Rock Gods #129: Adventures in Our Little Music Scene

Somebody knows how to stretch a pun to get a gig, so the Bad Housekeeping Seals played the state aquarium last Thursday.

“We did it as just the BH Seals. People kept asking us what a BH Seal was, like it was some rare class of seal,” says vocalist/ guitarist Bo Ra. “We didn’t want to blow their illusions, so we clammed up. So to speak.”

Not that the BHS didn’t bone up a bit on subjects aquatic: the band learned a wild surf rock medley with just a couple of rehearsals. “You get some amazing echo in an aquarium,” Ra offers. “It adds tone to the instrumentals. And it also helps cover up your mistakes.”

One seal-like mistake, however, was hard to miss. “I tried to balance a ball on my nose,” Bo Ra says, chagrined. “It came down hard and I think it cost us a microphone.”

Honey Spot, The Sleepys, Certified No Brainer and Companions & Homemakers at the Bullfinch, including some shared songs…. The  Hooss Tonics, Pre-Owned Center and The Sacred Hearts at Hamilton’s… Hamburg Sud and an unknown opening act (involving dogs, perhaps?) at Dollaire’s…

Listening to…

The Revere, Ashia

A power trio that does ongoing multi-character concept albums about romantic identity in the modern age. In the same way that the well-enunciated narrative-filled lyrics pause for anthemic choruses, the jangly rhythm-guitar backgroundstrums ascend into frantic arena-rock power chords. (The EP was co-produced by the guitarist from Sister Hazel, which should give you a good idea of the straightforward old-school rock attitude at work here.) At the risk of using “power” as an adjective for the third time in a short paragraph, Ashia’s title tune (pronounced Ah-shee-ah, with equal emphasis on all syllables) is a power ballad that may slow the pace but actually helps propel what you imagine the plotline to be, and is followed by an even gentler survival-of-the-spirit tune, “I Will Arise,” which at one point erupts into Broadway-intense actor/vocals over classical-guitar noodlings. It’s impressive when a mere four tracks can add up to a interlocking rock statement, like a fucking fugue or something, but will be no surprise to fans of the first Reveres album, The Great City, which first set this epic in motion. A full-length sequel is expected, and required.

An Inflated Sense of the City

It was late Saturday afternoon and the Arts on the Edge festival was ending, but there is still a long line of children waiting to have balloon animals built to their specifications by the unflappable Evan Gambardella, who is committed to inflating and stretching balloons until every last tot is satisfied. Festival cleaner-uppers come and take away his table; he moves his wares to the brick ledge of a deserted storefront. That surface proves too hot and jagged for balloons, so Gambardella shifts across the street, and the line of customers follow as if they were the string on an errant balloon on a gusty day. He keeps pumping and twisting outside Creative Arts Workshop (which really, come to think of it, should offer a workshop on balloon animal craftsmanship). Dogs, monkeys, aliens emerge from his nimble hands. My own children get the balloons they sought, and we head down the street for coffee—you know, at Koffee? Half an hour later, we glance down the block and Gambardella’s still at it. You can’t pop this guy.

 

Just as we’re leaving the coffeeshop, one of the workers cleaning up the street ambles up with some of the gigantic round balloons which decorated Audubon Street during the festival. We walk them gingerly home, about eight blocks.

 

As we pass Toad’s, I notice a familiar face—familiar from music videos and from one of my favorite rock albums released last year.

“You’re from Titus Andronicus, right?”

“Yes,” says the band’s lead singer Patrick Stickles, grinning in his rabid-dog manner, then quizzes me amiably about the balloons. He wants me to bring them to the club for that night’s show. Titus Andronicus is all about off-the-cuff punk pageantry.

I thank him for playing so often in New Haven. “We love New Haven,” he says.

On days like Saturday, so do I.

Rock Gods #128: Adventures in Our Little Music Scene

We know more than one band that’s given listeners tinnitus—one of them, The Adventures of Tin Tinnitus, brags about it in their very name. (Please don’t go see them.) They’re not all willfully cruel, however. We know an act who fractured a fan’s eardrum, and was so remorseful that to this day they give a percentage of all their gig money to deafness charities.

So, ear damage galore. But until last week, we never knew a band whose sonic ferocity actually killed a squirrel. Now that’s some kind of bragging rights.

It happened at Hamilton’s, to the Yellow Pinkies, and could scarcely have been more grisly. The song, funnily enough, was called “Skunk”; it’s the one where singer Penny screams “you stink!” like a billion times. At about the 150,000th refrain, a pal pointed out to us that one of the ceiling tiles above the stage was trembling and cracking. Dust was settling on the stage and getting blown about by the whoosh from the monitors.

Then the sky opened up and a stiff furry figure plummeted onto one of punk percussionist Hy-Spy’s overturned trash cans. Hy-Spy (aka Hyram Gaspiri—his parents were into opera and stuff) says his first impression was that one of his cans had gone over by itself—happens a lot—so he just kept thrashing. The squirrel, clearly seen falling by much of the audience, flipped between Penny’s legs and balanced off the front of the stage, teetering with rictus.

There were calls to stop the show, and just-as-loud demands (which sounded like “Whoo!”) to keep it awesome. The anti-PETA punks won out, mostly because the band had no idea exactly what was going on. They were signaled at the end of the song and a hurried clean-up ensued, featuring buckets of that smelly pine cleaner they use in the Bullfinch bathrooms.

