More Larry Jon

Really nice interview with LJW by Stephen Deusner here.

Royal City

Review of the band's new Asthmatic Kitty retrospective here. Recommended.

More Blurting

Review of Foreign Born's Person to Person here. Wasn't blown away.

Ch-ch-changes

Donewaiting head honcho Robert Duffy made an announcement yesterday, but I should probably address it briefly here, since I've been maintaining this blog on a semi-regular basis.

So Duffy's heading to New York to take a great job there, and while he'll be continuing Donewaiting from NYC, he asked me if I'd be the Columbus editor. I was flattered and honored that he would ask me, and I couldn't say no. I'm excited to get started. ...My wife is due with our second child in the next two weeks, so the exact start date is TBD at this point, but probably not before August.

I'll still be writing for The Other Paper on a regular basis. Hopefully a couple of other publications off and on, too. This blog will undoubtedly be updated less often but supplanted with posting over at Donewaiting.com, so add that to the ol' RSS reader if it's not there already.

Comfest is fun

The stabbing puts kind of a damper on the whole peaceful community vibe of Comfest (so sad), but Saturday was a fun day nevertheless. I particularly enjoyed Bookmobile's set (that's singer Sean Gardner above). If you're in Columbus and haven't made it down yet--shame on you!-- there's still good music and fun times to be had today.

More on my Saturday Comfest experience later...

Dirty Projectors - Wexner Center, 6-21

I imagine that by this point, David Longstreth, singer/guitarist and driving force behind Dirty Projectors, is tired of his band being referred to as “brainy.” It’s a tough tag to avoid when you’re a former music-major Yale grad who intricately crafts compositions that are near-impossible to categorize using other musical precedents.

The great thing about Dirty Projectors, though, is that anything that may come across as high-minded is balanced with something high-spirited, thereby dodging pretension. It takes significantly more knowledge and musical prowess than your typical rock band to sing and play the songs this band performed Sunday night at the Wexner Center. Yet the six musicians played with an organic ease and all the while maintained an electricity that was enveloping. (Not to mention the fact that, because the Brooklyn band’s van broke down in St. Clairsville on the way to the gig, they were playing with borrowed gear from the disappointing opener, Skeletons.)

Elvis Costello’s claim that writing about music is like “dancing about architecture” never rang so true as when attempting to describe Dirty Projectors. I could say that Longstreth conjures up the soulfulness and cadence of R&B singers; that the treble-heavy, snaking guitar lines have a distinct African influence; that the three supremely talented female singers contribute harmonies so complex that at times it’s difficult to even distinguish who’s singing; that the drummer’s big beats incorporate oddly-timed experimentalism, reggae and Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks.”

But none of that really does it justice, especially those ladies—Haley Dekle, Angel Deradoorian and Amber Coffman—whose vocal theatrics were consistently the highlights of the show. “Remade Horizon,” off the recently released Bitte Orca, began with an extended vocal intro of start-and-stop, staccato harmonies that sounded so intricate yet so precise, like an entire section of computer-controlled woodwinds. And Coffman’s lead vocals on “Stillness is the Move” showcased a freakish range that could hold its own next to Mariah Carey, a singer she closely resembled on that tune. Coffman threw herself into the song, and her dancing only added to the impact.

It’s a little tough to relate to the lyrics, though, especially in a concert setting. These songs take a little while to comfortably settle. But Longstreth seems to be a lyricist more concerned with how the words sound than what they mean. The singers’ inflections and affected pronunciations convey a word’s impact more than its dictionary definition. The concert opener, “Two Doves,” which featured only Longstreth on guitar and Deradoorian on vocals, was one of the few songs that was entirely decipherable, a (love?) song with a refrain of “Call on me” that starts off describing a lover as a “geranium kisser, skin like silk and face like glass,” but later as a “geranium killer, throat of soil and mind like stone.” The soft song was the closest Dirty Projectors came to a ballad, and it was the prettiest of the night.

“Bitte Orca” wins the prize for most frenetic, cacophonic and virtuosic of the night. The level of choreography was breathtaking, as were the women’s preternatural, siren howls. I also enjoyed hearing “Rise Above” from the album of the same name, which was Longstreth’s re-imagination of Black Flag’s seminal 1981 debut album, Damaged.

Brainy? Yes, but this band-of-the-moment is also a lot of fun.

Larry Jon Wilson

Last year I talked to Jerry DeCicca of the Black Swans about an album he produced by a guy named Larry Jon Wilson, an old Nashville singer-songwriter who hadn't recorded a new album in almost 30 years. We chatted back and forth about the story for a while, and finally Drag City is releasing the record on Tuesday. So after a year of talking and exploring Wilson's music, I was at last able to put some words on paper. You can read the story in The Other Paper this week, or online here.

I had more fun working on this story than any others I've written in a long time. Hopefully that comes through. And I can't recommend Larry Jon Wilson's new eponymous record highly enough.