Ugly Americans (Firewater, Cordero/Skeleton Key, Southpaw/Bowery Ballroom, 5/24 & 5/27/08)

["Delhi Wall" by Tod A.  "Clown Graffiti" (Franklin St. in Greenpoint, Brooklyn) by d.billy. (via)]

Firewater (myspace) released a fine record last month, though all your favorite new media outlets were too busy suckling at Scarlett Johansson's massive PR teat to notice.

The collective helmed by singer-guitarist Tod A. has been dealing in Waitsian carny cabaret and world musics since long before the current round of indie indulgences, and it doesn't have to resort to rummaging through record collections and staring at postcards.  Firewater has shared members with Balkan Beat Box and Gogol Bordello; the group fielded on this tour includes a French drummer, a Swiss guitarist, Brit dhol player Johnny Kalsi, and, from "Tel Aviv by way of New Jersey," trombonist Reut Regev.  The Golden Hour, their first new disc in four years, includes recordings of performers met during travels through South Asia and the Middle East.

They're not cuddly enough to get a shout-out from David Byrne.

Firewater - Some Kind of Kindness (mp3) (buy)

Firewater - 6:45 (So This is How it Feels)(mp3) (buy)

These two songs appear back-to-back on Hour - odd, because I think they're basically the same tune reworked with different textures and attitudes:  "Kindness'" vigorous gypsy rumba(*) and kicked-up backbeat make the best of a bad situation; "6:45's" beachside samba repaints paradise as a personal hell.  But they help highlight what works on the record as well as raise a couple of questions.

That the same song can function so well twice in a row shows how capably the band incorporates sounds and styles.  Balkan, Middle Eastern, and Caribbean flavors intermingle in a very fluid way, but it's very much a Western rock album ("Three-Legged Dog" steals some "ooos" from "Sympathy for the Devil;" "Borneo" quotes the Pixies).  The band's lax last effort, The Man on the Burning Tightrope, was too complacent inside its circus tent.  This album was built on the lam and never feels lost.  Wherever it goes, there it is.

A. can be a fantastic songwriter and he writes perfectly for his own voice.  Well-turned phrases and an evocative vocab, when coupled his slurred, world-weary growl, come off as more than bored wordplay.  There's character, here.  The hopelessly frustrated malcontent, the overeducated underdog.  You don't resent the vagabond who occasionally takes refuge in elegant locution.

(He has affectations.  He enjoys similes.  And that lovely "sleeping down under the overpass, dreaming that our dreams have come true" is part of an ongoing series of netherdirectional maneuvers:  Elsewhere on Hour he sings, "I've been down so long that coming up is giving me the bends;" one older work contains the song "Woke Up Down," another the line "going down like a pederast at a boy's school.")

Hour indulges in some obvious political smack - two separate songs bash Bush as both baboon ("got a monkey for a president") and buffoon ("Hey Clown" flips "Those Were the Days My Friend:" "We had it all and then you threw it all away/Hey, clown/You turned our happy upside-down") - but the personal stuff's got punch.  The last resort described in "6:45" is so horribly beautiful.  A vivid skysplash melts morbidly ("the sun has cut the sky and the clouds are still bleeding"), the entertainment is torture ("the band's on fire - it's a pyre and the bodies are burning"), beautiful women only remind you of your broken heart ("she's just the end of a melody that sings to me of you").  You can't run from your memories.  Wherever you go, there they are.  "So this is how it feels to crawl out from the accident and die beneath your wheels."

Easy to see A.'s extended escape - before an overland trek from Delhi to the Afghan border and a jump to Istanbul, there were stints as a teacher in Thailand and a "professional plagiarist" in Calcutta - as domestic despair (a marriage meltdown, the 2004 presidential election, the ongoing yuppification of New York) playing dress-up in worldly concerns.  That's a good thing - anything that gets you out of your house, right? - and there's no attempt on Golden Hour to gloss over the idea that he's running-from more than going-to.  But there are self-righteous motivational burps in the promo material that waft a stink of false empathy over the writing.

