THE EX 6/12, EMPTY BOTTLE The days when anyone could safely assume that real rock ‘n’ roll was American or British are long gone: in the last couple decades, wave after wave of noise from Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and continental Europe has left us with our ears ringing, thinking, “Damn, I wish I’d thought of that.” Amsterdam’s hardest-working anarchist collective, the Ex, have touched on these shores often enough to be legendary but rarely enough that we’ll never get tired of seeing them. Since the band’s formation in 1979, personnel have come and gone, but as a musical entity the Ex has grown both tighter and wilder, honing its skills in collaboration with Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo, the Dog Faced Hermans, Han Bennink, and the late Tom Cora, among others. Most amazingly, the band has managed to maintain a political perspective in what’s become an increasingly apolitical scene–without losing the unbridled passion and joy it played with ten and twenty years ago. And with Chicago’s US Maple opening–well, I’m not fool enough to try to call the show of the year as early as June, but here’s a strong contender.
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JESUS And MARY CHAIN 6/12, METRO For a few shining moments brothers Jim and William Reid really had their fingers on the pulse of…something. Back in 1985 the Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy, with its walls of feedback and pop-perfect melodies, inspired music writers to create bits of cloak-and-dagger fiction about a secret meeting between the singles-era Beach Boys and the early creepy Velvet Underground in the back room of some goth club to invent summer cruising music for people who don’t like the sun. The band’s first new album since 1994, Munki (Sub Pop), walks that fine line between comeback and cash in, but I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt: though even the eerie throb of “Perfume,” which features wispy guest vocals from Mazzy Star’s Hope Sandoval; the dark, tuneful pulse of “Cracking Up” and “Never Understood”; and the feedback blast on “I Hate Rock ‘n’ Roll” don’t hit with the epochal force of “Just Like Honey” and “Taste of Cindy,” as throwaways go they still put most of my weekly slush pile in its place.
GRUPO MONO BLANCO 6/13, OLD TOWN SCHOOL OF FOLK MUSIC Mexico’s Grupo Mono Blanco is named after a playful white monkey that, according to an old Mexican legend, appears and causes all sorts of mischief among the dancers at the peak of a fandango–not to be confused with the noisy white apes that show up at parties here and drink all the beer. The multigenerational band, led by Gilberto Gutierrez, performs the traditional music of rural Veracruz with a combination of guitars, tambourines, and harps; and the percussion comes from the quijada–a donkey’s jawbone with loose, rattly teeth–and rhythmic dancing, called zapatedo, on a wooden stage. The overall effect for a gringo like me is to cause homesickness for a place I’ve never even been.
