MATT ASHARE

Rock therapies

MATT ASHARE — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 20:09:45 GMT

Blake Hazard and John Dragonetti work it out
A little over four years ago, the Boston music scene lost one of its cuter couples when singer-songwriter Blake Hazard and guitarist/producer John Dragonetti left town for LA.

FRANKLY, MY DEAR: “When you write a song,” says Hazard, “you can be honest in a way that can be difficult in conversation.”

A little over four years ago, the Boston music scene lost one of its cuter couples when singer-songwriter Blake Hazard and guitarist/producer John Dragonetti left town for LA. Hazard had been working to establish herself as a singer-songwriter in a pop world filled with girls with acoustic guitars, and Dragonetti had already been through the major-label wringer once with his band/alias Jack Drag, who released an album of quirky alterna-pop on A&M in ’98. It seemed like a perfect match: Hazard — a fresh-faced blonde with a backstory that includes a distant relative by the name of F. Scott Fitzgerald — had the songs and the pretty voice to go with them, and Dragonetti’s pop sensibility — his talent for texture and hooks — brought a whole new dimension to those songs. But within six months of their move, the two had parted ways — both musical and romantic. It turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to them.

“I started playing with a different band,” Hazard says over her cell from LA, “and John was doing all this composing on his own. But then it started to become clear that the break-up was failing.”

That’s right: the break-up didn’t work out. Hazard and Dragonetti reconciled and married and found themselves with a batch of songs they’d written while they’d been apart — songs that dealt candidly with the split. “The material had this cohesiveness about it,” says Hazard. “They were talking about the same things from two different perspectives. So we thought it would be cool to put them together even just for us and our friends, to document a particular time in our lives.”

“It was never about money or getting a big advance,” Dragonetti adds in a separate phone conversation. “We didn’t have any big expectations. We both kind of felt that we could do this the way we wanted to. It just felt natural. And I know it had been an awful long time since it had felt that way for me.”

Christened the Submarines, the duo scored a deal with Nettwerk before the label had even seen them live, and in 2006 their first album, Declare a New State!, came out. “It was incredibly cathartic when we got back together — it really did help us in our relationship,” Hazard admits. “When you write a song, you can be honest in a way that can be difficult in conversation. I know that when I was writing some of those songs, things came out that I hadn’t even really been in touch with before.”

Fortunate one

MATT ASHARE — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 21:55:34 GMT

Chris Brokaw is booked solid
It was no surprise to find Chris Brokaw in Hawaii last week, just two Saturdays before he’s due back in Cambridge to pull a double shift upstairs at the Middle East.

GETTING BUSY: “I’ve been really fortunate. I’ve had a lot of amazing people ask me to play with them in the last year.”

It was no surprise to find Chris Brokaw in Hawaii last week, just two Saturdays before he’s due back in Cambridge to pull a double shift upstairs at the Middle East — a solo guitar set followed by drumming behind the Kadane Brothers. Seems that every time I’ve bumped into Brokaw this past year, he’s been off to place his talents in the service of something interesting, whether it be Thurston Moore, with whom he spent last fall touring, or Dirtmusic, a collaboration with two other multi-instrumentalists, Bad Seeds guitarist Hugo Race and Chris Eckman of the Walkabouts. Dirtmusic’s homonymous debut arrived in April on Glitterhouse, after the band had already toured Europe and played a set in Mali at January’s Festival in the Desert. But last week Brokaw wasn’t away on business.

“My girlfriend’s parents live in Hawaii,” he admits a bit sheepishly when I track him down in Brooklyn. But he’s not playing down his accomplishments. “I’ve been really fortunate. I’ve had a lot of amazing people ask me to play with them, particularly in the last year.”

It has been quite a year. It began with Brokaw turning down an offer to play on Thurston Moore’s Trees Outside the Academy (Ecstatic Peace). “I was already booked to be in Europe playing guitar and organ with Eleventh Dream Day.”