At the start of this self-described "infomercial" (put together before Golden Hour had a distributor), A. tosses off stuff like "I kind of wanted to go see the places [America] was bombing" and "in a way this record is a document of my attempt to gain understanding about what my country was doing."  It isn't until four minutes in that we hear he never actually, y'know, made it into Afghanistan or Iraq (though measure of America's influence and reaction to same can certainly be found all over).  The images - helping a stuck car, shaking hands, doing something vaguely votive-looking at something temple-ish - are clumsily chosen if not completely contrived.  And his "Minority" t-shirt makes you want to punch him in the face

So yeah, don't watch that.

Problem is that A. primarily writes in the first person, singular and plural, and the vid above - along with inclusion on the album by random, seemingly meaningless snippets of captured dialogue - implies a noble eye-opening agenda, like this Firewater record might give voice to otherwise unheard victims of our foreign policy.  Extremely iffy when your narrator's smearing out stuff in "Kindness" like "we're so dirty" and comparing his comrades to "sick monkeys in a zoo."

Always best to let folks speak for themselves.  And one of the things that makes it possible to push past presumptions of pretense is the robust party music provided by, among others, musicians A. hired along his trek.  The other is that A.'s oeuvre is well-established.  If it's not enough that the album's structured as a round trip, his voice is distinctive enough that it's hard to think his songs are from anyone's point of view but his own or that of his usual cast of hard-luck itinerants.  Early track "This is My Life" has the former Cop Shoot Cop member singing "I've never cared for authority."  Okay, duh.  I'm over being overconcerned.

*

(If this widget still works, you can stream all of Golden Hour before buying it.  If it doesn't, admire the pleasing colors.)

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("Borneo" is available as a free download at Amazon.  Which is something I've not noticed before.)

*

"This song was written on the border of India and Paki... oh, I'll just shut up."

Firewater's a better live band when the center shifts.

A.'s:  Gangling, craggy, amiable.  Looks like he might live off bummed smokes.  Pinstriped slacks and a black t-shirt with Japanese (?) writing and the stitching on the outside.  (On Saturday.  Monday it was orange and read "SUPER FUNK 69.")  Wheat-colored thatch styled by static electricity.  This set has a couple theatrical moves - there's a spread-armed evangelist bit where "rise up" fingers flirt with hassapiko; "Already Gone" has roller coaster screams written into the lyrics - but he slacks through them enough to inoculate himself from the threat of dramatis personae.

He begged the Southpaw techs to kill the twin spotlights trained on him.  "I don't mean to be a dick about this," he said, "but it's like being a mineral collection."

Given the chance, he happily ceded the floor to either Kalsi or Regev.  The former made the instrumental "Bangra Bros." the highlight of Friday's performance, jumping around behind his dhol, whomping its short side with a long stick and its broad side with something that looked like a leafy crowbar, leading the audience in a bit of call-and-response applause.  The latter's slide work - she switched briefly to "flugabone" and again to an adorable Lilliputian trombone, and had a second effects microphone set up for echoey psychedelic asides - was pulled out as the go-to jam, and for the most part she was amazing.  (At Sunday night's show it seemed like every song had a trombone solo, and every song certainly didn't need a trombone solo.)

It's got to be tough deciding what sort of band to bring along.  There's such a variety of instrumentation on Firewater's records they could either bus along a sprawling selection of role players or distract the audience with a shifting squad of multi-instrumentalists.  "Already Gone," for instance, starts with a jumpy, vaudevillish (**) banjo and - after the occasional brass band blast - morphs neatly into ska, the banjo slurs to something vaguely Oud-like.  Budgetary and sanity considerations helped, I'm sure, in paring it down to a very full-sounding sextet, stocked with musicians like Regev who can seamlessly shift tones and genres between breaths. 

But they also limited the set list to the new material, a shame given these were the band's first shows in its hometown in four years... and the first times I've seen them.  Even with two encores at Southpaw, they only played three older songs ("Some Strange Reaction," "Dark Days Indeed," and another I didn't recognize).  Their fans were game and danced throughout - even calling out requests for new songs - but I really would have liked to hear something from my favorite Firewater record.

