I always admired The Hold Steady’s narrative approach to songwriting, but I didn’t imagine it could be applied to this particular Western Colorado town, and tonight’s opening track clearly shows my lack of imagination. Elsewhere tonight, I’m happy to bring you new music from The No Ones, featuring the unmistakable holler of one Scott McCaughey of the Young Fresh Fellows, R.E.M., The Baseball Project, and so much more.
The new album from Jen Cloher is magnificent, and when her Twitter account favorited the playlist entry for the lead track tonight, I near swooned. I recommend you listen to I Am The River, The River Is Me from start to finish, and enjoy something you’ll be doing for years to come for the first time. In other news, our recently adopted cat Princess Otoboke Beaver (aka Pris) gave birth to four healthy kittens on St. Patrick’s day — Ziggy, Stardust, Spider, and Mars.
As it happens, if yours truly has a Valentine’s gig, it’ll be followed by one on Pi Day. Except on leap years. But the point here is that I thought about doing a show themed on circles, spheres, and other such expressions of the number and decided against it, but keep your ears peeled for some future incarnation of a “Round and Round” playlist. Instead, tonight we kick things off with the sort-of eponymous track from The Nude Party’s latest release, and wrap things up with about 30 seconds of Railroad Jerk, because technical difficulties.
I used to get a couple of dozen packages containing CDs each day, but these days receiving even one is something that happens once in a blue moon, a rare treat. It’s even more special when it contains a couple of releases from Sex Clark Five, one of my personal favorites. They sound like blurting out that thing you told yourself you weren’t going to say but felt good to say.
Dating back to a time before the whole phrase was unceremoniously truncated to “chillax”, Serge Gainsbourg’s imploration to enhance your mood is given a frantic workout by Stereo Total and in this case, their toy electronic noisemakers are a welcome homage. Elsewhere this show, we have Carl King’s prog-rock-and-glockenspiel interpretation of Rebecca Black’s infamous “Friday” … and it’s quite the improvement.
Nothing to do with Peggy Lee’s sultry standard, this particular “Fever” comes from Aldous Harding, whose unique marshmallows-and-razor-blades sensibility makes for songs that leave you bleeding but which you crave again and again. Also tonight and also from New Zealand, a track from Garageland, one of my favorite underrated Kiwi bands of the ‘90s, which isn’t saying much because they were all underrated and they are all my favorites.
The story of Nell Smith & The Flaming Lips is as improbable and unexpected as their album full of Nick Cave covers. Existing in a triangular universe of mutual admiration, Where the Viaduct Looms gave us the opening track tonight, the menacing “Red Right Hand”.
The mysterious Orville Peck is a modern cowboy marvel, a rare and legendary masked man with a dusty guitar and a lonesome coyote howl.
Coriky is three musicians crumpling up their resumes, throwing them to the floor, and showing you exactly what they can do.
The topologist carefully unfolded the graph depicting prime number frequencies. Across the scrub, the baker was returning from the Unimog, having concluded the search, and from the looks of their empty hands, unsuccessfully. They must have left it in the cab back in Calabar. Wonderful. Together, they considered the placement of the carved stone monoliths before them, their geometric arrangement random to the average visitor, but a clear reflection of order to the ancient people of Alok Ikom, and apparently, also related to the graph before them, with cataclysmic mathematical consequences.
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