After that, he reunited with Matt and Bubba Kadane (ex-Bedhead), to record a third album as the New Year. That band quietly emerged as Brokaw’s decade-long tenure alongside Thalia Zedek in Come was reaching its end in the late ’90s. In a sense, it brought him full circle: having established himself as a gritty guitarist in Come, he was back to playing drums behind the Kadanes’ stark soundscapes, much as he had in his pre-Come days with Codeine. Brokaw also continued to expand on the role he’d played in Come as a scalpel-sharp foil to Zedek’s serrated bluesy churn, performing with Steve Wynn, Evan Dando, and a trio of Chicago post-rockers (Bundy K. Brown, Doug McCombs, and Curtis Harvey) in Pullman. And he recorded four solo albums, showcasing his talents as both an experimental guitarist and, on 2005’s Incredible Love (just reissued on limited edition white vinyl by I and Ear), a singer-songwriter.

Boston music news: July 11, 2008

MATT ASHARE — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 21:03:06 GMT

Notes on the New Year
The New Year, a band the Kadanes started with Chris Brokaw on drums a decade ago, are still a going concern.

Geography lessons

MATT ASHARE — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 15:55:04 GMT

Street Dogs remain Boston to the core
"You could put us in Anchorage or Alaska or Antarctica or even somewhere in the Himalayas, and at heart we’d still be from Boston.”

SEPARATION ANXIETY: “Being away from the place that I love comes out in the songs,” says Mike McColgan.

"You could put us in Anchorage or Alaska or Antarctica or even somewhere in the Himalayas, and at heart we’d still be from Boston.”

It’s been nearly four years since Street Dogs frontman Mike McColgan moved to LA, but you’d hardly know it from the band’s fourth album, State of Grace (Hellcat). Set to hit stores on July 8, in the midst of Street Dogs’ first summer on the Warped Tour’s mainstage, it’s as Boston as the left-field scoreboard in Fenway Park — from the raw-throated bark of the hard-nosed, rebel-rocking opener, “Mean Fist,” to the local geography that peppers “Kevin J. O’Toole” (an ode to the firefighter uncle in whose footsteps McColgan followed after he left his post fronting Dropkick Murphys) to the vivid memories of growing up in North Quincy that color the Celtic-flavored “Two Angry Kids.”

“Distance makes the heart grow fonder,” McColgan admits. “And being away from the place that I love comes out in the songs.”

McColgan relocated to LA only because, as he puts it, “we generally spend about nine or 10 months a year on the road. So once we started going full blast, I thought it would be beneficial for my wife if we moved here because she’s from here and it’s nice for her to be closer to her family when we’re on tour. But I really do feel more strongly about Boston being away from it. And I didn’t see that coming. I didn’t anticipate it. I know it’s an inevitability that I’ll end up back there, by hook or by crook.”

He has company. “Joe Sirois and Joe Gittleman and Dickie Barrett from the Mighty Mighty Bosstones are out here. And Johnny Angel, who way back in the day was in the Blackjacks, is out here too. We all found each other, and then we find other Boston people. You can spot someone from Boston in LA in a second.”

Back in the early ’80s, the Boston punks’ feelings about LA were summed up by the hardcore compilation This Is Boston, Not L.A. (Modern Method, 1982). But even with the renewal of the Celtics/Lakers rivalry, the competition between the two scenes has mellowed. It’s a change reflected in the Warped Tour, which saves a spot on the mainstage for a Boston band every summer — a spot that the Bosstones ceded to Dropkick Murphys and that’s now been passed to McColgan and his fellow Street Dogs: bassist John Rioux, guitarists Marcus Hollar, and Tobe Bean III, and drummer Paul Rucker.

Remasters of the universe

MATT ASHARE — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 20:53:40 GMT

The ‘definitive’ Mission of Burma
The adage “All things come to those who wait” tends not to find too many useful applications in rock and roll.

VIDEO: Mission of Burma, "Academy Fight Song" (Live at Great Scott)

The adage “All things come to those who wait” tends not to find too many useful applications in rock and roll. For the most part, the business is about grabbing all you can as quickly as possible. In this regard — and plenty of others — Mission of Burma are exceptional.

After all, when the group broke up after playing a pair of now-legendary farewell shows at the Bradford Hotel in March of 1983, having released one single (“Academy Fight Song” b/w ”Max Ernst”), one EP (Signals, Calls and Marches), and one full-length (Vs.) on the local Ace of Hearts label, they were just months away from having drawn so few people to the Paradise that they were asked not to return. And yet Burma have managed to sustain an ongoing second life since reuniting in 2002 — one that’s included two new albums, 2004’s OnOffOn and 2006’s The Obliterati. It would be hard to find anyone more surprised than the guys in Mission of Burma themselves.

