in performance: heartless bastards
heartless bastards: dave colvin, erika wennerstrom, jesse ebaugh
As of last night, Christmas was a mere week away. But there wasn’t any holiday slant at all to the thick power trio charge Erika Wennerstrom designed with her newest Heartless Bastards lineup at The Dame.
Though the singer/guitarist was a congenial host, flashing broad smiles to the sizeable crowd between songs, her music was spun from a dark, dense yet often hopeful fabric. Vocally, emotively and, at times, instrumentally, the trio recalled the muscular attitude Johnette Napolitano fashioned two decades ago on her first albums with Concrete Blonde. Wennerstrom’s music wasn’t quite that anthemic. But the husky authority of her singing and the band’s assertive rhythmic drive, particularly the tight, thunderous support drummer Dave Colvin summoned on Searching for the Ghost, brought more than a few Blonde moments to mind.
Though it wasn’t openly flaunted, there was also a pronounced power pop undercurrent to Wennerstrom’s songs, from Jesse Ebaugh’s opening bass stutter during the Ramones-like New Resolution to the crankier Neil Young guitar colors of Blue Sky.
Not everything could be so quickly pegged to past influences, though. Gray hitched a theme of personal restoration to a pop assault the Bastards could rightly call their own. A similar sense of personal rediscovery (”things are coming into focus”) propelled Into the Open, where Wennerstrom lightened the volume for an introductory keyboard melody but not the show’s inherent drive and restlessness.
I am a native Kentuckian and freelance journalist who has been writing about contemporary music for the Lexington Herald-Leader since 1980. I have not a lick of honest musical talent myself, just a pair of appreciative ears for jazz, folk, blues, bluegrass, Americana, soul, Celtic, Cajun, chamber, worldbeat, nearly every form of rock 'n' roll imaginable and, when pressed, the occasional tango and polka.