The Tris McCall Report

Calendar, May 15 - May 18

 

Pardon my disorganization this week; we're on the home stretch of making the Shootout At The Sugar Factory, and I've been pushing to finish album art, liner notes, etc. Moreover, I'm in a bit of a mood, and I am inclined to take it out on NYC venues. Anyway, let's get on with it:

Thursday, May 15

The Negatones @ CBGB, 9 PM (with Suffrajett, Ruth Ruth, Pisser, Essex & Thump)

Let me say again what ought to be painfully obvious to clubgoers citywide: there's no aesthetic mileage left to squeeze out of the neo-garage movement and the eightieth iteration of Iggy Pop. That car stalled on the highway sometime during 2001, and the usual bandits are now stripping the carcass and selling off the parts. Lucrative business, yes, but pleasant or improving only to culture merchants and camp followers. Luckily, up in the sky isn't a bird or a plane, but an unidentifiable gadget straight out of Q's laboratories; too hot for Mr. Bond himself, but poised to crash to earth Skylab-style at Bowery and Bleecker. Returning from a masochistic mini-tour of Northeast Jersey dive bars (Wayne? East Rutherford?), the Negatones are battle-hardened and ready for whatever obstacles CBGB might throw at them. This is a record release event for Snacktronica, the haywire followup to the Heavy EP, and the show will be as ambitious and exuberant as the hot-off-the-presses CD. I'm glad that at least one person has chosen to take my predictions of incipient art-rock revival seriously, but if you, too, are a King Crimson admirer frustrated by the propensity of intelligent New York City musicians to talk down to their audiences, you'll join me in welcoming a little craft, density, and virtuosic good humor back to the Manhattan mainstage. You probably hate CBGB as much as I do, but every now and then it's worth putting up with the grime, the inevitable indoor humidity, and the unpleasant odors in order to catch an imperative performance. Techno-rockers, spazzes, conceptualists, gaming-geeks and high ironists -- the future starts Thursday night.

 

Friday, May 16

Mishka Shubaly @ Luxx, 10 PM (with Kyle Fischer and Brady Brock)

The rumors are true: Mishka is resigning his post as booking agent at Luxx in order to concentrate on his writing and performance. That he lasted there as long as he did is testament to his political skill and his even-handedness -- two qualities not everybody was certain he possessed when he first took the job. Over the course of eighteen tumultuous months since, Mishka managed the Augean task of making Wednesday nights meaningful, and in the process he officially moved the beginning of the weekend forward another day. Mishka affixed his stamp to a club that quickly found an identity and personality, and to some degree it was Mishka's personality it adopted: raffish, sincere, literate, boozy and heartbroken, diabolically clever when not earnest and plain-faced, relentlessly committed to rock and roll. That's not all there was to Luxx, of course -- there were deejay nights and gay dance parties and the whole bizarre electroclash charade -- but these were the things that made it a club worth noticing if not attending, and Mishka can afford a little victory lap here, knowing he penned his own fascinating chapter in the great chronicle of New York nightlife. Friday's show is billed as Mishka's Last Stand, and while that could just be the name of his backing band (the Vitamen plus Alison Langerak of the Blue 88s), the end-of-an-era implications are inescapable. Kyle Fischer is the guy from Rainier Maria who used to sing, but doesn't anymore; now he just plays guitar while doing a strange masturbation dance. There's no telling what he's like in a solo setting. I do find it hard to believe he and his band are from New York -- they feel like quintessential out-of-towners.

The King Of France & Benjamin Cartel @ Pete's Candy Store, 9:30 PM (with Supermarket)

The King Of France played a short set at Milton's George Harrison tribute, held at Pete's in March. I hadn't heard of them before. By the time they took the stage, fifteen to twenty other acts had already turned in their interpretations, it was pretty late, and the room was thinning out. Those who stuck around were treated to absolutely stunning versions of "Blue Jay Way" and "Within You Without You", both driven by piano performances of power and precision. I've never heard any of their original music, but their reimaginings of the George Harrison songs they selected were so astonishing that I would be absolutely flabbergasted if TKOF turned out to be anything other than a great act. Benjamin Cartel contributed their own ramshackle covers to the Harrison tribute, and performed them with the same two-fisted, slightly weary relaxed intensity of their excellent Salt Water album. The intimacy of Pete's should draw you tightly into the Cartel's orbit.

Tracy Bonham @ Fez, 9:30 PM

The Fez has turned into a waste basin into which the runoff from the Lilith Fair is sluiced. Bonham served hard time on the Lilith tour, but she's an uneasy match for audiences expecting Paula Cole numbers. Her debut, The Burdens Of Being Upright, shared little to nothing with the resurgence of singer-songwriters, and had only passing similarities to Alanis Morissette's work. Instead, Bonham opted for a full-scale Nirvana ripoff, and managed to do it better than any of the then-rampant Seattle wannabes, mainly by virtue of insanely-catchy songs and her vicious little exacto-knife of a singing voice. I caught Bonham's act at Irving Plaza after Burdens, and she seemed quite overwhelmed by her own wattage; a beach ball bouncing around atop a roiling sea of rhythm guitar. She regained her equilibrium on the vastly-superior Down Here, produced in typical artsy style by the omnipresent Mitchell Froom. About half of the record consists of bizarre grabs at mainstream acceptance; the other half of fragmentary rockers with huge, muscular choruses and bitter lyrics about her mistreatment at the hands of the music industry. I don't know how she'll present any of these tracks live, but an pseudomainstream artist this fascinating and idiosyncratic is always worth a closer look.