“It’s like what our manager, Mark Kates, always says: the band is going forward in spite of the band,” reflects guitarist Roger Miller. I guess I’m just used to the old way of seeing the world, and I assume that no one is going to care. Not that that ever stopped us. It’s just so weird that people are paying attention to us now.”

“One of the things that would have precluded our continuing to do this was if the only people coming out to see us were our age,” adds drummer Peter Prescott. “Not to disrespect any of those people, but when we went out to tour behind The Obliterati, there were so many kids coming to the shows — and that made all the difference. They weren’t relating to us like they owed us respect because of what we did 20 years ago. They were there because they were relating to what we’re doing now in a real visceral way.

Miller, Prescott, and bassist Clint Conley are in the midst of packing for a quick trip to Europe when I reach them to discuss the recent Matador reissues of “the definitive” Mission of Burma catalogue. In just a few hours they’ll be off to Barcelona, where they’ll hook up with Bob Weston, the soundman/tape manipulator who’s taken over Martin Swope’s role in the group, as well as Weston’s band Shellac, for seven dates in Spain and France. Then they’re headed back home to celebrate the reissues with two shows at (where else but) the Paradise. On June 12 they’ll focus on tracks from the expanded Signals EP; the next night’s show will include the entire Vs. album.

Boston music news: June 13, 2008

MATT ASHARE — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 17:29:18 GMT

Notes on Ketman and more
After three EPs, Ketman are ready to release a full-length album.

Rock relaunched

MATT ASHARE — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 21:34:08 GMT

Orbit resume their aborted mission
Jeff Robbins is something of a rock star — just not the kind who plays Super Bowl halftime shows or collects Grammys.

MODEST MUSE: “It wasn’t so much that we were good as that we avoided all the things about our previous bands that had sucked.”

Jeff Robbins is something of a rock star — just not the kind who plays Super Bowl halftime shows or collects Grammys. But he appeared to be on his way to that kind of rock-stardom just a little over a decade ago, when the band he then fronted, the Boston trio Orbit, were riding high in the wake of their A&M debut, Libido Speedway.

“In 1997, I did the Lollapalooza tour, I played live on MTV, our album came out, and we had a Top 10 modern-rock single,” he recalls with a laugh over beers at the Independent in Union Square. “Now I run a company — Lullabot — that basically creates free open-source software. We work with really large clients — companies like Sony/BMG. And we built the Web site for MTV UK. It’s a different kind of rock star. I mean, the people in that world refer to me as being a rock star. And every once in a while, someone will make the Orbit connection. Like, I had one guy who’d been working for me for three or four months and then one day, out of the blue, I get the fan call from him. Like, ‘Oh my God, I’ve got all your albums . . . ’ ”

Now, years (and many Web sites) later, Robbins, founding Orbit drummer Paul Buckley (who’s also played with Kay Hanley and Dear Leader), and bassist Linda Pardee (a veteran of Ad Frank’s many projects who joined Orbit after they’d been dropped by A&M in ’99) are toying with reviving the band. They played two Sheila Divine reunion shows back in December, and they’re gearing up to headline T.T. the Bear’s this Friday.

“Most bands get together and say, ‘We’re going to pay our dues and it’ll eventually pay off,’ ” Buckley explains. “But with Orbit it happened really quickly. I met Jeff in ’93, we started the band in ’94, and one year later we were signed. We were fortunate that some of the songs we had were timely, and we’d learned from the mistakes we’d made in previous bands.”

“Yeah, it wasn’t so much that we were good as that we avoided all of the things about our previous bands that had sucked,” interjects Robbins.

But music-business bullshit eventually caught up with Orbit when, in 1999, the Seagram/Universal merger in effect made A&M part of Interscope, a move that left a lot of artists homeless.

Boston music news: June 6, 2008

MATT ASHARE — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 21:41:12 GMT

Notes on 7L & Esoteric, Travels, and Mission of Burma
The local rap duo 7L & Esoteric head east on their new full-length.

Quitting time

MATT ASHARE — Wed, 28 May 2008 13:48:17 GMT

Lock and Key close up shop
Sometimes you just gotta eat shit.

