Rent is due again and they’re on to me. Just when I want to live here again I have to leave.

Seasick Steve, You Can’t Teach an Old Dog New Tricks (Third Man

Seasick Steve plays the blues on an electric guitar with three strings removed. His proficiency on such a scaled- back instrument might seem miraculous to guitar fans, but probably not so astonishing to those who play the bass or ukulele. His playing isn’t particularly complex; mainly, he’s got a great sense of rhythm and he indulges in a host of textures and effects that underscore the central “Look Ma! Almost no strings!” gimmick. Whatever voluntary limitations he places on his playing, as with the bass or uke, they’re in service of a grander instrument, which in Seasick Steve’s case happens to be his voice and attitude.

His major accomplishment is to create a gruff stage character that’s a mix of busker and bar hustler, a guy who knows some really cool tricks and knows how to present them for maximum effect.

Which begs the question of how he’ll succeed with a well-produced high-profile studio album, without the flash of his popular series of live-in-concert YouTube videos.  You Can’t Teach an Old Dog New Tricks acknowledges this by opening with announcing that he’s not just a one-trick one-string pony, opening with the subdued acoustic singer-songwriter fodder “Treasures” before moving into the accustomed economy-size pyrotechnics of the title tune.

It’s a sharp enough record, and will appeal to the same post-blues generation that eats up everything Jack White does. (The White Stripes showman didn’t work on this album but has anointed Seasick Steve by working on a couple of Mississippi Fred McDowell covers for him.) It also has a presold audience in England, where Seasick Steve got wide exposure on Jools Holland’s live music show and where this album was produced at London’s Air Studios. Ultimately, you can’t help but feel you’re missing something—the patter, the attitude, the actual thrill of seeing Seasick Steve mangle those strings and whack that wooden box in person. I have the same sense of disconnect from these songs as I had from the Beatlemania Broadway soundtracks or the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow album.

New Kids on the Block and The Backstreet Boys are on tour together, playing the Mohegan Sun Arena June 2. When the bands were first big, they were too young to gamble, though their Svengali promoter Lou Pearlman certainly wasn’t.

It’s hard to argue them as has-beens. They’re playing one of the largest indoor concert arenas in the state, tickets cost $75-$90, and a second show had to be added when the first (May 30) sold out. Granted, it took the lure of both acts to do it, and there’s the added benefit of two or three of the groups’ members having had relatively successful solo (singing or acting) in the past 15 or 20 years. But even Entertainment Weekly had this pegged as a major mainstream tour, not a nostalgia exercise.

I saw The Backstreet Boys at their height, in 1998 at New Haven Coliseum. I still have the useless “Backstage Pass” sticker from that show stuck to a hat somewhere.

The Coliseum was in its waning years, and so, unbeknownst to them, were The Backstreet Boys, who could have gotten a clue from the fact that they were beginning to stretch the definition of “boys.” Kevin was married and in his late 20s while the most boyish of the quintet, Nick Carter, was being upstaged in the cuteness category on this tour by his opening-act little brother Aaron.

I remember the opening acts at that show at least as well as I remember BB (as they were known, usually with the second B turned backwards). Besides Aaron, who entered by jumping through a hoop, then tripping and falling flat on his cherubic little face, there was the female duo S.O.A.P. (this was the era of Spice Girls) and the impressive retro pop of Jimmy Ray, who had his own rockabilly/ techno theme song and a cool stage manner that I thought would carry him far, instead of straight to the undeserved obscurity addressed in hits title song:

“Are you Jimmy ray? Who wants to know?”

