Andrew Bird’s Bowl of Fire 5/23, Lunar Cabaret It can’t be easy to be a singer-songwriter-fiddler–try belting out your soul while your vocal cords are stretched sideways and your jaw’s clamping a piece of wood to your shoulder–but Andrew Bird (a Chicago-based touring member of the Squirrel Nut Zippers) makes a fine mess of a bad situation. On his CD Music of Hair, Bird borrows freely from Irish, Gypsy, and Appalachian styles, and nods to everything from Ravel to Haitian dance songs, western swing to the Mad Shak Dance Company, in both his recastings of traditional tunes and his own not-too-seriously titled compositions (“Ambivalence Waltz,” “Oblivious Reel”). This is the debut performance of his full old-timey band Bowl of Fire.
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Wharton Tiers, Lake of Dracula 5/23, Empty Bottle Wharton Tiers is known best as a producer–he’s worked with Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr, Glenn Branca, and Helmet, so we know he knows guitar sounds and how to get them. Yet the shimmering, pulsing textures of the “eight mega gtr instrumentals” on his recent Brighter Than Life (Atavistic) never quite push over any sound barriers; only on “Fooled Again” (“This is my Who tribute,” he writes in the liner notes, “though I’m sure it sounds like nothing they’ve ever done”) does he break far enough free of rock constraints to make the cyclical return to them rewarding. Of course Lake of Dracula–with ex-Scissor Girl Heather Melowic and rodent-about-town Weasel Walter–can be counted on to bulldoze them all.
Pinetop Seven 5/24, Schubas For all the corny gunfighterisms on their album cover, Pinetop Seven redeem their mournful Byrdsiness with eerie atonalities and off-kilter intervals that add up to a genuinely haunting whole, wringing all the available pathos from songs saddled with titles like “Out On the Broad American Night” and “Flushed With Sun & Passion.” Another reason country radio don’t want ’em: the heartbreak songs are too wordy to sing along with when you’re drunk. Edith Frost & Chris Mills open; the Volebeats headline.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Photo of Two Dollar Guitar by B.C. Kagan.