POTENTIAL ENERGY Lock and Key spent years on the short list of bands capable of breaking out of Boston

Sometimes you just gotta eat shit. If Lock and Key singer/guitarist Ryan Shanahan had had his way, that would be the title of the band’s final salvo, the long-in-coming follow-up to the foursome’s full-length debut on the North Carolina emo label Deep Elm, 2004’s Pull Up the Floorboards. He didn’t. The new (and final) Lock and Key disc is a homonymous job, recorded on the band’s dime and released on a friend’s start-up label, Get a Life Recordings. “It’s funny,” guitarist Mike Vera admits of Shanahan’s proposed title, “but some of us just didn’t want it to be the name of our last album.”

We’re sitting at a table at the Silhouette Lounge in Allston as Lock and Key contemplate the days leading up to their swan song this Friday downstairs at the Middle East. It’s a moment that’s been a long time coming: last winter, after five-plus years together, the band decided to call it quits. And eating shit had something to do with that decision.

“We did so many basement tours, we were always what we called ‘eating shit,’ ” Shanahan says with a smile and not a hint of bitterness. “If anyone ever complained, we’d give him a hard time and tell him, ‘Sometimes you just gotta eat shit.’ It was sort of our mantra. And since this was going to be our last record, I felt like we could call it whatever we wanted. But Mike, being Mr. Serious, couldn’t handle it.”

“We snuck it into the artwork,” Vera offers. “It’s right there when you open the CD.”

The process of recording an album has broken up many a band. All that time spent in the close quarters of a studio can test friendships, and artistic differences have a tendency to arise over things like how loud the kick drum should be. But when Lock and Key went into Fenway recording studio New Alliance in late 2007, they’d already made up their minds. Shanahan had enrolled in a six-month certification program in sustainable design at Boston Architectural College — a career that will take him to Portland, Oregon, two days after the final show. And Vera was by then playing in two other bands: Where the Land Meets the Sea, with one-time Lock and Key drummer Nick Maggorio, J.T. Hargrove on bass, and Ryan’s girlfriend Nikki Dessingue playing keyboards; and, as the bassist, in the Cold Beat, with two ex-members of the Call Up, singer/guitarist Chris Amaral and guitarist Mike Shepherd.

Boston music news: May 23, 2008

MATT ASHARE — Mon, 19 May 2008 15:36:59 GMT

Notes on the Submarines and two great local benefits
There are two worthwhile benefits coming up this week.

Jazz hands

MATT ASHARE — Mon, 19 May 2008 15:24:31 GMT

Geoff Farina’s new Glorytellers
There was a time when it was easy to hate Geoff Farina. Well, maybe hate is too strong a word.

KARATE, CHOPPED: Glorytellers’ understated, folky feel does without extended displays of virtuosity

There was a time when it was easy to hate Geoff Farina. Well, maybe hate is too strong a word. After all, he’s a nice, polite, well-groomed, thoughtful, generally likable guy. But in the mid ’90s, he took one of this city’s more promising post-Slint indie guitar-rock bands and messed it all up by adding a bunch of jazz-flavored stuff, from minor-ninth chords to long, modal guitar solos. It didn’t help that he’d been to Berklee. And all of this from a singer/guitarist with an otherwise immaculate résumé that included playing in the quiet, indie-folk Secret Stars with Jodi Buonanno and, in the late ’90s, co-founding the Narragansett Grange Hall in Wakefield, Rhode Island — a living/performance space that opened its doors to artists-in-residence like DC punk photographer Pat Graham and violinist Ida Pearl, namesake of the band Ida. Oh, and Geoff’s sister Amy is married to Ian MacKaye.

“So,” I can’t help asking when Farina and I meet at the Sherman Café, near his current home in Union Square, “when you go home for Thanksgiving and Christmas, Ian’s just there?”

“Yeah, yeah, more or less. But I’ve known him for a while. So it’s not that different. And he’s a regular dude. With Glorytellers he’s been super helpful and inspiring.”

Glorytellers, who play upstairs at the Middle East this Friday, are Farina’s new band, and the reason we’re meeting. As a vehicle for his songwriting, the trio delve even deeper into the jazz Farina, drummer Gavin McCarthy, and bassist Jeff Goddard toyed with in Karate — so much so that iTunes has their homonymous Southern debut listed under “jazz.”

