Top Stories Washington DC

Somewhere in the desert between the sun-bleached instrumentation of Calexico and the gauzy California rhythms of the Morning Benders is the musical territory inhabited by The Dodos. This San Francisco duo has produced some of indie’s prettiest harmonies on their 2007 release Visiter and its 2009 follow-up Time to Die. I haven’t had a chance to wade into the tracks on No Color, which was released in March, but I’ll gladly do so soon. This is the closing track from that album. The Dodos will be at the 9:30 Club, with Gauntlet Hair opening, on Sunday, June 12.

Some people, mostly men, like to refer to prostitution as the world’s oldest profession, but surely the storyteller practices just as ancient a craft. As the cave paintings of Lascaux and the rock paintings of Tsodilo attest, storytelling is deeply ingrained in human culture. Despite the proliferation of iPods and Xboxes and Nooks, there are still storytellers who tell their tales much as Homer did, with nothing more than a voice, a story, and some simple musical accompaniment, and Todd Snider is one of them.

A self-proclaimed “stoner folk musician,” Todd Snider roams the country delighting audiences with his funny and poignant stories punctuated by simple guitar picking and a few plaintive bars from a harmonica. Looking like a scarecrow in a battered felt homburg and a buttoned up vest, he kept his audience rapt for an hour and a half at The Birchmere on Wednesday night. Starting with the simple ballad “I Can’t Complain,” a quintessential American folk tune of the little guy who can’t win but doesn’t let that break his heart, he proceeded to take his audience all over this great land of ours, from his hometown of Beaverton, Oregon, in “Rose City,” to his current neighborhood of East Nashville in “From a Rooftop.” We sat shotgun with him on a road trip from Tahoe to Reno in “45 Miles” and met the denizens of a trailer park in in Anywhere, USA, in “Double-Wide Blues.”

Wandering the backroads and byways of American history, we paid homage to folk hero “D.B. Cooper,” pondered the vagaries of fame and fortune of America’s greatest music legends in “Alcohol and Pills,” celebrated the legend of the railroads with “Play a Train Song,” and examined the distinguishing characteristics of two of America’s demographic groups, evangelists and hippies, in “Conservative, Christian, Right Wing, Straight, White American Male.” When he ran out of the songs that he needed to “get off his chest,” which included a delightful, if sadly insincere, dissing of Bob Dylan as a preamble to “Keep Off the Grass,” he took requests from the audience, every one of whom seemed to have a treasured song they wanted to hear from his impressive backlist of songs.

No matter that he maybe told the same stories as he did last time he was in town, the storyteller’s job is to entertain by telling us the stories that we already know, but never tire of. It is testament to Todd Snider’s masterful abilities that he can repeat them over and over to the everlasting delight of his audience, once again bringing us close to tears with the story of a kid from the ghetto on the run from the law in “The Devil You Know,” or doubling us over with laughter with a tale of frat boys on a “Beer Run.” To bring the evening to a close, he played the classic, “Runaround Sue.” “Here’s the moral and the story from the guy who knows,” he sang as the audience howled along. He sure does know, and he sure can tell it.

*Thanks to Alice Stephens for contributing this review*

Photo: Legdog / Flickr

Plato wrote that music was the “movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue”. Having not participated in the “prog rock” scene in nearly two decades, I had no expectation of what the band Blackfield had in store for me at the 9:30 Club last night. Despite having ventured nothing, I couldn’t help but think that I gained something listening to a band that has built a steady and loyal following with little in the way of press coverage.

Blackfield is the collaboration behind Porcupine Tree frontman Steven Wilson and Israeli singer Aviv Geffen. The former is better known for producing albums consisting of long-form movements in odd time signatures; the latter for being a conscientious objector to mandatory service in the Israeli Defense Force and a witness to the assassination of the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Together, they produce a sound that, by virtue of their collaboration, defies easy categorization.

Wilson comes across like a proletarian version of Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus; Geffen a more energetic vocal analog to Placebo’s Brian Molko. Their songs are tightly constructed pop nuggets, often tinged with melancholy, defiant in the face of daunting odds and societal expectations. Their sound veers toward hard rock, but then abruptly leaves the bombast behind and delves into the sublime. Their strongest numbers feature the densely layered harmonies of Wilson and Geffen with the support of bassist Seffy Efrati and keyboardist Eran Mitelman.

Plato also described music as a “moral law”, one that gave “soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination”. Wilson occupies a niche as a prolific if under-appreciated artist with a yeomanlike body of work, both solo and with the various groups to which he belongs. Geffen is an icon of the Israeli peace movement, his fame and his fate inextricably tied to an unwanted externality. Given all this, perhaps it isn’t that strange of a notion that these two men, born of very different worlds, would have found a way to bend genres and make music somehow more than the simple sum of its parts.

Former Metro-area indie-poppers Jukebox the Ghost return to DC this Saturday, April 23rd, at the Black Cat. Yeah, the band is made up of three guys, but they’re not the typical “power trio” line-up, having ditched the usual bass for a piano. And it works quite nicely, thank you very much. Their newest album, Everything Under the Sun, is a remarkably catchy slice of herky-jerky piano pop, and they’re is able to deftly shift between bouncy rave-ups (“The Popular Thing”) and sweeping grandiosity (“So Let Us Create”) without losing a sense of melody and hooks.

Singer/songwriter Robert Francis was an unexpected surprise last night, opening up for KT Tunstall. He took the stage by himself, looking pretty scraggly, wearing a shirt that looked like it’d been on his back for five days straight. But no matter, as soon as he started playing, that was forgotten. Even with just a guitar, his songs packed an intimate emotional punch, kind of like Joseph Arthur, and his raspy voice was able to soar or dive into grittiness, depending on what was needed.