I remember watching scores of parents grabbing their kids and fleeing the auditorium after the main Backstreet Boys set so as to beat the traffic out of New Haven back to the suburbs. (It wasn’t even a school night—it was a Saturday in July.) Those folks missed the encore, when the group did the intricate folding chair routine for which they were justly renowned, accompanied by a screening of the Thriller-esque video in which the boys all turn into movie monsters. (I know thus song has a name and a tube and lyrics, but rise were all unavoidable and meaningless, while the video images and chair trick endure.) Those unfortunate tots who were dragged away from the coliseum prematurely probably never forgave their longsuffering parents for this cardinal concertgoing sin. Those scarred youths can now be healed by seeing the Backstreet Men creak through the same routines, and pony up the hundred bucks for tickets themselves.

As for the New Kids, I grew up in the Boston area, so to me they were the white version of New Edition—both groups were brought into being by the canny producer Maurice Starr. I had friends who bragged that they’d actually grown up “on the block” with the New Kids (a well-known neighborhood, since it’s where the Boston Children’s Museum used to be). In the last throes of their remarkably long initial time as a group (a full decade between their formation and the 1994 break-up), they severed ties with Starr, changed their name to NKOTB (which has exactly the same number of syllables as New Kids on the Block), tried new musical directions (particularly rap) for the album Face the Music and played a tour which eschewed stadiums and theaters for large clubs. In New Haven, they played Toad’s Place. The New Haven Advocate sponsored the show (when presented with a list of shows the paper could sponsor, the published picked New Kids because it was the only act on the list she had heard of) and I was assigned to write the cover story. I was able to arrange a phone interview Joey McIntyre—who’d been 12 when he joined the group, and was considerably less cute and cuddly at the age of 22. Mostly we chatted about Boston. Then I asked him what was the most embarrassing piece of merchandise his face had ever been emblazoned on. “Marbles,” he said. I glanced down at my desk, where a colleague had left a container of New Kids on the Block marbles to psych me for the interview, and felt a moment of spiritual transference.

We’re going to day something now which will have you attending every tribute band show which remotely interests you for the rest of your life, and looking extra closely at everyone involved:

It was really them.

The band at that big game weekend gig at Dollaire’s last week was pretending to be themselves.

The drummer has a daughter in the college on the hill, who was graduating. The band is so tight that they all attended the ceremony. But since they weren’t dressed up in scarves and top hats and, like, a quarter mile away from where you were sitting, they weren’t recognized. Not even when they played their own songs the night before graduation at Dollaire’s

There were actually boos when they announced over the PA in the middle of an already band-packed evening that another act had been added. Some cheers to, to be fair– this was an overwhelmingly gracious crowd which fully deserved the bragging rights they now have earned.

Alas, we weren’t among the lucky ones. We were on the block, engaging in a long conversation about beards with a little girl of our acquaintance. You can’t be at everything. But some people can apparently be in two places at once, posing as their own cover band.

Astonishing. Almost as astonishing as the fact that no local journalists got tipped to the gig before it happened, not even by pals inside the club. As far as we know, we’ve got the scoop.

No international celebs expected, but you don’t need a reason like that to turn up at an inspired bill such as Soak ’em for Crutchy, Lousy with Stature and High Times Hard Times, all at the Bullfinch… Newsies  at Hamilton’s, with at least one TBA… Grounds of Brooklyn grinds and funks up D’ollaires; two sets, no slacking….

The whole house goes out to our Chinese place. It’s as if nothing ever happened. Mar and I talk all night.

He’s My Brother She’s My Sister

Appearing live June 1 at BAR.

Their band name has both a frank literalness (the combo is co-fronted by singer-songwriter siblings Rob and Rachel Kolar) and a surprise-hiding humility (the sextet also features a stand-up bass, a cellist, a lap-slide guitar and a tap dancer, with an accordion in there somewhere too). Interestingly, their publicist’s business name is He’s My Manager Entertainment.

