DJ, a sarcastic dig at the kind of clown who'd pay a cover charge to hear some other clown plug his phone into the PA, is a co-write with the Squirrel Nut Zippers' Jimbo Mathus and one of several tracks from the Lakeside album. Over the slow, slinky beat and a buzzsaw backdrop, Ambel turns the sarcasm loose: "Crank the drums, crank the bass, crank that shit all over the place."
The slow waves of the warped blues Don't Make Me Break You Down keep the smokering intenstiy going, through lingering phrases that Ambel takes into the grimy depths, then up again.
"Just to show you I'm not anti-cisco, I have a disco song," Ambel tells the crowd, then launches in to the strutting Have Mercy, which is actually more of a simmering take on vampy early 70s psychedelic soul.
The band follow Let's Play With Fire, a shuffling mashup of honkytonk and Lynchian Nahville pop with a slowly crescendoing take of the David Rawlings/Gillian Welch hit Look at Miss Ohio, a staple of Ambel's live show back in Lakeside's glory days in the 90s and zeros.
Massive Confusion, the loudest track on the Lakeside recod, is a more swinging take on a familiar Ramones formula. Ambel then closes the show with two of his best songs. Buyback Blues, the centerpiece of the Lakeside record, is a slow, evil rollercoaster in a Cortez the Killer vein. The night's last number is Total Destruction to Your Mind, the Stonesy Swamp Dogg cover that was Ambel's signature song as a solo artist for years. For anybody who got to hear Ambel blast his way through this one back in the Lakeside days, Christopher making his way up the fretboard as the chorus kicks in, it's a real shot of adrenaline. How long do we have to wait until the real estate bubble finally bursts so somebody can open up a place like Lakeside, with cheap beer and great bands every night? The closest thing we have to that in New York these days, Barbes, won't last forever,
Eric Ambel Brings His Expert, Purist Tunesmithing and Sizzling Lead Guitar Back to Brooklyn
If a clinic in spine-tingling, dynamic. expert lead guitar is your thing, you could spend hundreds of dollars and make Ticketbastard rich and go see Richard Thompson at a place like City Winery. Or you could go see Eric Ambel and his band for free this Saturday night at 9 upstairs at Hill Country Brooklyn. The Brooklyn branch of the bbq franchise is 180 degrees the opposite of the Manhattan location. The staff are friendly and seem happy to be there, the crowd is local and multicultural, and while they don't nceessarily come to listen, a lot of them do. That way, the band doesn't have to try to drown out the touristy din like they do in Manhattan. And the Brooklyn branch's sound system is better, too.
Ambel has been on tour this summer with his band – Brett Bass on bass, Phil Cimino on drums and Spanking Charlene's Mo Goldner on second guitar – so they should be stoked to be back on their home turf. Ambel's most recent New York show was here on this same stage at the end of June, and it was amazing, one of the year's best. Switching between his custom Telecaster and Les Paul, "Roscoe" delivered searing, string-bending intensity, judicious jangle and clang, choogling four-on-the-floor grooves, a couple of stomping detours toward punk rock, even some plaintive wee-hour C&W. All that in two sets, about two hours of music where the band finally ran out of rehearsed material and blasted through a couple of old R&B covers to close the night.
There were so many high-voltage moments, it's impossible to separate one from the rest. The band opened the second set with a searing take of Song for the Walls, the first track on Ambel's second solo album, Loud & Lonesome, part psychedelic Beatles, part acidic Kevin Salem rock. Lou Whitney's defiant Thirty Days in the Workhouse ("If I'd been a black man, they'd have given me thirty years") resonated especially with this audience. There was roadhouse rock like Scott Kempner's Here Come My Love. country-flavored material like Jimbo Mathus' Let's Play with Fire, and a couple of snarling, Ramones-influenced numbers, the best of them being the snide Hey Mr. DJ. Introducing that one, Ambel told a hilarious story about the first time he saw the Ramones, as an eighteen-year-old party animal in Illinois. That story's too good to give away here.
Spanking Charlene frontwoman Charlene McPherson came up to duet on a swampy take of Have Mercy, which she co-wrote with Ambel. Mary Lee Kortes – Ambel's wife and an equally skilled tunesmith, whose long-awaited forthcoming full-length album The Songs of Beulah Rowley is awe-inspiring – lent her crystalline voice to a couple of numbers too. The night's longest and most darkly simmering epic, Buyback Blues – a bittersweet look back at Ambel's well-loved and dearly missed East Village venue, Lakeside Lounge – was as good as anything Neil Young & Crazy Horse could come up with. If memory serves right, the band ran through just about everything from Ambel's latest solo album, also titled Lakeside.