I’d never heard of him before, but apparently he does a lot of touring in Europe, and he does pretty well there. “I’ve got, like, a number one hit in France, but when I come home I sleep on my parents’ floor,” he said. “They’ve painted my room pink…And filled it with stuffed animals.”

Amos Lee was at his best last Wednesday night at the 9:30 Club, where he played a full hour and a half set of new songs from his recent release, Mission Bell, as well as several well-loved older tunes that helped launch the singer/songwriter’s career.

Lee was surprisingly well-suited to the venue, which tends to lend itself more to harder rock and dance music (Girl Talk’s show was a sensation here a few months back). But from the sweet-singing opening act, the Secret Sisters, to Lee’s mellow yet soulful on-stage vibe, the openness and high volume packed in the club resulted in a friendly, feel-good atmosphere.

Starting things off with a relaxed track from “Mission Bell” called “El Camino,” Lee performed an impeccably crafted, dynamic set. There were ups; the bluesy “Jesus” made particularly good use of the two backup singers to create a full, punchy sound with a kick, and the crowd-pleaser “Sweet Pea” brightened even the dark walls of the 9:30 Club.

Lee struck a quieter, more melancholy note with his best known tune, “Keep It Loose, Keep It Tight,” and a hint of bluegrass with “Clear Blue Eyes,” which the harmonizing Secret Sisters sang, filling in for Lucinda Williams, who sings the duet on “Mission Bell.” Other songs included “Violin,” “Bottom of the Barrel,” “Black River” and “Cup of Sorrow,” again with a mix mostly of songs from Mission Bell and the artist’s first album, Keep It Loose, Keep It Tight.

Lee’s voice was undoubtedly the star of the show. Gruff and raspy at points and clear as a bell at others, his vocals jumped out in a way that gets muffled in the recordings. Part of this was undoubtedly a product of the spontaneous nature of a live show. But Lee’s improvisations were spot-on, actually improving the experience of his music (not always the case when you grow to like a particular track on an album).

His band, while clearly comprised of strong players, lacked chemistry. For the most part, the song arrangements were simple and precise, leaving little room for spontaneity. The musicians came across as a strong studio band, playing exactly what was written on the page and adding little else by way of personality or finesse to keep the audience interested. In fact, Lee’s acoustic set hit home the relative superfluity of the band.

While that was Lee’s last date in D.C. for awhile, he does come to Richmond, Virginia and Baltimore in May. All in all, the show framed Lee’s talents nicely and allowed fans plenty of opportunity to enjoy his bluesy songs and rich voice.

Rock and roll will never die, according to some hoary old dude. But it is in danger of stagnating. Luckily, the Felice Brothers are working hard to resurrect the thrill. An anomaly in an age where contemporary rock bands trend towards heavy reliance on computer assistance for compositions that sound better on an iPod than they do live, the Felice Brothers’ studio work does not convey the majesty of their musicianship and the power of their exuberant, complicated, soulful songs. But that may be about to change if the single “Ponzi,” with a much heavier production style that lends it the drama and power typical of their live shows, is at all representative of their upcoming album to be released on May 10.

These boys will never fill an arena, but they don’t fucking care–their calling is to play music, the music must spew forth, like the magma of a volcano. Still, it must be wearing to flay yourself endlessly (they were last in DC about 6 months ago), squeezed onto a tiny stage playing for an audience that can never give back to you what you give to them. In his only attempt to engage with the crowd, singer and guitarist Ian Felice tried to get the crowd excited about their new release “Celebration, Florida,” but quickly gave up, sneering, “Aw, you guys don’t give a fuck.”

Nevertheless, the band held nothing back in a hefty hour and a half set, which included many songs from the new album. Clearly, they enjoy what they do, with James Felice, accordion player and vocalist, at one point inhaling deeply and announcing with satisfaction, “It smells like a rock club in here.” Despite the cramped stage (the fiddler, Greg Farley, was in constant danger of whacking his head on a duct) and a crowd that, while very enthusiastic, was also strangely intent on holding conversations during the quieter or less familiar songs (do you really have so much wisdom to impart that you have to shout it into your friends’ ears while a bunch of guys are playing their guts out 30 feet away?), they rocked the club like it was 1979, when rock stars were not yet our 21st century equivalent of the dinosaur and every club band had dreams of playing the Capital Center one day.

Highlights included “The Greatest Show on Earth,” (I put a pistol in my pants, coz we’re going out to dance), “Run Chicken Run” (Chickens don’t get no life after death), “Whiskey in My Whiskey” (I’ll make my bed on them railroad tracks, I’ll leave this world and won’t look back), “Hey Hey Revolver” (My teenage daughter’s knocked up, Well Jeanie this time you really fucked up), and “Ponzi.” With vocals like the beer soaked, splintered floor of a dive bar; the basic trinity of rock instruments enhanced by fiddle, piano, harmonica, accordion and the washboard; and songs of classic American themes of guns, liquor, sweethearts, mothers, and people scraping bottom, the Felice Brothers are keeping the flame alive, the once and future kings of American rock.

*post courtesy of Alice Stephens / photo courtesy of the band website*

The title of this post clears up the most confusing thing about singer/songwriter Meredith Bragg. With that issue out of the way, you’re free to enjoy his lo-fi pop goodness on tracks such as the gorgeous “Next Time.” With vocals that exhibit a Ben Gibbard-esque fragile melancholy, Bragg’s songs fall in the vein of Elliott Smith and Joshua Radin. If you like what you hear, Meredith Bragg will be playing with a full band for the first time several years next Monday, March 14th at Black Cat.