All this fingerpointing and identifying can be terrific fun. There’s individuality galore, but also no fear of covering a distinctive classic like Bowie’s Moonage Daydream (with vocal harmonies standing in for the studio pomp instrumental fade-out of the record). He’s My Brother She’s My Sister did both “Moonage” and their poppy original “Escape Tonight” on  NPR’s World Café broadcast this week, but it’s instructive to also check out the live video for HMBSMB’s slow, dreamy, strummy ballad “Wake Your Heart,” which demonstrates that this band, whose showy reputation has preceded it, also has a tranquil side. The band name, and the giddy interplay on a lot of their material, might come off as childlike, but HMBSMB aren’t as young as they sound, and there’s a real maturity in there too.

The L.A.-based band hasn’t toured the East Coast yet, and they crack New England for the first time on Wednesday, June 1 headlining the free weekly Wednesday series of fast-rising national acts at the downtown New Haven nightspot and pizza joint BAR.

Does Connecticut take its live music opportunities for granted? Hartford just hosted one of the most impressive festival line-ups of the season at the B.O.M.B. Fest, a slate as progressive as it was popular.

In  a few weeks, Yo Yo Ma will be playing live on New Haven Green thanks to the International Festival of Arts & Ideas. The classical scene here is already well sated due to those world-class players who serve on the Yale faculty.

It wasn’t the case 15 years ago, but since the rise of the casinos, and the Webster in Hartford, and The Kate in Old Saybrook, and the expansion of the Oakdale in Wallingford, and the increasing willingness of old-school theaters like the Shubert and the Garde and the Waterbury Palace to host pop and rock and country concerts, there’s a potential venue for every size and shape of music act that comes down the pike. And since Connecticut is conveniently located between Boston and New York City, they all have occasion to come down that pike.

So, jaded much? I felt that way when I brought my nearly 7-year-old daughter Sally to the Peabody Museum on Saturday afternoon. Not only was there a brand-new exhibit about bloodsucking insects, the much-hyped British band Stornoway was performing a full set of their original British folk-pop tunes in the museum’s Great Hall—where the dinosaur skeletons are.

Not only was Stornoway playing the Peabody for the second time in under six months, the UK-based band (named for a small island in Scotland) had been persuaded to debut a brand new song at the gig.

Incredulity can be tempered by facts. Stornoway frontman Brian Briggs is a local-boy-made-international-scholar who started the band while getting degrees in ornithology and zoology from Oxford University. His father is a Yale-based paleontologist who is currently serving as Museum Director of the Peabody.

There was an attentive crowd for Saturday’s show, which was free with museum admission. It was an older audience than one imagines the band usually gets, and there were clearly a lot of Briggs family and friends present. Attendance was probably as strong as at the clubs the band plays in Europe, where their debut album Beachcomber’s Windwosill (released on the formidable 4AD label) reached number 14 on the UK pop charts (and number 3 on the indie chart). But in New Haven it was a more casual crowd, with many seeing the concert as a bonus museum weekend attraction rather than a destination in itself.

As for that debut tune, Brian Briggs introduced it jokingly by saying he wrote it in the van on the day before the museum gig because his dad’s staffers had promoted it in a press release. It was, as the introduction forewarned, a minor work. Yet thesimple, under-rehearsed blues riff, albeit one easily livened up by the band’s fiddle, trumpet and wooden-crate percussion.

And the lyrics for “Bloodsucker Blues”—which equated the stinging insects of the adjacent exhibit Invasion of the Bloodsuckers: Bedbugs and Beyond with the emotional suffering inflicted by a demanding wife—made up for its central sexist cliché with an inspired rhyme that fit in beautifully alongside the often scientifically detailed lyrics of other Stornoway songs:

She drinks me down with anticoagulation

A constant flow of mutual flagellation

This parasitical position’s getting critical

Spare me those bloodsucking blues

The song’s chorus:

Bloodsucking blues, doctor won’t you set me free?

Looks like a case of acute matrimony

This lousy spouse has got her mandibles in me

And I’ve got those bloodsucking blues

Briggs sang “lousy” as if it rhymed with “spouse-y” (rather than “drowsy”), emphasizing the buggishness of the word.

