The Musical Box

battlefield band: sean o'donnell, alasdair white, mike katz, alan reid. photo by louis de carlo.

When asked at last night’s taping of the WoodSongs Old-Time Hour at the Kentucky Theatre to describe the instrument he cradled in his hands, Battlefield Band’s Mike Katz didn’t hesitate. “It’s beautiful,” he said. “It’s the sexiest of all instruments.” Then again, how else would you expect a six-foot-something Scot with a beard that would put ZZ Top to shame to profess his love for the Highland bagpipes?

Katz actually spent more time doubling on bouzouki last night, meshing with fiddler Alasdair White and guitarist Sean O’Donnell to create a sort of Scottish string band hybrid sound. Still, the pipes wheezed, whirred and roared to attention during the Counting Cowries finale of the Ku’ula-kai medley, one of four “pursuit of wealth tunes” Battlefield Band pulled from its new Zama Zama (Try Your Luck) album.

Once considered a bit of a rogue Scottish folk operation for its sometimes contemporary accents, Battlefield Band steered down a largely traditional path last night with the dance hall flavor of founder Alan Reid’s electric keyboards taking a back seat on the string driven Baile An Or (Gold Town).

But the traditions surrounding the performance took flight from Scotland more than once. While Plain Gold Ring became a lament of Celtic-spun desire thanks O’Donnell’s stoic vocals, the tune didn’t originate in ancient Scotland at all.  It instead emerged on American pop charts in the ‘50s as a hit for Nina Simone. Then there was the blues spark that prefaced the bagpipe celebration of The Pretty Apron. And let’s not forget that the title Zama Zama boasts zulu ancestry.

Adding to the program’s international thrust was Bardstown multi-instrumentalist Pauly Zarb, a native of Australia. Much of his set leaned toward Americanized pop-folk performed in almost vaudevillian one-man-band fashion with Zarb juggling keyboards, congas and guitars with his hands and kick drum and hi-hat with his feet. A nod to his homeland by way of a cover of the 1982 Men at Work hit Down Under added flute to the mix.

Zarb and the Battlefield Band also teamed for impromptu jamming at the show’s conclusion. While neither really needed the other’s help, the onstage bonding was fun to watch. But in the end, when Katz cranked up the bagpipes one last time during the encore of The Merry Macs (from Battlefield Band’s 2001 album Happy Daze), the global summit wound down as that sexy beast from “the ol’ kintry” took centerstage.

jolie holland. photo by scott irvine.

Even in its rockier moments, like the ones that define her wonderful 2008 album The Living and the Dead, there remains an unmistakable intimacy to Jolie Holland’s music. It requires space and demands attention. So placing her stories of addiction, abandonment and faith on display at the new Woodland Ave. music club Cosmic Charlie’s may not have been the most skillful booking job in the world. Located in the same space that occupied the old Lynagh’s Music Club, the room’s design seems to almost amplify the noise made by restless bar crowds - and last night there was a wealth of it. There was so much, in fact, that the musings of Holland and accompanist/guitarist Grey Gersten almost seemed like a secondary part of the bar atmosphere.

Amazingly, the performance drew a hearty crowd - a feat in itself, considering the concert received almost zero publicity. But it was disheartening to find nearly one-third of the crowd located at the back end of the room near the bar treat an artist and guest (and a performer they forked over 10 bucks to see) with such flippant resignation and ill respect. On club atmosphere alone, the evening was a disappointment.

Now, take away the offstage distractions and you were left with a rather accomplished performance. Holland painted musical portraits with a vocal accent beautifully stalled between the longing of Lucinda Williams’ Lone Star drawl (Holland, likewise, is a Texas native) and the soul/jazz phrasing of such timeless stylists as Billie Holiday. Instrumentally, she colored her tunes with rhythms from a weather-beaten Epiphone guitar and a handcrafted, cigar box-shaped violin, although Gersten’s keen guitar leads propelled the material

In terms of repertoire, the performance was a delight, from the show-opening montage of death, love and loss in Mexico City to the lone encore - a cover of alt-country fave Freakwater’s Gone to Stay. In between, the performance revealed snapshots of Western-flavored mystique (Roll My Bones) and rural Appalachian fancy (Alley Flowers) along with a few fun, well-chosen covers (Michael Hurley’s O My Stars and Sonny and the Sunsets’ Halloween-themed Death Cream).

Topping everything, though, was the highlight tune from The Living and the Dead - a remorseful but ultimately elegant romantic still life called Palmyra. Quietly rugged as this version was, it was still beautifully restless, emotive and tense enough to deflect the dismissive bowling alley ambience of an uninvolved bar crowd.

sergio dias of os mutantes.