Firewater - Another Perfect Catastrophe (mp3)(buy)

1998's The Ponzi Scheme - full of surf-and-spy twang, reeds and strings, expressive keyboard riffs - struck me as the soundtrack to a potential Dennis Potter-style project.  Storywise I suppose it spends more time mired in motivation - Hour's opens with its F.U.-I'm-outta-here, Ponzi's hobo call ("So Long, Superman") comes in its last quarter - but the writing's still sweet:

No plans

I'll go where the machine goes

The past is a placebo

Dissolving in a drain

I sleep beside the railroad tracks

With no rent or income tax

I've got no fixed address now

Waiting for a train

I've always pictured "Catastrophe" - "the floor turns into wall and then the wall becomes the ceiling" (suck on that, Ty Pennington) - as a bar brawl staged at some dockside underworld bar.  The calculated approach of the guitar line, the thuggish pair of saxes.  From the shadows, the Slavic fiddle and sly Asian piano, hints of foreign intrigue. 

It lacks the depths (and possible responsibilities - another monkey in another zoo, here) of Hour, but it's a glorious, stylized fiction.

*

Monday's Bowery show felt tired - maybe it was the near-identical set list, maybe I was just tired, maybe it's that first opener DJ Boro seemed to spin long past his time - and suffered through a host of technical difficulties.  (During a stretch of dead time, someone in the crowd asked a very good question of the bandleader:  "Don't you have any interesting travel stories?"  I mean, seriously.)

But it was more than worth it to see Skeleton Key.  I'd never heard of them before, shame on me, and you have to love a band whose myspace blurb reads "You still exist?"  Led by Firewater's touring bassist and former Lounge Lizard Erik Sanko, the sludgy band had a Grammy-nominated (for packaging) major label record in the late ‘90s, released a full-length follow-up five years later on Mike Patton's Ipecac label, dropped a few scattered EPs.  Not a high-output group.  But they've got one of the most dynamic percussion sections I've ever seen.

There's a band member whose job is just to wail on junk.  Actual junk.

It's more controlled than that sounds.  It sounds like this:

Skeleton Key - The Barker of the Dupes (mp3) (buy)

Piles of discarded metal - propane tanks, garbage pails, what had you - are sometimes played for tone, like a roadkill marimba, sometimes for crunch.  The drummer has a piece of old ductwork mounted into his standard kit, and sometimes pauses to whip a piece of plastic tubing around in the air, but the real dirty work's done by brutish showman Benjamin Clapp.  He chucks broken cymbals up into the air and slugs them on their way down.  He has the worlds most dangerous tambourine:   A rectangular frame, I'm guessing 36" x 24", with CIRCULAR SAW BLADES strung on it.  How he doesn't injure himself or his co-workers I'm not sure, but no one tell OSHA because the dude's fucking amazing.

Kalsi started watching from the band from the side of the stage, then crept out to watch from the main floor.  Maybe for safety's sake, maybe to get a better view of the awesome.

Skeleton Key - Roses (mp3) (buy)

The tunes are good, too.  "Roses," from SK's 2005 EP The Lyons Quintette, provided a natural, incredible climax.  A sad, quiet thing you just know will have the shit kicked from it by song's end, Clapp disappeared at its start.  The trombone solo midway through - the instrument had a spotlight strapped to it, so I couldn't make out who was playing - came from the Bowery's balcony.  When time came to get loud, Clapp was back up there, down on his hands and knees, pummeling at scrap with an honest-to-God hammer.  And it was never less than musical.

If you see these guys on a bill, any bill, go to that show.

*

Cordero (myspace) opened the Southpaw bill.  I'd heard good things?  Maybe I'd heard about someone else and gotten confused?  The Spanish-singing Brooklyn band has a too-timid singer (the most interesting thing about her was her outfit; the sleeves seemed to be vomiting feathers) and a drummer who thinks he's funny.  Tolerable.  Good background music for an outdoor summer conversation about anything unrelated.

*

Also there:

At Bowery:  Flaming Pabulum, Insky's Photos (pics)

At Southpaw:  En/Gender, A Report on the Next Clues (en Francais)

NPR's World Café Live will be broadcasting an appearance on June 18th.

*

New all-chick mux.  This one's got:  Artificial Joy Club, Wanda Jackson, Kelly Pickler, Miranda Lambert,  The Dollyrots, X-Ray Spex, Leslie Gore, Skunk Anansie, Dixie Chicks, The Gits, Neko Case, and Christina Aguilera.

(*)  I need a course in Latin rhythms.  This isn't technically a rumba, I don't think.  But it's such an expressive word.  Rummmmmba.

(**)  Obviously, by this point, I have no idea what I'm talking about.  Per the usual.

tags: firewater  skeleton key  muxtape  concert reviews  

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