For a handful of us, this was a real “I was there” moment to exploit when next conversing with intense nu-folk enthusiasts—a jokey, lighter side of an oft-maudlin band. For others, “Bloodsucking Blues” was a catchy theme song to hum while wandering the Peabody on a Saturday afternoon. Honestly, around here, we treat the constant stream of internationally known pop acts as casually as we treat bugs in the wilderness.

Revenge was sweet for the Old Shorts when they found themselves on the same bill as their nemeses Jam Like a Mother last week. You’ll recall that JAMLAM wedgied The Shorts right out of a gig a few weeks ago by jamming for hours on some insipid pop hit.

How could JLaM have forgotten that imbroglio? Short-term memory loss brought on by mysterious clouds of a suspicious smoke, we wager.

We surely didn’t forget about (or understate) the jam-band’s unforgiveable set-stealing maneuver; we wrote about it here. The event certainly didn’t leave the minds of The Old Shorts; the band’s been seeking some pop payback for the indignity for weeks, plotting their moves carefully. But JLaM didn’t seem to suspect a thing. Not that we’re sympathetic, mind you; back when they delivered the umbrage they were the biggest smarmy creeps we’d seen on a local stage, well, for that whole week. All the more annoying for being oblivious. Unknowing. Wide open.

“We thought about it way too much. It We got nothing done in rehearsals,” says a member of The Old Shorts who prefers not to be identified (except as a member of The Old Shorts). The distraction’s what made the band realize they couldn’t pull off the most obvious plan—the tedious choice of simply doing the same thing back to JLaM at the earliest opportunity, playing so long and hard that the long-haired freaks couldn’t get a note in edgewise. “We’re not good enough to play that long. We don’t know enough songs. Besides, if we did that, we’d lose our own fans.” Short and sweet has its drawbacks.

“Anyway,” pipes up a friend of The Old Shorts who’s sometimes in the band (and who doesn’t want to be identified either), “that just seemed too obvious and boring. We’re all gamers. We’re into strategy.”

So ground rules were set:

1. The comeuppance would have to come on the playing field. No “gotcha!s on the sidewalk, or visiting JLaM’s members’ homes or dayjobs.

2. The punishment would have to fit the crime. The crime, you’ll recall, was that JLaM chose to stay “in the groove” and extend a song interminably at the expense of another band’s entire set.

3. It would have to be cool.

Setting the stage for the rematch was the easy part. The Suburban Arts street festival about ten miles out of town had asked both acts to play. They were among literally dozens of other acts lining miles of bike path, alongside artisan’s galleries (card tables, really), kettle-corn vendors and area residents who were still going to walk their dogs, damn it, along this suddenly bustling thoroughfare no matter what.

What we have left out of this story so far is that Jam Like a Mother are mama’s boys with big trust funds and big allowances. They have nice equipment. They don’t need or know how to use half the gear they willingly pay so much for, except for one gimmick they take full advantage of: Everything’s wireless. The guitarist, the bassist, the singer, even the keyboardist, can wander off on the mildest whim.

That was a known fact. That helped.

Old Shorts aren’t just gamers, they’re hackers. And they know other hackers even cleverer than them. These are the kinds of guys who win at robotics fairs, then relax with punk rock afterwards. While they may not claim to play music well, they can take their guitars apart and put them back together.

It was child’s play to work up a wonder box that could interrupt and overtake the frequencies of the JLaM’s wireless guitar transmitters. A little more difficult, but worth it, to rig a cheap guitar tuner so that it could hear a note, duplicate it, and keep playing it as long as needed. A tech whiz from a local prog-rock outfit, that prefers not to be named, helped.

There’d even been a back-up plan, which itself constituted a more impressive scheme than most vengeful local bands would be capable of. Hidden speaker in a fake sculpture. Seriously. And nobody ever knew.