Indeed, Glorytellers goes a long way toward making sense of what Farina was reaching for when he first brought jazz into the Karate fold — in part by doing away with the usual guitar/bass/drums rock line-up in favor of fingerpicked acoustic guitar, electric guitar, and drums, with the acoustic as the focus. It’s a natural fit for Farina’s stark, impressionistic lyrics; and the low-key arrangements complement melancholy imagery like the lone rose in the disc’s opener, “Camouflage,” and the “suicide by cigarettes and Maker’s Mark” in “Awake at the Wheel.” Farina can continue to stretch out — displaying his nylon-string-acoustic chops in “Trovato Suono,” for example — without overreaching. If anything, the acoustic gives the album an understated, folky feel while steering the trio away from extended displays of lead-guitar virtuosity. In other words, all is forgiven.

Scoring points

MATT ASHARE — Fri, 09 May 2008 21:45:26 GMT

Tiger Saw show some animation
A tap-dancer, a magician, and an eight-piece horn section. According to a recent Web-site missive from Tiger Saw, the latest incarnation of the Newburyport-based indie collective includes all three.

VIDEO: Tiger Saw, "Words Not Used in Books," live at PA's Lounge

A tap-dancer, a magician, and an eight-piece horn section. According to a recent Web-site missive from Tiger Saw, the latest incarnation of the Newburyport-based indie collective includes all three. That’s par for the course for Tiger Saw, an entity amorphous enough to embody — at least in theory — the wildest whims of singer-songwriter Dylan Metrano, yet structured enough to have recorded and released five proper full-lengths since 1999, even as the cast surrounding Metrano has continued to evolve. In fact, as I sit down at Cambridge Common with two current members of Tiger Saw — bassist Erik Tans and trumpeter/keyboardist Chris Barrett — to discuss an adventurous project they’re presenting this week at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, Tiger Saw are on a tour, with Metrano somewhere in the vicinity of Chicago preparing for a gig.

“It’s a wrinkle in time,” jokes Tans.

And it’s also just the way Tiger Saw function. So it’s fallen to Tans and Barrett to lay the groundwork for the Tiger Saw performances at the Coolidge accompanying the 1926 German animated feature The Adventures of Prince Achmed, the oldest surviving full-length film of its type. A four-piece version of the band, with Metrano on guitar, Tans on bass, Barrett on various instruments, and Dylan Clark on drums (and everyone playing percussion and keyboard parts), will perform an original Tiger Saw score for Lotte Reiniger’s film based on “The Story of Prince Ahmed and the Fairy Paribanou” from 1001 Arabian Nights this Thursday night at 8 and 10 and Saturday at midnight. (They’ll also perform the score with the film at 1 pm on both May 16 and 17 at the Ioka Theater in Exeter, New Hampshire.)

This isn’t the first time Tiger Saw have scored a film. In 2000 and 2002, a different version of the band wrote and performed a score for the F.W. Murnau silent classic Nosferatu (1922). And though Prince Achmed shares some characteristics with Nosferatu, it’s a different beast.

“I don’t know if cartoon is the right word,” says Barrett as he attempts to describe it. “But it is animated with wooden and paper cutouts in silhouette. And the weird thing about it is that even though it was done in 1926, it’s in color. I don’t know if they painted the film itself or if they used some kind of gels, but it’s got this really trippy vibe to it.”

Buggy

MATT ASHARE — Tue, 06 May 2008 21:08:08 GMT

Chris Ballew’s POTUSA
Seattle’s Presidents of the United States of America were the right band from the right place at the right time when their homonymous debut flew up the charts back in 1995.

Seattle’s Presidents of the United States of America were the right band from the right place at the right time when their homonymous debut flew up the charts back in 1995. Their playfully hooky songs with lyrics bordering on nonsense (a girl like a bump on the head; a mischievous kitty; a magical peach) felt like the perfect antidote to the overly serious tenor of the grunge that had elevated their home town, and people were just ready to have a bit of fun again. But the good times didn’t last long: by the following year, the trio had rushed out a half-baked follow-up, and the joy of their debut was, with repeated playings, wearing a bit thin. So in ’97, head President Chris Ballew broke up the band and retreated from the rock life to raise a family. And that might have been the end, as he explains over his cellphone from a pool in Arizona in the midst of a tour supporting the band’s new fifth album, These Are the Good Times People (Fugitive), if not for Krist Novoselic . . .

How was it Krist’s fault?
Well, we had made a record in 2000 [Freaked Out and Small], but there was no touring: we played one show and we didn’t do any old songs. But Krist asked us to be his backing band at an awards show, and he wanted us to do some of our old songs with him. And it just felt right, so we slowly started doing more shows, and then we had a booking agent, and then we had new songs, and we did a couple recording sessions, and we gave a song to radio, and radio started playing “Some Postman” in 2004.