Midnight was less than an hour away when Os Mutantes took the stage last night at Buster’s to close out the Boomslang festival. But for the duration of its 80 minute set, the sunny inspiration of the band’s Brazilian homeland brought an ample measure of sunlight to the room.

Though often pinned as a psychedelic band - a label made good on when founder/frontman Sergio Dias let his guitarwork bow happily to distortion during the encore jam of Bat Macumba or fly with Zappa-esque animation on A Hora e a Vez do Cabelo Crescer (Cabeludo Patriota) - Os Mutantes unleashed all kinds of stylistic invention during the performance.

Top Top strutted to a funk/pop groove, Anagrama brought in some very Americanized pop/soul inspiration and the piano ballad Balada do Louco sailed from Hey Jude-era Beatles to crunchier guitar rock terrain.

And then there were the lovely moments where the Brazilian heritage was championed not only by the band but by a hearty pack of countrymen in the audience who waved the nation’s flag and sang along in Portuguese.

Baby, for instance, was pure pop-flavored bossa nova as well as a lyrical showcase for singer Bia Mendes while 2000 e Agarrum dizzily juggled warp speed samba, carnival-esque pop and shards of mambo.

But the show closing encore of Panis Et Circensis literally said it all. Just as the evening opener Tecnicolor introduced the band’s bright pop voice in English, so did the mantra-like chorus of the finale: “The music lighted by the heat of the sun.”

On a chilly October night, the beaches of Brazil might as well have been on the moon. But through a performance that was ceaselessly inviting and upbeat, the warmth of Os Mutantes’ music more than compensated.

kings of leon: matthew, caleb, nathan and jared followill. photo by lego.

“We’ve had a hell of a year,” commented Caleb Followill after On Call, a blast of cerebral Southern soul that morphed into brawling post-punk pop, wound down last night at Rupp Arena. “Who’d have thought?”

Who indeed? Maybe we can start with the 9,200 very vocal fans that turned out for the show. A year ago, few, if any of them, would have even imagined Rupp as a workable performance home for this band of three brothers and their cousin. But things change quickly when you come up with a hit album that takes its sweet time ascending the pop charts to remain a Top 30 seller 54 weeks after its release.

Needless to say, that recording, Only By the Night, figured prominently in the 95 minute performance. The show, as does the album, opened with a one-two punch of Closer and Crawl. The former employed a bass hook by brother Jared that sounded like a synthesized loop to usher in the sweaty, scratchy singing of brother Caleb. The latter set up a serious sonic roar anchored by cousin Matthew’s guitar lead - a sort of dissonant, Southern inflected reflection of early U2 music - and brother Nathan’s jackhammer drumming.

That was the elemental thrust of the show right there - four family mates playing with focus and intensity, creating an original spin on Southern music with an increasingly anthemic pop appeal in the process.

Of course, with Kings of Leon now being an arena band, the stage presentation came with a few bells and whistles. Specifically, video screens projected keenly edited images of the onstage action. The visuals amounted to what was, in essence, a made-to-order music video that nicely augmented the no-frills performance.

There was a touch of humor, as well, as when the screens briefly jumped from live action to splice in the silent, split-second screams of a ‘60s Hollywood vixen (Janet Leigh from her Psycho days seemed to be the inspiration) during Charmer, a tune already ripe with zen mischief ( “she stole my karma… sold it to the farmer”).

The U2 references reappeared often as the show progressed, as in the mix of stuttering guitar and militaristic drums during Only By the Night’s Be Somebody - not to be confused with the monster radio hit Use Somebody from the same album, which was served as an encore - and Sex on Fire. But this was by no means a show of derivative influences. Kings of Leon has nicely allowed what was once a fairly primal, almost rootsy sound to evolve into something more expansive.

Last night, during an encore of Knocked Up (from the band’s underrated third album, Because of the Times) a percussive shuffle bled into a simple, roaming bass line - the kind that sticks in your brain for hours. Then a guitar groove emerged, all bright and atmospheric. It sounded like something the veteran British guitar pioneer Robert Fripp might create were he from Tennessee.

Ultimately, such a metamorphosis revealed the key to the show’s potency (and, perhaps, to Kings of Leon’s overall appeal) - the ability to retain its Southern heritage regardless of how dense, brooding, mysterious or ambient the music became.

The British band White Lies opened the evening with a good-natured set of ‘80s inspired pop. True to those times, songs like Farewell to the Fairground were built around efficient guitar and keyboard melodies. The high, winding vocals of Harry McVeigh, which very much brought bands like The Fixx and The Outfield to mind, nicely completed the retro fit.

mission of burma: bob weston, clint cowley, peter prescott, roger miller. photo by kelly davidson.

