This Week's Shows (5/2 - 5/8)

This is a particularly streamlined edition of TWS.  I could say it's because we all need to rest up for next week's Shaky Knees festival, but the truth is that I'm suffering some sort of internet connectivity problem that I can't quite figure out.  I can access some sites, like this, quite readily, but I can't get to other URLs, like every venue's website, despite multiple reboots, unplugging and re-plugging of modems, and all manner of other attempted fixes, and had to research most of this post using my iPhone.  But, still, there's some good shows this week that still deserve mention despite my problems (it's not about me), culminating in Saturday night's sold-out Animal Collective show at Buckhead Theater.  

As always, please keep in mind that musicians and night-club proprietors lead complicated lives and I'm prone to errors, mistakes, typos, and fubars; it's advisable to confirm any of the information below on your own before making plans.

MONDAY, MAY 2

Lupe Fiasco (Terminal West)

Lupe Fiasco is an acclaimed and uncompromising Chicago rapper whose lyrics take on countless political and social issues. 

Megadeath (The Tabernacle)

Led by Dave Mustaine, Megadeath are one of the most popular and important thrash metal bands, with music that contains strong social and political messages. 

TUESDAY, MAY 3

Woods (Purgatory at The Masquerade)

The underground psychedelic folk-rockers alternate between pastoral songcraft and otherworldly strangeness. 

Chelsea Wolfe (Heaven at The Masquerade)

A darkly distinctive singer/songwriter with nods to electronic, folk, and metal, Wolfe has attaracted an almost cult-like following. 

Chelsea Wolfe at The Earl, January 30, 2013

Bullet For My Valentine (The Tabernacle)

Welsh metal band who built up a large fan base by blending muscular riffs and emo harmonies. 

WEDNESDAY, MAY 4

Wild Belle (The Earl)

Chicago-based brother-and-sister duo make folk, dance, and psychedelic-tinged indie pop. 

Wild Belle at Shaky Knees, 2014

Kamasi Washington (Variety Playhouse)

On paper, I should really like this saxophonist who has drawn comparisons to Pharoah Sanders and John Coltrane, and whose connections include Gerald Wilson and Raphael Saadiq, but somehow he just hasn't clicked yet with me.  But it's not about me.  A crucial part of L.A.'s progressive jazz scene, Washington released the expansive LP The Epic in 2015. 

Citizen Cope (Center Stage)

Cope creates a soulful blend of folk-R&B with laid-back reggaefied beats and the occasional hip-hop flourish. 

Queensrÿche (Heaven at The Masquerade)

This Seattle quintet constructed a progressive form of heavy metal drawing equally from guitar pyrotechnics and art rock. 

Mother's Finest (Eddie's Attic)

Two sold-out shows in one night by popular Georgia funk rock band Mother's Finest. 

THURSDAY, MAY 5

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard (The Earl)

Freaked-out psychedelic madness by way of Melbourne, Australia. 

Larkin Poe (Terminal West)

Southern roots rockers who formed after the Lovell Sisters called it a day in 2009. 

FRIDAY, MAY 6

The Deslondes (The Earl)

Loose but lively country-influenced band featuring five musicians who found their groove in New Orleans. 

La Luz (Aisle 5)

La Luz are a Seattle-based quartet that mixes up doo wop, surf music, girl group sounds, and indie rock into one smart package. 

La Luz at Bumbershoot, 2014

Liz Vice (Eddie's Attic)

Elizabeth Lorraine "Liz" Vice is a gospel music recording artist and musician from Portland, whose music career started in 2015 with the studio album, There's a Light.

Bring Me The Horizon (The Tabernacle)
Popular U.K. metalcore band.

Disturbed, Rob Zombie (Aaron's Amphitheater)

Disturbed are a multi-platinum nü metal band from Chicago, bolstered by their songs' melodic complexity and by swaggering frontman David Draiman.  Rob Zombie was the lead vocalist of hard rockers White Zombie who went on to a solo career that blends gore-inspired lyrics with heavy, abrasive rock. 