The main plan was better though, because of the way it totally messed with the heads of Jam Like a Mother (and when we say “heads”…). It happened live. It was as creative and awe-inspiring an involuntary collaboration as you could ever hope to witness.

Brief sound check. Set starts, goes on for a couple of minutes so that JLaM can be lulled into a sense of security and find a groove. Then the madness starts. A low-level buzz, which the band obviously believes is just its own technology glitching a bit due to the outdoor gig.

Then the lead guitar is shanghaied. First, it’s just overladen with soft effects that the band doesn’t even notice. But when the notes start coming faster than the guitarist’s fingers seem to be moving, everyone freaks. A guy in the crowd shouts “Backing tapes!” Somebody else yells “Eric! Come out of there,” which we took as a joke meaning they thought another musician was lurking in the bushes. Little did they know. The guitarist, whose stringy-haired visage had been stuck in that insidious jam-face goon grin since the set started, suddenly grew face muscles—his jaw dropped and his eyes popped as if he’d been possessed. Which he had.

Meanwhile that bothersome feedback buzz has grown into a disco throb, eventually adding a hooligan chant of “Jam Like a Mother, Fucker! Fucker! Fucker!” Parents are covering their children’s ears. Teens are dancing and laughing. Ceramic artworks are quivering from the decibels. The guitarist drops his enchanted axe and it keeps playing.

This is life-changing art at a freaking street festival.

As often happens in times of mid-set crisis, most of the band was either unaware of what was happening to the guitar or too “professional” to stop playing without a signal. The guitarist (forgive us for calling him that over and over; we just don’t want to learn his name) finally was screaming and tossing his instrument on the stage. Yet it played on, and so did the hexed frontman’s bandmates, partly because they weren’t hearing through the monitors much of what the audience was hearing. Their diligence and obliviousness (a real consistent trait with Jam Like a Mother) only added to the chaos and amusement.

How can we reveal so much? Are we sacrificing our pals in Old Shorts just so we can write a fun story? Unfortunately, while some of our info is exclusive, we weren’t the first out of the gate with this info. It was released first in a police report. Luckily, that report was just a $25 ticket dutifully presented to members of Old Shorts for some sort of public disruption. Any attempt at an arrest or a hearing was laughed away before it could even get any further. Old Shorts has paid the fine, apologized for the foul language, and a chastened JLaM urged their parents not to press charges.

Not only was justice done, The Old Shorts got a gig at this weekend’s Underground Arts fair, as a performance art exhibit. Don’t expect it to be a double-bill with JLaM; they’re laying low. It may be true or just a snarky joke, but some say the band has gone acoustic.

Mar’s friend has disappeared. She cries and yells. Don’t know what to say to her.

Anchorless, Anchorless (6-song EP on Ponyrec)

There are so many great Danish pop bands, if you’re willing to excuse how they sound exactly like great American pop bands of five or ten years earlier. Derivative is too cold a description: a band like Anchorless has taken the studio jangle and twang you associate with a thousand acts from Athens, Boston, Bloomington or Seattle and have codified it into the essence of contemporary pop. What you lose in spontaneity and progressive spirit, you gain in refinement. And sometimes that’s just how you want your pop: refined.

…and amiable. There are lots of cheery new-wave “wo-ee-o”s and climactic harmonies on this six-song EP, but it’s even more gracious than that. All six songs have been put out as a free download from the Copenhagen-based PonyRec label and are also all available at Anchorless’ MySpace. They’re worth paying for, but you don’t have to.

I’m finding these tracks irresistible. They remind me of the sort of a singles I’d seek out due to back-pages reviews in mags like Trouser Press in the first throes of the indie revolution. There’s a steady, studied confidence in the grooves. The English language vocals are crisply enunciated, bending to American rock accents the same way The Beatles did. Upbeat with frisky basslines, yet nervy enough to matter. Nostalgia yet new to me. As they bleat so delightfully in “Alignments Bend”: “I like what you do.”