But when it came time to do the heavy lifting, [original guitarist] Dave [Dederer] realized that he was done. We respected that, and we had Andrew [McKeag] waiting in the wings as Dave’s replacement. So we’ve been busier than it might seem. In fact, if you go back in time, we’ve put out a record every election year from 1996 on. We didn’t even realize that until someone pointed it out.

Even with the line-up change, you’re still using the three-string guitbass and the two-string bassitar, and you still have a fondness for writing about animals and insects . . .
It’s less a fondness than I’m allowed to do it again. Dave actually forbade me to write about animals. That’s part of the reason we broke up. We were going to do a third album, and he came to me and said that he didn’t want me to write about animals anymore.

Hot and cold

MATT ASHARE — Wed, 07 May 2008 19:57:10 GMT

A revved-up Bang Camaro and techno Freezepop lead the way
Bands and artists do have a way of coming and going here in Boston.

HIP-HOPPIN’ Rather than big breakbeats, Big Digits rely on drum-machine grooves, instrumental loops, and a familiar sample or two.

View results and more from this year's Phoenix/WFNX Best Music Poll at BestMusicPoll.com.

Bands and artists do have a way of coming and going here in Boston. But this year’s Best Music Poll seems to reflect a real turnover in terms of who the emerging dominant artists are, from the operatic metal ensemble Bang Camaro to vintage soulman Eli “Paperboy” Reed to synth-pop vets Freezepop, whose time apparently has arrived now that New Wave is new again. If you’re looking for any sort of order amid such a wide-range of winners, well, good luck. The brave new digital world has done more to democratize the music business than even SoundScan managed a decade and a half ago. In fact, if you think of SoundScan as the one major factor that changed the entire look of the top of the charts for a few years there, suddenly ushering in the alt-rock revolution, then the emergence of MP3 trading, digital releases, and sites like MySpace.com have had much the same effect further down the line, especially at the local level, where bands and artists now have unprecedented access to promotional tools. Add YouTube to the equation, and bands and artists are in a position to deliver everything from music and merch to videos — the whole shebang, so to speak — without spending the hundreds or even tens of thousands of dollars that major labels habitually shell out. How else to explain the wide range of styles represented by this year’s Best Music Poll winners? (Seriously, if anyone’s got a good theory, e-mail me: mashare@phx.com.)

This year’s big winners, the retro ’80s synth-pop trio Freezepop, are well-acquainted with the various avenues of self-promotion. They were just a little bit ahead of the neo-New Wave curve, and their playful approach to synth-pop isn’t as confrontational as electroclash or as overly serious as bands like the Bravery and the Killers. NYC’s Scissor Sisters are probably the closest kin Freezepop have anywhere close to what you might call mainstream. So Freezepop, who won Best Local Act, Best Local Live Act, and, for 2007’s Future Future Future Perfect (Rykodisc), Best Local Album, have been taking full advantage of opportunities like licensing songs to video games (including, yes, Guitar Hero II) and, of course, using the Internet to create a network of fans that by now is national, if not international. Freezepop present a persuasive business model for any aspiring band or artist unwilling to just wait around for some A&R scout to discover them.

Zedek’s æsthetic

MATT ASHARE — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 14:47:26 GMT

Thalia continues to move beyond Come
Thalia Zedek is hunched over a pint at the Cambridge Brewing Company, looking a bit like a grizzled veteran of some sort of mythical rock-and-roll war.

TOUGH AND TANGLED: Thalia’s music lies at the crossroads of apocalyptic poetry and the demon blues.

It’s a bright, blue Friday afternoon, and Thalia Zedek is hunched over a pint at the Cambridge Brewing Company, looking a bit like a grizzled veteran of some sort of mythical rock-and-roll war. It’d be great to continue on in that vein — contrasting the beautiful weather with Zedek’s dark and stormy disposition. Then again, maybe not. She saves me the trouble. “If you know me as a person,” she says with a disarming gentle chuckle and subtle smirk, “I like to laugh and have fun.”