Later in the second set Ambel entertained the crowd with his funniest song, I Love You Baby – if you don't know it, the lyrics are also too funny to give away here. The show this Saturday night should be something like this, who knows, maybe even better. If we get lucky they'll play Garbagehead, the ultimate Lakeside Lounge Saturday night party anthem.
Texas Art-Rock Jamband and Neil Young Collaborators Lukas Nelson & Promise of the Real in Williamsburg Tonight
If the idea of blowing off work or school today to wait for hours in the suddenly scorching sun for this evening's free MOMA Summergarden event – where the new Neil Young album is being premiered over the PA at 6 out behind the museum – doesn't appeal to you, there's a relatively inexpensive alternative tonight at Brooklyn Bowl where Lukas Nelson & Promise of the Real, who back Young on the record, are playing their own stuff at around 9. Cover is a reasonable $15. That a band that packs stadiums coast to coast hasn't sold out this comparatively smaller venue testifies to something really troubling as far as live music in New York is concerned.
The group's latest album Something Real is streaming at Spotify. The opening track, Surprise, is exactly that, kicking off with a wry Pink Floyd quote and then hitting a bluesy metal sway over an altered version of the hook from Sabbath's Paranoid .Then they make a doublespeed Blue Oyster Cult boogie of sorts out of it. The title track is a straight-up boogie: "I got tired of trying to please everybody…you're just a name in a picture frame," the bandleader rails, then bassist Corey McCormick, percussionist Tato Melgar and drummer Anthony LoGerfo take it down for a searing, blues-infused solo. These guys don't coast on their bloodlines: Lukas and Micah Nelson play like they really listened to their dad…at his loudest.
Set Me Down on a Cloud has a pretty straight-up, growling Neil-style country-rock sway. Don't Want to Fly has a similar groove, a dark stoner blues gem that David Gilmour would probably love to have written. Ugly Color is an unlikely successful, epic mashup of Santana slink, Another Brick in the Wall art-pop and BoDeans highway rock. Speaking of the BoDeans, the ballad Georgia is a tensely low-key ringer for something from that band circa 1995.
This brother outfit goes back to boogie blues with the strutting I'll Make Love to You Any Ol' Time. Then they blast through Everything Is Fake in a swirling hailstorm of tremolo-picking. The album winds up with an amped-up cover of Scott McKenzie's famous 1967 janglepop hit San Francisco, Neil Young cameo included. It's sad how so few children of noteworthy rock musicians have lived up to their parents' greatness – on the other hand, it's heartwarming to see these guys join the ranks of Amy Allison (daughter of Mose), the Wallflowers' Jakob Dylan and Sean Lennon. And these guys rock a lot harder than all of them.
Eric Ambel's New Lakeside Record Captures the Guitarmeister at the Top of His Game
Eric Ambel is well known in Americana rock circles and something of a legend in New York. He's played with everybody. He did a lengthy stint as Steve Earle's lead guitarist back in the zeros. Before that he fronted the influential Del-Lords. For more than a decade, he ran the East Village's coolest bar and music venue, Lakeside Lounge. And he continues to produce artists at his Williamsburg studio, Cowboy Technical Services.
He's also got a new album, also called Lakeside, a fond over-the-shoulder look at the kind of edgy, purist retro sounds that could be found onstage during his old venue's heyday. Interestingly, rather than producing this himself like his other solo albums, Ambel brought in Jimbo Mathus. formerly with the Squirrel Nut Zippers, who also contributes guitar and bass – and drums on one track. The result is a gatefold vinyl album (that comes with a couple of download cards), available in a limited edition of 500 copies, signed and numbered. This is one of those records you'll probably want to tape and then play the caasette til it self-destructs. Seriously – if you own a turntable, you probably own a tape deck too.
Ambel's longtime rhythm section, bassist Keith Christopher and drummer Phil Cimino show up on most of these tracks. As dirty and messy as Ambel can get, there's a level of craft in what he does that's rarely seen these days. That isn't to say that there aren't guys dedicatedly spending hours hunched over their laptops trying to get the right sound or the right mix, just that Ambel does it with quality gear. And while he's known first and foremost as a guitarist, he really hit the vocals out of the park here. Other guys get old and reedy and raspy; Ambel sounds about 25, full of piss and vinegar.
The opening track is Ambel's old Del-Lords bandmate Scott Kempner's Here Come My Love. It's a ba-bump roadhouse rock number with that band's signature sardonic, surreal sense of humor and a tasty acoustic/electric backdrop. Mathus' first number, Hey Mr. DJ is a sludgy, coldly amusing look at groupthink among the entitled sons and daughters of the idle classes on the demand side of the current plague of gentrification.