Nicole McKenna @ The Cutting Room, 8:30 PM

A more traditional singer-songwriter, McKenna is also a good one -- nice breathy vocals, instantaneously winning stage presence, polite but occasionally exciting full-band arrangements. She's actually been compared to Bonham, but her sensibilities are cleaner and less obviously perverse -- instead, she's closer to Heather Nova at her most fetching. A show at the Cutting Room means the McKenna group will be involved, and that's a definite benefit. (If you've never been there, The Cutting Room is a large and underutilized space in the Flatiron district that supports rock band performances that err on the side of sparseness.) It's hard to imagine she won't do "Giving Up Your Ghost", but just in case the group slips up and omits her showcase number, now you know what to request.

 

Saturday, May 17

Bastards Of Melody @ The Baggot Inn, 9 PM (with Jessica Weiser, Mark Donato, The Better World & Soulfire)

The Bastard Paul Crane is a local hero of mine. The Jersey City patriot was one of three rockers (Doug Forbes of Bobfields and Craig Cirinelli of Elemae were the others) who put aside their own personal ambitions and aspirations to labor on behalf of a largely thankless task: bringing the Independent Music Festival back to Hoboken in 2000. Crane was one of the first area natives to book shows at Uncle Joe's, and deserves some of the credit for establishing its name and its viability. Before that, he worked tirelessly to convert a standard-issue Hoboken sports bar into a legitimate acoustic venue; that he periodically succeeded over the din of the hockey games and falling beer bottles is remarkable, and testament to his persistence, generosity, and the warmth and confidence of his vision. The Bastards Of Melody, his long-running traditionalist rock act, positively radiates generosity and unaffected warmth. Incapable of getting onstage and striking alt-rock poses, he instead sports an instantly ingratiating performance manner -- he's a showman, welcoming and community-minded. It's a club almost anybody can join, and if I tend to err on the side of exclusivity, I'm happy that most Jersey rockers follow Crane's lead. There are those who fight to homogenize and reduce difference (most everybody, I've noticed), and a handful of others who try to make this a more interesting planet. Paul Crane would walk into a goon hangout and imagine an indie rock club, and better yet, he'd be willing to put his muscle behind effecting that improbable transformation. We need more like him.

The Hold Steady @ The Mighty Robot, 10 PM

My new favorites, rocking at an intimate rooftop party space underneath the Williamsburg Bridge. The Denver Zest did a show at the Mighty Robot last year, and while there was something undeniably Bostonian about its living room feel, I can imagine Craig Finn and the Hold Steady framed brilliantly there. Rooftops, gutters, and all-night parties feature prominently in these songs, and away from the relative sterility of the Mercury Lounge, the narrative logic ought to feel even more airtight. Then again, the venue likes to project psychedelic swirly designs on the back wall during the show; It's cool, but offhand I can't think of a group for whom it'd be less appropriate. Maybe the E Street Band themselves. Hey, it's a minor thing. Expect to be blown away.

 

Sunday, May 18

The Giraffes, The Beauty Supply & Girl Harbor @ Cafe Sin-e, 8 PM

The verdict is in on the new Sin-e: I like it, but it shares too many features with the dreaded Arlene Grocery for me to be entirely comfortable there. For one thing, the bar is against the right side wall in performance space, guaranteeing that a good percentage of the audience will have its back turned to the stage. There's something tacky about the interior, and the crappy looking floor and tables most recall the high-school funk band feel of the Lion's Den. Also like Arlene's, the bands are elevated too high -- the new trend in Manhattan clubs is to raise the stage level in an attempt to make the musicians appear to be thunder gods. The problem is that most rockers aren't gods at all; they're working-class hero Joes and Janes who simply don't look good from that angle. I know this is, in part, a reflection of a new city rock ideology that rejects the easy egalitarianism that led some early nineties clubs to dismiss the concept of the stage altogether, and that was a bad idea too. But we're overcompensating now. A good rule of thumb is this: an indie rock stage should never be so high that you'd hurt yourself if you fell off of it while executing one of your power moves. As for Sunday, The Giraffes actually are a bunch of thunder gods, so there shouldn't be any problem here. But I don't get the sense that the people who run Sin-e want to turn it into Don Hill's and a shrine for rock idolatry -- for one thing, they persist in calling the club a cafe despite the absence of a coffee-drinking crowd. This is another venue that needs to sort out its identity. Hey, don't hold your breath, they're still working on it over at the Merc.

Just for pure senile devilment, check out last week's calendar.

 

There's always a crisis at hand. Always.