S Carey & White Hinterland at Eddie's Attic, Atlanta, May 11, 2014

In one of the most startlingly non-rock'n'roll moves of the year, the promoters and proprietors of Decatur's Eddie Attic decided to put on a show featuring S. Carey (of Bon Iver) and White Hinterland starting at 7:00 pm, still the height of Atlanta's rush hour and an hour too early to allow one to eat some dinner beforehand - I had to arrive directly from work without even stopping home to feed the cats.

So with that off my chest, it was a great show, due entirely to the artistry of the performers and not the constant "shushing" of Eddie's management to the audience (note to Eddie's Attic: you might want to reevaluate your attitude toward your audience and honestly decide if promoting music shows is the right livelihood for you).

So, with that now off my chest, White Hinterland opened at 7:00 sharp (note the daylight coming in through the window at the upper right).  White Hinterland is Scituate, Massachusetts' vocal powerhouse Casey Dienel, a graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music and keyboard and loop-supported one-woman band.  She performed an emotive and stylistically diverse set of songs, ranging from quiet voice-over-keyboards songs to rhythmically complex orchestrations of multiply looped vocals.

    

Her set included a terrific cover of Leon Russell's ballad, Song For You.

Her set ended concluded with a call-and-response piece with the audience (poorly) attempting to match her wordless vocalizations, but as the keyboards slowly dropped out of the mix and Casey's unaccompanied voice filled the room (she even moved away from the microphone and sang unamplified), an otherwise cliched moment became truly transcendent. 

After that, the audience didn't want her set to end and at only 7:45 pm, it didn't seem like it should have to, but all was quickly forgiven when Eau Clair, Wisconsin's (god, I'm so specific today) S Carey took the stage.  

 

We've seen S Carey once before, back in June 2011 when he opened for David Bazan (Pedro the Lion). Much like Bon Iver, for whom he plays drums, S Carey's music is hard to classify, ranging at times from quiet, polite balladry, to rhythmic, tribal percussion, to indie rock with electronic flourishes and coloration. To put it another way, he's a skilled interpreter of his music, willing to add whatever elements are necessary to convey the emotional content of his songs.

S Carey performed several new songs from his new album, Range of Light, and ended his set with a great one-two punch, staring with his probably best-known song, In The Dirt. 

In The Dirt, including its enthusiastic audience clap-along, was then followed by White Hinterland joining him on stage to cover Bjork.

@hessie via Instagram

Despite the early hour and the restrictive (repressive?) nature of Eddie's management, there was still something magical about the performances, the evening, and the artists.  I can't wait to see White Hinterland and S Carey perform someday at a real venue.

Real Estate

Frankly, it's more surprising to discover that Real Estate haven't played on television yet than it is to realize that Stephen Colbert will be taking over David Letterman's job.

Austerity Blues

Another song from Thee Silver Mt. Zion, etc., this one a mere excerpt from a song on their recent Fuck Off Get Free We Pour Light on Everything.  Did I mention they're coming to Athens' 40 Watt next week?

Mutual Benefit vs. Shaky Knees

So the Shaky Knees schedule has been announced, and the whole festival starts with Mutual Benefit playing the Piedmont Stage (which appears to be in the space that Cirque du Soleil always sets up their tents) on Friday at 12:45 pm.

I missed Mutual Benefit at The Earl earlier this year, as it was on a Monday night after my first day back at a real, full-time job in almost two-and-a-half years. However, it shouldn't be as much of a challenge getting to Shaky Knees in time to hear his opening set. 

Other than scheduling Mutual Benefit a tad too early, I don't see any other major irregularities in the schedule, other than Friday is clearly better that Sunday, and Sunday is clearly better than Saturday (Fri > Sun > Sat). But even Saturday still has the terrific Lord Huron, as well as Modest Mouse, Jenny Lewis, and Conor Oberst, so it's not like there's really anything to complain about.

Thee Silver Mt. Zion Orchestra . . .

. . . And Tra-La-La Band, featuring members of Godspeed! You Black Emperor, have released a new song, Birds Toss Precious Flowers. The southern leg of their current tour doesn't touch down in Atlanta, but will have them performing at the 40-Watt in Athens on April 15 before they embark on the tour de ville (Asheville, Louisville, Nashville).

I'm scheming how to arrange a business trip to Athens next week. . . 

Cell Song

As described by Fanfarlo, "Cell Song is a song about the body. Most of us think of ourselves as an individual, a unity. Some sort of lone spirit living inside the head of a soft machine. But really we are the product of billions of little organisms that at one point decided that they were better off together, and so gave up their independence and joined together in a pact for survival. It's a beautiful thing, how the body is at once one and many. Like an evolutionary love story."

The Cell Song video employs thousands of individually inkjet-printed sheets of paper to create a stop-motion world teeming with bizarre cutouts from childhood science fiction and story books, and a cast of topsy-turvy biology gone decidedly strange.

Enjoy.

Red Baraat at Smith's Olde Bar, Atlanta, April 4, 2014

Still catching up . . .  here's my pics and commentary (such as it is) on the Red Baraat show at Smith's Olde Bar last Friday night.

The show opener, Atlanta's The Dialect Trio, were a revelation.  Where have these guys been hiding, and why haven't I heard them before?  The "trio" took the stage as a quartet and played a great amalgam of various world musics, incorporating elements of Hindustani pop, Afro pop, reggae, Cumbia, and various Afro-Cuban rhythms, with pleasingly Santana-esque guitar.  They described their style as "Chichia," a psychedelic, surf-inspired form of Cumbia popular in Peru.  Their Bandcamp site lists a full dozen albums and EPs, so they've obviously been around for a while - perhaps they've just been playing in an alternative universe of clubs and venues than I've been attending.

Here's a great video of them set to a memorable scene from Rodriguez' From Dusk 'Til Dawn (written and featuring Quentin Tarantino), posted here for The Dialect Trio's music and because you can never get too much Selma Hayek.

Headliners Red Baraat may be from Brooklyn, New York, but their music is from the Asian subcontinent by way of New Orleans, which is to say this is what a second line brass band might sound like in the India Quarter of the Crescent City, if such a thing even existed.  

To say they got the party started and the audience up and dancing would be an understatement - it was clearly the band's singular aim and mission in the very same manner as, say, the Dirty Dozen or Rebirth Brass Bands.  

There was a large contingent of Indians in the audience - I've never seen more turbans in an audience at any show before - engaged in a friendly, South Asian form of moshing, which involves two or more people locking feet or hands in the center of a circle, and then spinning around the center as rapidly as possible.  It was fun, and I speak from personal experience as late in the show I got pulled into one of those circles by an outgoing young man.

The band is led by percussionist Sunny Jain, whose hard driving North Indian bhangra rhythms merge with the five-man horn section's elements of jazz, funk, and hip-hop, and if you've never experienced a Sikh rapping over brass-band funk before, then you've got to catch Red Baraat.

This is the kind of band that really needs to be experienced live in order to be appreciated, so here's a little taste of Friday's show and a video below from a show in their native Brooklyn to give you a rough approximation of the joyful multiculturalism of their performance.