Have Mercy, a co-write with Spanking Charlene frontwoman Charlene McPherson, revisits that theme, an update on Creedence swamp rock with plenty of Ambel's signature, offhandedly savage riffage. Let's Play with Fire, another Mathus number, mashes up shuffling C&W and Orbison noir, with an absolutely Lynchian lapsteel solo by the bandleader. Side 1 concludes with Don't Make Me Break You Down, an Ambel/Mathus co-write with a glowering Neil Young/Crazy Horse vibe.
Side 2 opens with the Ramones-tinged Massive Confusion, a Mathus tune. Gillian Welch's Look At Miss Ohio, which always seemed to pop up somewhere during Ambel's shows on his old East Village turf, gets a lingering, nocturnal Sticky Fingers treatment that builds to a mighty psychedelic peak. Ambel does the old soul hit Money as a haphazardly prowling Neil/Crazy Horse burner. The album's best track is the slow, brooding minor-key Buyback Blues, drenched in an ocean of reverb and guitar multitracks."It takes a special kind of understanding for a man to live in the nighttime," Ambel sings dryly and knowingly. The record winds up with Ambel's twangy, bittersweet, distantly Lynchian instrumental Crying in My Sleep.
Is this Ambel's best solo record? It's definitely as good as any of the other three. From the perspective of having caught the cult classic Roscoe's Gang album back in the day when every bar in what used to be a happening neighborhood was playing it, it's hard to tackle that question with any real objectivity. Ambel's next show is at Berlin (in the basement space under 2A; enter through the door on the right, midway down the bar on the first floor) on April 29.
A Gorgeously Jangly Paisley Underground Rock Masterpiece from Girls on Grass
The first thing that hits you right off the bat about Girls on Grass' debut album – streaming at Bandcamp – is the guitars. Two Telecasters, one in the left channel, one in the right, with multitracks in various places. Barbara Endes and Sean Eden's playing is judicious, wickedly smart, purist and catchy as hell. There's fifty years of Americana and tasteful, jangly rock in those matter-of-factly measured changes, and long crescendos, and solos that could go on for twice as long and you'd still want more. Girls on Grass know to always leave you wanting something else.
Girls on Grass play what was called "paisley underground" back in the 80s. Blending the twang of Bakersfield country, the insistent chordal pulse of the Velvet Underground and the electric blaze of Neil Young & Crazy Horse, bands like Steve Wynn's Dream Syndicate, True West and Green on Red earned a devoted fan base on college radio and in sweaty clubs across the country, and, soon after, around the world. Girls on Grass work that turf with a tightness and tersely imaginative ferocity that would have made them stars in that demimonde. Who knows, if we're lucky other bands will hear them and we'll get a paisley underground revival. They're playing February 19 at Matchless in Williamsburg at 10 PM; cover is $10
The album's opening track, Father Says Why is a plainspoken young rocker's escape anthem with a spiraling, hair-raising solo filled with eerie bends over a a tight rhythm section. Too Pretty bounces along on an altered Bo Diddley beat before it straightens out at the chorus, Endes' narrator broke and brooding over a girl she's got a crush on…but that girl's from New York, and gorgeous, and probably out of reach.
What They Wrought looks at the sheer force it takes to build a city…and that the talent and energy that went into building this one will probably never be repeated. The clanging, spiraling solos and contrast between the guitars in each channel has a similar craft and majesty. The band slows it down a little with Fair, a swaying C&W ballad: "I'll take what comfort I can get, real or imagined," the sad girl in the story admits.
Drowning in Ego opens and closes with a scampering Tex-Mex flair over drummer Nancy Polstein's hard-hitting 2/4 stomp and another searing guitar solo midway through. The vindictive When the Pleasure Ends is a dead ringer for the Dream Syndicate (with a woman out front); the way the unhinged lead line slowly pulls away from the center is nothing short of delicious. The twin solo after that's as tasty as it is intricate, too.
Pissin' Down a Road starts off as a chain gang song and then hits a gorgeously hypnotic post-Velvets groove, spiced with lingering guitar flickers; it doesn't even change chords til the turnaround into the second chorus. The way the second guitar echoes the first is an especially neat trick. The nonchalantly savage Return to Earth is another Dream Syndicate soundalike with its multi-channeled jangle and clang, Dave Mandl's bass finally bubbling over the roar and crash as the song winds up to a mighty peak.
Karen Waltuch's spare viola enhances the country sway of How Does It Feel. Dave We Love You sends a brisk electric bluegrass shout-out to a guy who "carries twenty film critic books under his arm….someday you'll teach at NYU." The final track, with its hints of Hendrix and gospel, is the 6/8 ballad One of the Guys, a fond nod back at someone who was a needed, steadying influence on a rugged individualist during her confused adolescence. There hasn't been an album in this style of music this good since another band with girls in their name, Girls Guns & Glory, put out theirs in 2014. Like that one a couple of years ago, this is an early contender for best rock record of 2016.