(This show preview originally appeared in Cleveland’s Scene magazine.)
Espers’ ornate folk has always sounded like the music of forest nymphs: otherwordly voices hovering over meadows of lacy guitars and moody drones. Soft, quiet, but intense, it acts like an opiate, slipping into the bloodstream and drowning the senses in dreamy reflection.
Singer and guitarist Meg Baird refers to her band’s aesthetic as the “superhuman approach.” It’s something she ditched when recording Dear Companion, her solo debut, released on Drag City last May. “The record has different tonal qualities — more vulnerability, a greater human quality,” explains Baird, taking my call from her home in Philadelphia.
That “human quality” is key. With Espers, Baird’s delicate voice sounds disembodied — “reflections of a shadow,” to quote David Crosby. But on the eight covers and two originals that make up Dear Companion, Baird turns mortal. She’s now an American woman — paying bills, finding her way, and feeling pain along with the rest of us. “Riverhouse in Tinicum,” for example, meditates on a day trip to the Pennsylvania countryside. It’s gorgeous, but “You know you’ll never live there,” she says, laughing at the irony of the high-priced pastoral life.
In person, Baird resembles the kind of folkie babe who’s down for smoking a joint and spinning Zeppelin’s “Going to California.” So it comes as no surprise that of the covers, which are split between traditional folk and modern singer-songwriter fare, she’s most human on the latter, especially the ballad “All I Ever Wanted.”
“It has this kind of sad, New York feeling — almost like a Velvets quality,” she says of the tune, originally written and performed by New Riders of the Purple Sage, who hung out with the Dead in the early ’70s. “It’s a weird East Coast melancholy from a West Coast band.”
Dear Companion, in general, is a fairly sad statement. But it’s also the start of a promising solo career.
On the surface, drawing comparisons between the Motor City Five and Magik Markers seems absurd: The former are proto-punk icons from the Vietnam era; the latter are modern indie upstarts. On the other hand, the two share key strengths and weaknesses. Along with their Detroit idols, the Markers are renowned for cathartic live shows — orgiastic collisions of rock, free jazz, feedback, and sweat. Unfortunately, the duo can’t produce a great rock album, much like their heroes.
Jack Rose’s latest album is deeply patriotic, and I can’t stop spinning the thing. Almost every other night since its release this summer, I’ve cranked the self-titled disc before hitting the hay. It’s kind of like back in the ’70s, when television sent us to bed with an actual music video for “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
Strawberry jam rarely invokes the phrase “totally fucking gross.” But take a gander at the cover art for Animal Collective’s new disc, titled Strawberry Jam. Cranking the yak-factor to 11, it’s a hyper-detailed close-up of battered berry-brains and bloody syrup that transforms the sugary-sweet condiment into something garish and hostile.
Defining rock music as a common language for the American masses is the stuff of fiction, not the people’s actual history, which tells us that rock has always been a fragmented tribe of competing subcultures. But every now and then an album appears that builds a Babel that never existed.
Derek Jackson wants to send a message to anybody who’s thinking of attending the 2007 Ohio Hip-Hop Awards, so he sets down his fork, leans over his Caesar salad, and bellows into my cassette recorder: “Leave your white tees at home, your do-rags, your saggy jeans. This is a black-tie, red-carpet event.” The decree sends Jackson’s OHHA partners — Quincy Taylor, Derrick McKenzie, and Mike Vasquez (aka Garbs Infinite) — into fits of laughter.
Guitar Music From the Western Sahara is one of Sublime Frequencies’ first releases to spotlight the recordings of a single artist. And Group Doueh deserves the global attention.
Like so many indie bands these days, Mystery of Two’s chief inspiration is post-punk and British DIY. But unlike Interpol and the Rapture, the Cleveland trio primarily takes its cues from Ludus and the Desperate Bicycles, not Joy Division and Gang of Four. As you can probably guess, this is a pleasant surprise. Please, America — no more angular funk.
With a frizzy gray mane and a 27-year-old tee from Sabbath’s Dio years, Bill Peters has to bleed pure heavy metal. If I jabbed a fork into this dude’s chest, I’d probably hit copper ribs, iron lungs, and a huge heart made of cobalt.
When rock fans start ranting about Michigan rock, they’re always talking up the Motor City. But since the mid-’80s, Southwest Michigan has maintained a cultish, insular indie scene that has spawned five midwest legends: the Sinatras, the Sleestacks, Twister, Goldstar, and Fortune & Maltese & Phabulous Pallbearers.