That’s not quite the impression most attentive listeners would come away with from her new Liars and Prayers (Thrill Jockey), and it’s certainly not the sense she’s conveyed over the past 25 years — first as the frontwoman in the Boston post-punk outfit Uzi, then as a member of NYC’s art-damaged Live Skull, then returning to Boston to join forces with guitarist Chris Brokaw in Come (who were hand-picked as an opening act by both Kurt and Courtney but never fully emerged from Alternative Nation). After a good run (four albums in six years), Come called it quits in time for the new millennium. Brokaw found plenty of work as a hired guitarslinger; Zedek slowly graduated to her solo career.

More than just Zedek’s singing and songwriting, the one constant has been her presence: stoic yet haunted, desperate yet never quite despairing, wounded yet resilient, with a touch of androgyny to top it all off. On the first Come album, 1992’s Eleven: Eleven (Matador), she sang the Jagger/Richards tune “I Got the Blues.” Her first solo album, 2001’s Been Here and Gone (Matador), featured her interpretation of Leonard Cohen’s “Dance Me to the End of Love.” To the extent you can gauge an artist by the songs they choose, the Zedek æsthetic lies somewhere near the crossroads where apocalyptic poetry meets the demon blues, where stormy passions find poignant release.

And so it remains: the piano that found its way into the final Come line-up has become more dominant on her solo albums, and viola has emerged to spar with her thorny guitar — but neither has brought with it a lighter touch. Liars and Prayers is as tough and tangled, as heavy and just plain angry, as anything she’s recorded. As with the best of Come, the songs don’t follow strict verse/chorus/verse structures so much as they build momentum, each instrument coalescing around a central motif, minor-key melodies buoying waves of emotion, until the band, on the verge of discord, reach a controlled climax.

Dead Child

MATT ASHARE — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 18:55:18 GMT

Attack | Quarterstick/Touch and Go
From the first monster-metal riff and warlock scream, it’s pleasantly obvious where Dead Child are headed on their full-length debut.

Indie gets the blues

MATT ASHARE — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 17:23:37 GMT

The Gossip, the Black Keys, and the Kills
White rockers generally come by the blues one of two ways.

GO BETH! If the White Stripes can do it, why not the Gossip?

White rockers generally come by the blues one of two ways. They can spend hours upon hours living inside the grooves of Exile on Main Street (which can lead to all kinds of nasty habits, including Led Zeppelin, Muddy Waters, and even early Aerosmith). Or, like the raucous guitar/drums duo Black Keys, they can be blessed/cursed with coming of age in a city like Akron (long known as “Rubber City,” America’s tire capital). The weather may be nicer in Vero Beach, but the cultural climate drove singer/guitarist Alison “VV” Mosshart to join the punk band Discount before she hooked up with British drummer Jamie “Hotel” Hince as the Kills, yet another bassless duo with a taste for blues — albeit one that sounds as if it had been fostered in a basement with a needle and spoon, a handful of Velvet Underground albums, and a dose of Royal Trux attitude. At least the Gossip — a hard-rocking trio of guitar, drums, and vocals — had the advantage of growing up in the vicinity of blues country (Searcy, Alabama); that could account for singer Beth Ditto’s big-voiced, gospel-inflected delivery. It’s hard to imagine an outsized, outspoken, out lesbian like Ditto fitting in all that well in the small-town South, so no surprise that the Gossip escaped to Olympia, Washington, to launch their career for real on K Records in 1999.

Whatever its source, the blues has been instrumental in reintroducing sex and sensuality to rock, which seemed all but nunnery-bound in the hands of bands like Pavement for much of the ’90s. Ditto in particular has been forthright about getting the asses of Gossip fans moving, often leading the way, shaking her big, lingerie-clad body as her bandmates — drummer Hannah Billie and guitarist Brace “Nathan” Paine — deliver garage-blooze basics of muscular backbeats, sinewy riffs, jeans and T-shirts. The Gossip haven’t yet managed to capture in the studio the energy they generate on stage — at least not in its full, bursting-at-the-seams glory. So they’ve started their relationship with Columbia by releasing a live album/DVD recorded in the UK, where they tend to draw larger crowds, at Liverpool’s Carling Academy.

Un-Unbusted

MATT ASHARE — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 19:18:26 GMT

The Billionaires escape from the island
Unbusted. If that name rings a bell, chances are you were around Boston three years ago.

CLASSY SHIT: The Billionaires aren’t trying to be all loud and aggressive.