Although the diagnosis was that the poor squirrel was probably dead long before the gig, Hy-Spy says he spent the rest of the night in an emergency room getting a tetanus shot “just in case.” Punk rock! And no busted eardrums.

The Ancient Grains, Nature’s Path and Amaranth at the Bullfinch, some kind of hippie-dippy wingding… The Keen Wahs, jamming the surf at Hamilton’s with fellow West Coast cover act Tree Nuts… Singer-songwriter Kamut Khorasan at D’ollaires—“An Evening With,” as they say, with no opening act and no backing band…

Listening to…

Sun Araw, “Crete” (listen here)

This is the modern indie version of a late-‘70s European-prog band like Tangerine Dream—same grandiose imagery and leisurely groove-finding, but without the bloat. Its leanness is what makes this instrumental track (which lasts nine and a half minutes but seems like an hour) at all palatable to me. You can sense the sweat; the creativity is feverish, even if the rhythm is laid back. “Crete” is from the presumed concept album Ancient Romans, on which all the tracks have titles from antiquity, like “Impluvium,” “Lute and Lyre” and “Fit for Caesar”). Sun Araw, otherwise known as Cameron Stallone is currently on an East Coast tour, playing New York, Maryland and New Jersey between June 2 and 7.

Comics Book of the Week

Love From the Shadows

By Gilbert Hernandez (Fantagraphic Books, $19.99).

Gilbert Hernandez has done more to articulate the social dilemmas of large-breasted Hispanic women and nerdy space aliens that any other writer I can think of. One half of the legendary brother combo who created the indie-pioneering Love and Rocket comic book, Gilbert is much more prolific than his brother Jaime, having ventured solo in mainstream comics series, graphic novels, even a wacky public access sci-fi TV series.

 

Much more than Jaime’s more grounded, more realistically drawn social dramas, Gilbert uncovers galactic conspiracies, massive frauds against family members, wild flights of imagination which alter the universes of key ongoing characters, then alter them again, then bring them back to earth as if nothing had really happened.

But the more he exaggerates the real world, the more mystical his stuff becomes. In his erotic series Birdland, characters had flashes of cosmic understanding in the midst of orgasms, only to completely forget the revelations immediately afterwards. In his Love and Rockets stories, characters hold lifelong obsessions that result in massive physical changes and major psychic obstacles. The narratives are propelled more by the forces of the universe than by any plot points.

Love From the Shadows is the third in a series of hardcover graphic novels Hernandez has published since 2007 through Fantagraphics (the longtime publisher of Love and Rockets, the acclaimed indie comic Gilbert does with his brother Jaime). There’s a related volume, Speak of the Devil, which came out via Dark Horse Comics in 2009. The main trilogy stars Rosaldo Martinez, nicknamed Fritz for her resemblance to the knock-out aunt of Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy. Fritz has had a long history in the Hernandez canon. She was in a devastating codependent S&M relationship with a self-help guru. She has been visited by space aliens on numerous occasions. She has been a B-movie goddess and a psychiatrist. Hernandez has described these latest adventures as adaptations of the movies in which Fritz has appeared, then clarified that these are not style parodies or meant to show any specific cinematic influence. In fact, they’re elaborate, complex, open-ended psychodramas which, thanks to the comics medium which Hernandez has long since mastered, add a dreamlike and ever-mutating quality which refreshingly distorts and expands any attempt at a conventional narrative. Some panels of Love from the Shadows are hazy and twilit and ruled by nature, others are uncomfortably confining. There are casual sidewalk dialogues and suspenseful journeys into caves. There are intimately familiar characters and maddeningly distant ones. There’s magic.

You can gobble up a Hernandez story in no time, leaving you wanting more. Luckily, he’s one of the most prolific artist/writers in the indie comics realm, so there’s always more to scarf down. Fritz, last seen shuddering tensely on street corners, then vanishing naked into a yawning chasm, may have been betrayed once again by those she’d come to trust, but she will live to love another day.

Rock Gods #127: Adventures in Our Little Music Scene

Latest band top be denied a gig at Hamilton’s due top a perceived drug- related band name: Hypostylus.

“They hear hypo and think hypodermic needle,” says self-described “science geek” bandleader Marsh, who insists he wasn’t trying to cause any trouble. “First of all, a hypodermic needle doesn’t necessarily have illegal drugs in it. Second, I got Hypostylus from the Latin name for a prehistoric horse.

Indeed, hypostylus the bands sounds remarkably like a prehistoric horse. Do the field work and discover for yourself Sunday night. It’s a grunting, trotting, branch-swinging kind of thing, not the pristine electronica you might expect from a science whiz. “Anthropology’s messy,” Marsh postulates. “So is my band. But,” he winks, “we’ve calculated it all out cleverly in advance.” Also on the bill: The Othnielia Wrecks and Archie & the Op Tricks.

Hustling at Hamilton’s, same night: The Bone Urges and The Ray Darts, whose new song “Middle Awash” is taking them in a whole new direction. Write more originals, guys!… D’ollaire’s gets all sensitive and dark with the supposed cutting-edge capers of The Anceps and The Robert Brooms, but it all still sounds like fossilized hard rock to us…