As Hawk and a Hacksaw
kicked into their first number at the YMCA Theater last Friday night, I thought, “So this is what the kids are
listening to?” Sitting crossed-legged on the main floor of the theater,
campfire style, indie nation (with a few creaky older types in portable chairs
at the perimeters) listened intently as violinist Heather Trost and
percussionist/accordionist Jeremy Barnes spun through a repertoire of vintage,
odd-metered instrumental Balkan dance music. A few years ago, this stuff would
have been strictly the province of world-music geeks and jazz nerds (in fact,
World Music/CrashArts were the presenter of this event). And I remember about
100 years ago the jazz/world fusionist Matt Darriau playing similar stuff at the old 1369 Jazz
Club. He couldn’t get arrested.
What
accounts for AHAAH’s modest popularity? (The YMCA Theater isn’t that
big, after all, and there was room for plenty more people.) For one, there’s
Barnes’s tenure in indie-rock savant band Neutral Milk Hotel. Then there’s
Trost’s virtuoso charisma -- standing there in her long straight brown hair,
belted patterned short dress, spinning through breakneck fiddle lines while
Barnes thumped a bass-drum head with a foot pedal and wheezed along on
accordion. The other thing is that they’re just plain good. After a
couple of numbers, bouzouki, tuba, and trumpet joined the mix. The music was
both free-wheeling and carefully arranged, with cued fade-out segues and tempo
shifts. Trost brought out her antique-style trumpet-horn-amplified violin and
played it with a string (her own modification of an instrument still in use in
the Balkans). Barnes shout-sang a number. In their way, AHAAH fit right in with
the post-freak folk exoticism of Boston’s Beat Circus and Humanwine,
Providence’s Eyesores, and you-name-it. And there’s the authenticity factor --
Trost and Barnes logged serious time in Hungary learning this stuff from the
people who invented it. More power to ‘em.
It was
fitting that AHAAH have chosen Cambridge’s Damon & Naomi as openers for
their tour [read Michael Brodeur's preview/interview with the band here]. Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang anticipated psych-folk and freak
folk with their own ‘90s Amer-indie take on the British folk tradition. They
pride themselves on playing unapologetically slow, sad music. Or they just
can’t help themselves.
These days,
they’re touring behind their Sub Pop Years compilation (20|20|20), and
at the Y, despite the gorgeous sadness of it all, I was reminded of how funny
they are in concert. Krukowski delivered one dry-witted one-liner after another
between songs, introducing “New York City” as “echt ‘90s indie rock,”
and pointing out that several songs on The Sub Pop Years were written
“in a rent-controlled apartment right here in Central Square.” Karl Marx, who
features in “Eye of the Storm,” was referred to as “a 19th century romantic
poet.”
And then
there was the music, still gorgeous after all these years. They began with Tim
Buckley’s “Song to the Siren,” Krukowski taking the lead vocals, Yang
harmonizing. Damon & Naomi’s principle collaborators in concert on recent
records have been Neil Young-ish pysch-rock guitarist Michio Kurihara (of the
Japanese band Ghost) and the Boston horn duo of saxophonist Bhob Rainey and
trumpeter Greg Kelley. Here it was just the assertive strum of Krukowski’s
acoustic guitar and Yang’s keyboard -- especially effective when played in its
rich, sonorous organ setting.
Like the
Buckley --- and despite what Krukowski said about “New York City” -- everything
they played sounded both up-to-the-minute and timelessly ancient . “We’re going
to play this song as slowly as possible,” Krukowski said before “Lilac Land,”
the “saddest song in a career of sad songs.” At times, the combined vocal
harmonies -- Krukowski’s high keen, Yang’s long-toned laments -- and the mix of
acoustic guitar and keyboards, conjured a third voice, as if the Y’s acoustic
itself were a “sympathetic” string being sounded. Sadness never felt so good.
--Jon Garelick