Jim Beloff, Dreams I Left in Pockets
Jim Beloff found his voice decades ago when he picked up a ukulele at a flea market, struck a chord, and quit his day job. He has done much to improve the Joe’s stature in the 20th century, helping develop the Flea and Fluke models, publishing the “jumping Jim” songbooks and teaching others to play. Beloff is a skilled arranger of songs by other composers, but he’s always tossed an original song or two into his songbooks and they can be exquisite too. He takes simple concepts of beauty, graciousness and passion and applies them to gentle four-string strumming. I’ve heard Jim Beloff play live a few times, and he’s done a few recordings Before this one, including the lovely dust album rare air with his wife Liz. Dreams I Left in Pockets is presented squarely as a showcase for his songwriting prowess. Some are great advertisements for its favored instrument and the culture that surrounds it: “Blues on a Ukulele,” “That Hawaiian Melody,” “I’m Carry a Tiki Torch for You.” Others are odes to wandering, presumably with a uke in hand: “The Open Road,” “At the Magic Laundromat.” Some are both whimsical and wistful: “Scratchy Records,” “I’m So Happy Not to Be Sad.” The best of the tunes, such as “Charles Ives,” are both whimsical and inspirational, clear and uncompromising declarations lightly filtered through an unassuming uke and Jim Beloff’s own gentle soul.

The Foresters are young, but that’s not really what they’re about. Leader (and eldest of the three brothers in the band) Evan Nork writes about relationships, and society, and common sense. He and bassist Hayden and drummer Liam bash out these songs amiably in a confident, accomplished punk-pop style that allows for melody and harmony and nuance. The Bethany-based band’s new seven-song EP shows how The Foresters are maturing. They can play more complicated riffs. They can sing high notes like Robert Plant. Then again, that may be because their voices haven’t changed yet. Again, that’s not the point. They are present and active and fast and loud and in the moment, and they have fast loud things to say about how people interact in this headlong day and age. They are quick and smart and capable. They are fast and loud. They are young, yes. And they have something to say.

The Cold Rods kept their cool Thursday at the Bullfinch, even when Stanky & Their Gags (who’d ended their “Evening With” set early at D’ollaire’s) wandered in shortly before cliosing time. Most of them anyway; they were short a bass and, uh, congos.

There was enough time for three punk jams, then a quiet after-hours party with the still-smokin’ S&TG. (When we say “still smokin’, you known what we mean.) It’s actually surprising how many songs these two disparate bands both knew.

The Cold Rods and Their Gang otherwise had little in common. There were the three local college chums who gig maybe seven times a year, and then there were the wizened hippie survivors.

Yet we forget how much garage punk can be found in psychedelia. Removed from the need for pyrotechnical virtuosic guitar solos, this was well-blended, slightly softened hard rock. There was cameraderie and an unwillingness to let the music end. So it didn’t. Until the whiskey ran out.

Tonight: Diane Long and Short at the Bullfinch, with songs from both their albums… Head Band Green at Hamilton’s. Stanky & Their Gags would be proud. The rest of us retch… DCWX and ten other bands (TBA) at D’ollaire’s, paying the rent…

Usually when I’m crashing at friend’s parents’ houses, it’s total laze-around time, but this is constant work.

Steve Adamyk Band, Dial Tone.

The Steve Adamyk Band is a punk band from Ottowa, and that Canadian part is significant. They sound as if they’ve learned punk from their fathers’ record collections. They play classic Ramones/Buzzcocks-speed punk. There are a few harmonies and chant-alongs and abrupt chord changes, but all within the realm of straight-ahead no-nonsense mainstream punk rock. They are very good at assimilating this now decades-old style. The production style on this album even sounds old-school, like the way traditional studios would clean up raw punk sounds for public consumption. Something honest and rough occasionally sneaks through this good-natured cleanly delivered Canadian punk, though however happily I can listen to this album over and over, it refuses to captivate me with any original thoughts. This may be the band you’d want on tour to get the crowd moving for a more distinctive headlining act. They are standard-bearers, even if the standards they bear are original tunes that sound remarkably derivative. Really trying to mix my admiration for The Steve Adamyk Band’s remarkable grasp of early ‘80s punk sounds with the fact that I find the songs themselves unmemorable. Great background music for headbanging while typing, however.