Freddie Gibbs (Hell at The Masquerade)

Influenced by 2Pac, Biggie, and Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, this Midwest rapper came up through the world of Internet downloads and mixtapes. 

SATURDAY, MAY 7

Animal Collective (Buckhead Theater)

Their best LPs are apparently now behind them, but this innovative and acclaimed indie band with a penchant for experimental electronics, childlike campfire folk, and a warped take on Beach Boys harmonies can still be counted on for a wild and interesting live show. 

Animal Collective at tHe Tabernacle, October 2012

Old 97s, Heartless Bastards (Terminal West)

Led by Rhett Miller, Old 97s are a second-wave alt-country band from Dallas that mixes twang-filled rock and power pop. Heartless Bastards are a smart, scrappy, and muscular roots rock band led by Erika Wennerstrom that fuses blues, hard rock, punk, and country. 

Old 97s (with Nikki Lane), Shaky Knees 2015

Heartless Bastards at Shaky Knees, 2015

Steep Canyon Rangers (Variety Playhouse)
This band of young souls plays old-time bluegrass music.

SUNDAY, MAY 8

Secret Sisters (Eddie's Attic)
Secret Sisters are a Muscle Shoals-based country-folk duo.

California Honeydrops (Park Tavern)

Formed in 2007 by playing in the subway stations of Oakland, California, The Honeydrops are a blues and R&B band whose sound is tied to their instrumentation, vocal harmonies, and NOLA style.

Rocktober?

The weather outside is already noticeably cooler than it was last month, and football has officially begun.  More significantly, today is one of those embarrassment-of-riches days like we get in Rocktober (which technically might already have started this year) where one has to choose between a number of great shows on a given night.  Specifically, appearing at The Mammal Gallery this evening are Thee Oh Sees.

 

Meanwhile. at The Drunknen Unicorn, we have Laetitia Sadier (Stereolab), with Adron and Deradoorian opening.

But wait, there's more!  Over at The Earl, Jenny Hval is performing.

And finally, Chelsea Wolfe has a sold-out show over at Aisle 5.

There are many, many evenings where there aren't this many good shows on one night in New York City, much less Atlanta.  Alert readers already know which show I'm going to, which may or may not be the best of the night but the first one that had tickets go on sale.

Chelsea Wolfe, The Earl, Atlanta - January 30, 2013

Chelsea Wolfe played The Earl last night, with Women's Work and Featureless Ghost opening.  There's a lot that needs to be said about this.  But first I want to note that last night was my first time at The Earl since last November 3 when we saw Lost In The Trees. It's been nearly three months since I've been back, surely a record, due in part to the Wilnter Doldrums and in part to the bookings at so many other clubs.

Writing in The New Yorker (Music To Your Ears, January 28, 2013), Adam Gopnik explains that there seems to be two "systems" in the brain that respond to music.  One is veridical and responds to the pleasant sounds of the songs we already know.  The other is sequential and anticipates the next note or harmonic move in an unfamiliar phrase of music. The sequential system is stimulated when  music follows the logic of the notes or surprises us in some way that isn't merely arbitrary.  

If you want to know if your mind is primarily veridical or sequential, consider this:  which would you choose if given the choice to be able to hear all of your favorite music whenever you wanted but to never be able to hear any new music at all, or to be able to hear nothing but new music all the time but never hear again anything that you've heard before.  If you choose the first option, your mind is primarily veridical and if the second option sounds better, your mind is primarily sequential.