Unbusted. If that name rings a bell, chances are you were around Boston three years ago, when out of the blue there was a big buzz about this band from the Vineyard who’d managed to get a handful of their songs into the Farrelly Brothers film Stuck on You. They had the support of Juliana Hatfield, who was then dating their frontman, Joe Keefe; Fort Apache vet Paul Kolderie was working with them on a debut album; and they’d been signed by former Geffen A&R bigwig Mark Kates to his local Fenway Recordings label. Everything seemed to be going their way.

And then: nothing. The album they’d been recording with Kolderie for Fenway just sort of disappeared. And so did the band.

“Things had started to go pretty good for us in Boston,” Keefe recalls over his cell on his way to buy cigarettes in Silver Lake, his new home on the West Coast. “And it was the classic example of everyone . . . well, I thought I was pretty fucking awesome. We thought we really had it made and we’d be able to do whatever we wanted — go on the road and, you know, get management. Not big-time or anything like that, but we were excited about the future. But me and my best friend when I was growing up, Jackson Sandland, we ended up struggling for our say in what was happening in the band. And it got pretty ugly pretty quick. We went through some personnel changes. So we went and finished the album we’d started as a five-piece as a three-piece. Everything was really starting to lose its coherence. And then Fenway stumbled. It was like they didn’t know what to do with the record. We were playing in New York and Boston, but something just wasn’t clicking. It got really frustrating for us.”

Keefe, who’d drafted his brother Seb to play drums, was already working on another project, something he and his friend Tim Laursen had discussed while driving around one day in the summer of 2005. With Unbusted, Keefe had been fortunate enough to spend a winter recording with famed producer Danny Kortchmar, a veteran of the ’70s California singer-songwriter scene who’d worked on albums by David Crosby, Carole King, Graham Nash, Jackson Browne, and Don Henley. “He moved to the Vineyard for one winter,” Keefe explains, “and he was looking for a project. So a friend’s father told him about us, and we spent a whole winter working on this elaborate fricking EP with him. It was like spending six years at rock-and-roll college over one winter.”

Political dispatches

MATT ASHARE — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 20:19:57 GMT

State Radio approach punk on Year of the Crow
Last summer, Chad Stokes (né Urmston) had the ultimate New England jam-band experience.

DANGEROUS: The guitar might say “reggae,” but the anger level is in the red.

Last summer, Chad Stokes (né Urmston) had the ultimate New England jam-band experience: he and his comrades in the reggae-loving Dispatch headlined a sold-out three-night stand at Madison Square Garden to raise money for humanitarian aid to Zimbabwe. “It was funny even walking to the rehearsals at Madison Square Garden and seeing our name up on that big jumbo billboard,” he recalls of the experience, which is documented on the Dispatch Zimbabwe DVD that he self-released back in January. “That was a trip. And walking out on stage there was one of the only times I can remember getting weak in the knees recently. I was just hoping the equipment would work and that we’d sound good.”

Which is all well and good. But it’s also very much in Stokes’s past. In early February, the trio are once again on hiatus, with Stokes turning his focus back to the politically fueled trio he now leads, State Radio. As we sit in the Brookline apartment he shares with his girlfriend, there’s a flurry of activity as the rest of the band — drummer Mad Dog and bassist Chuck (no last names, please) — finish packing up the gear for an in-store performance at Newbury Comics to support their boldest disc to date (after an EP and 2006’s Us Against the Crown), the Tchad Blake–produced Year of the Crow (Nettwerk). It’s the last time Boston fans will get to see the band until this summer, when they’ll return from touring Europe with punk standard bearers Anti-Flag and a club tour of the States to headline Bank of American Pavilion on June 28 and then again on August 2 for a “Bikes Not Bombs” benefit.

This marks a major step up in terms of audience numbers for State Radio, just as Year of the Crow goes farther than the band’s previous releases to depart from the lite reggae ’n’ funk of Dispatch. There are still traces of Stokes’s faux Jamaican patois and a few funky reggae breakdowns on the new album. But you get the sense that he picked the muscular feedback and distortion-laced “Guantánamo,” with its references to “the war machine,” “torture advocates,” and a “war president,” as the disc’s opener for a reason.

Canon ball

MATT ASHARE — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 15:55:47 GMT

Carbon/Silicon at T.T. the Bear's Place, April 5, 2008
Britpunk enthusiasts got a taste of what might have been Saturday night as two legends of ’77 — Mick Jones and Tony James — brought their new band Carbon/Silicon to a packed T.T.