LONESOME ORGANIST 10/18, Lounge Ax Former 5ive Style keyboard whiz Jeremy Jacobsen might just be making a vain play for sympathy by calling himself lonesome, because on his debut Collector of Cactus Echo Bags (Thrill Jockey) he generates a lot more excitement in collaboration with himself than the hundreds of guitar-toting boys who conceal the fact that they’re starting to hate their band mates behind a facade of grim purpose. And as anyone who’s caught his previous live performances has undoubtedly marveled, Jacobsen is a genuine one-man band in concert as well as on record, banging spastically on multiple keyboards, junkyard guitar, traps, and various other toys while blowing a harp and yodeling through a heavily reverbed vocal channel. His maniacal hodgepodge of funk, rockabilly, jazz, and sound track and broken-down merry-go-round music is the aural fulfillment of the Jim Rose Circus’s ambitions, and much more cost-effective. Grace Braun (see Critic’s Choice) opens; the Sea and Cake headline.
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CHRIS KNOX 10/22, Lounge Ax Video auteur, cartoonist, and Tall Dwarf Chris Knox isn’t just a hero of the New Zealand punk scene–there were times when he was the New Zealand punk scene. (A couple of years ago he filled an epic Forced Exposure profile with scabrous and hilarious tales of provoking fistfights and scaring sheep throughout his native land.) On his solo records he shows his sensitive side–if that’s the word for a sensibility that explores the territory between Jonathan Richman and Lux Interior. His new Yes!! (on Flying Nun, of course) breaks no new ground–unless you count that bagpipe part–but it’s a dirty and painful good time. I nominate “The Sweaty Hide of Circumstance” as song title of the year.