Personally, my mind is predominantly, even aggressively, sequential.  It's not that I don't enjoy re-hearing music that I've learned to love (I do), but I'm much more interested and intrigued by the next thing, by what's new, by what I haven't yet heard.  As it turns out, this is a great time for sequential minds.  In the past, if you wanted to hear new music you would have to go out to a music store and buy a not-inexpensive new CD or LP, which caused one to make conservative choices and purchase "tried and true" music with which one was familiar.  Today it's fairly easy and cheap to load an iPod with more gigs of music than you can possibly listen to, while also using streaming services like Spotify or Pandora to generate endless playlists of a nearly infinite variety of new music.  Meanwhile, music blogs, YouTube, and other internet services open up more opportunities to hear even more new music.  The real problem, to be honest, is keeping up with it all, and my biggest regret is realizing that how much I'm still missing out on despite prodigious efforts to keep up with it all.

The sweet spot between a purely sequential experience and a strict viridial one is when you have the chance to listen to a new, unrecorded  band that you've heard once or twice before and know what to expect, but who's particular songs you still don't know so that everything still sounds fresh.  Such was the case with the opening band last night, Atlanta's Women's Work.

We've heard Women's Work twice before - last year in Oakland Cemetery at the annual Tunes From The Crypt event, and then again at Criminal Records during the Little Five Fest.  I like this band - they have a dark, somber sound but aren't afraid to play loud  when volume's needed, but I don't know much about them, so every song's still a bit of a surprise, even when they performed a Hank Williams cover.  They have their first record coming out soon, which may give them some deserved recognition and exposure.

I'm more familiar with the next band that took the stage, Atlanta's Featureless Ghost.  Featureless Ghost is the duo of Matt Weiner and Elise Tippins, who've been performing and recording music together since 2007 and relocated from Brooklyn to Atlanta and formed the band in late 2010.  

We've seen Featureless Ghost a number of times now, opening for bands at both The Earl and 529.  I wouldn't go so far as to say that I know all of their songs, so it wasn't a completely veridical experience, but I had a pretty good idea of what to expect from their synth-flavored electro-dance rock.

 

I like these guys, a lot, but last night's stage was not the place for them.  Their highly danceable, dark wave sound sounded a little out of place between the southern gothic melodies of Women's Work and the acoustic  folk-trance that Chelsea Wolfe brought to the stage after them.  This is in no way a criticism of the band, but perhaps of the booking.  The first band, Women's Work, had heads nodding  approvingly, and Featureless Ghost got people up and dancing.  But it's a disorienting if not a little cruel to get folk's feet moving only to have them stop and the body return to head bobbing for the headlining act.

So this leaves us with the main event, LA-by-way-of-Sacramento's Chelsea Wolfe.  We last saw Ms. Wolfe on this same stage at The Earl back in August when she was touring behind her Apokalypsis album and fronting an electric band,  playing electric guitar herself.  Now, she is touring behind a new album, Unknown Rooms: A Collection of Acoustic Songs, and is backed by a smaller, almost minimalist band.  

Ms. Wolfe performed exclusively on acoustic guitar last night and was backed by a violinist and keyboards, which merely provided some coloration to the songs rather than fill out the sound.  It was a quiet sound, quite different from her previous visit to The Earl, and the usual noise and chatter from the bar at the back of The Earl were distracting at times.  Still, Ms. Wolfe played a great set full of some very interesting harmonic effects and melodies that more than compensated for the attention the music required, even is she did have to "shush" the crowd a couple of times.  This was basically coffee house music being performed in a bar.

As always, Chelsea Wolfe looked lovely, and the stage was lit with candles giving it a suitably gothic look. I had managed to get up to the front row and can confidently report they smelled great as well.  A pair of talismanic animal horns sat on  a table next to Ms. Wolfe as she performed.

Here's a pretty representative video of what the band sounded like last night.

The hour-long set set ended dramatically with a lovely and complex number dominated by over-layered vocals, the same song, I believe, that she ended her Apokalypsis set with last year.  After she left, the audience stayed by the stage but only called her back for an encore with the most half-hearted of applause and cheers.  But ever the professional, Ms. Wolfe came back on stage alone and displayed a warmer side of her personality than the lean, tortured songs before permitted, even asking the audience if anyone had a guitar pick and requesting a song to perform.