Pulling together a downpayment, but can’t find a room to rent.

I find purity and poetry in the simple names given to the feature stories and one-page gags in Archie Comics. When bundled as thick digests, the mass of titles can provide a unique uplifting sensation.

These are the punny, rhymey or otherwise distinctive titles found in World of Archie Double Digest #37 (April 2014):

• For Whom the Bowl Tolls (in which Mr. Weatherbee goes bowling)
• Trail’s End (the ever-popular Archie theme of snow shoveling)
• A Date With Suzy Stringbean
• Wheels of Fortune (a Life With Archie story in which our intrepid teen hero and his pal Jughead are tied up inside a car that is set rolling down a curvy dirt road towards Bottomless Lake.)
• Psychic to Me
• Open and Shut Case
• Bust Out
• Love Out
• Turn Out
• Loan Moan
• The Delicate Disaster
• Team Steam
• The Dating Game
• Spoil Sport
• Problem Players
• Chop Chop
• The Final Test
• Critics’ Choice
• Affection Connection
• Ringmaster
• Miss Beazley’s Gag Bag
• Mister Weatherbee in Hit Bit
• TV or Not TV
• Gig Gag
• Cool Collector
• Glee Spree
• On the Defensive
• Angel With a Pitchfork
• Rap Flap

and

• Doodling Around

Most disappointing Archie Christmas special: The Archie Comics Super Special, which is oversized in format and which promises “over 100 pages of Archie fun,” but which is padded with several non-Christmas stories. Sure, there’s the first Jingles the Elf story, but there’s also, at great length, Part One of the “Bollywood Love” serial and, at even greater length, the entire first 24 pages of the new chapter book Betty: Diary of a Girl Next Door. Of course I own that whole book already, but it’s also a waste of a large-format magazine to blow up those black-and-white book illustrations at the expense of, say, more pin-up pages. Archie Comics Super Special also features the silent-film tribute “Quiet on the Set,” written by Frank Doyle and drawn by Harry Lucey. This is an all-time Archie classic, which first appeared in the 1975 Archie Annual, but it’s here as part of a three-story sampler of stories anthologized in the currently available The Best of Archie Comics Book Four. Again, got it already. Shilling for its other publications is a grand Archie tradition. Rerunning dozens of pages from them in a whole other comic, without warning, is Christmas regifting of the cheapest kind.

The Minor Improvements and The Bug Fixes are apparently both better bands now, but we don’t know quite how. Both have been enhanced with a new rhythm guitarist, the alleged Oswald Xavier the Tenth. But he barely plays, he’s the antithesis of a natural showman, and even the comedy potential of his name seems as yet unrealized.

Where Mr. Xavier really matters is behind the scenes. He’s arguably the best street-flier designer in town right now, and more importantly he’s a street-flier designer who actually makes the effort to get his work seen. We’ve run into Ozzie X (real name as yet unknown) dozens of times in the last few weeks, on the street, hanging his art. His role onstage is strangely muted—both times he played Thursday, with both those bands, his guitar was buried in the mix and he seemed to actively evade opportunities to use the mic.

Why is he even onstage? “He’s a musician first,” the MI’s Flip Casuary counsels. “We respect that. He’s finding himself. You know, he’s never been in a band. He grew up in the sticks, dreaming of being in a band. Now he’s in two.”
“He’s actually pretty amazing,” adds the BF’s Joe Smith. “He writes bridges. Like three of our songs, they had no, you know, bridge, and he came up with those, well, bridges. He hears our music and makes it better.”

Casuary noted that Ozzie X was doing more that it seemed, including working the pedals and feedback for other members of the band.

So what we have here, music fans, is part anomaly, part godsend: The quiet, selfless scenester. We could use more of a show from him, sure, but he’s a character to watch.

The Pixelmaters and The Prizmos at the Bullfinch… The Calcbots (retro New Wave electronica covers) and World Clock turn back time at Hamilton’s, for a college-on-the-hill reunion-party thing that happens to be open to the general public… Neo-prog-fusionists Collage It are at D’ollaire’s. It’s the full show, with lights and projections, not the “Evening With…” rip-off they brought last time. XScope opens…