Among the final snapshots offered from the first night of the first Boomslang festival was that of Zappi Diermaier, drummer and co-founder of the German psychedelic industrial band Faust, taking a welding saw to a weathered sheet of metal above his percussion riser while the dwindling audience faithful near the front of the stage at Buster’s (thinned not from the decidedly abstract stance of the music, but by the simple fact that the clock has spun past 2 a.m.) leapt in pogo-like fashion to the drone like groove. Sadly, this was as experimental as Faust got.

zappi diermaier, jean-harve peron of faust.

For a band known for fashioning wondrous collages of rhythm, noise, spoken dialogue and electronic mischief, Faust’s 75 minute Boomslang outing was a sort of self-involved bit of exhibitionism. That was especially the true of the very odd rock star postering of British guitarist James Johnson. Bassist/co-founder Jean-Herve Peron, however, nicely summoned a bit of the band’s old krautrock magic by setting 1971’s It’s a Rainy Day, Sunshine Girl to a sort of hippy happy drone.

Sure, it was fascinating to watch a living bit of prog rock and psychedelic history in action, especially since Faust so seldom tours North America, much less Kentucky. Other than that, though, Faust’s sense of musical invention was disappointingly static.

The evening’s big surprise, though, was the veteran Boston post-punk trio Mission of Burma. The set understandably focused on fine new material from what is only the band’s fourth studio album in 30 years, The Sound The Speed The Light. Though the punkish Burma spirit was still bounteous enough to make you think the band was from Britain instead of Boston, there was also a muscular precision to the musicianship. It was largely defined through the tireless drum fills of Peter Prescott, although guitarist Roger Miller and bassist Clint Conley provided ample rhythmic and vocal crunch on new tunes like Possessed and Blunder.

As usual, a forth member, Bob Weston was back at the soundboard manipulating mixes. But aside from a few intriguing washes and effects, his work was largely lost in the rugged, rockish charge the Burma trio summoned onstage in decades-old rockers like That’s When I Reach for My Revolver and This is Not a Photograph.

While expectations were huge for Faust, night one of Boomslang clearly went to the Burma boys.

mary chapin carpenter.

As twilight gave way to night, as dipping temperatures sent patrons to sweaters and blankets, as a full moon lit up over the stage at Equus Run Vineyards like a neon marquee, Mary Chapin Carpenter confided that fall was her favorite time of year.

She certainly dressed the part, performing her entire 90 minute concert last night wrapped in a thick scarf. But the setting and the season fittingly complimented tunes already rich with an autumnal intimacy.

Admittedly, having only longtime allies John Jennings on bass and Kevin Barry on guitar as her support team onstage made the music all the more delicate - to the point, even, that pockets of audience chatter seemed especially intrusive. But there remained, even in the more assertive songs Carpenter performed last night (such as the radio hits Shut Up and Kiss Me and I Feel Lucky, both of which opened up enough to let Barry freshen the tempo with tastefully rugged guitar breaks), a conversational air that beckoned the crowd to put down the wine glasses and listen close.

When the music became as chilled as the evening temps, this truly became an performance full of aural fall color. The title tune to 1995’s Stones in the Road album, for instance, was delivered with a quiet but pensive grace. Twilight, the closest thing offered to an obscurity all night (it hailed from 2007’s The Crossing), unfolded with a lovely mantra-like chorus. And All the Sad Songs, one of two unrecorded works performed from an album Carpenter will begin recording later this month, glided along with a sort of effortless yet poetic melancholy that has long been an earmark of her best work.

There were airs of playfulness, too. Barry morphed the guitar hook on I Take My Chances so that Carpenter could insert, of all things, some broken verse from Blue Oyster Cult’s Don’t Fear the Reaper. And even though her full band was absent, the Carpenter trio still managed to convincingly substitute hearty Americana twang for Cajun-ization on the show closing encore of Down at the Twist and Shout.

Still, it was those moments when the stark detail of Carpenter’s most modestly disquieting works, such as the Come On Come On stunner He Think He’ll Keep Her, hung in the autumn air that seasonal charm, performance intimacy and real life reflection all beautifully merged.

Don’t think for a minute that Monday’s Silversun Pickups/Manchester Orchestra/Cage the Elephant sellout show was the only multi-act bill Buster’s has in store for us this week. Tonight, the club brings us a double-header of Shooter Jennings and JJ Grey & Mofro.

Jennings, of course, is the son of country outlaw Wayon Jennings. But he has forged his own electric country sound on a trio of Universal South studio albums over the past four years. While songs like Busted in Baylor County possess much of the gift for narrative that made his father’s music so distinctive, the younger Jennings is also right at home exploring dark rural inspirations with potent, rockish backdrops that ignite fully onstage.

A new anthology album with ultra cheapo album art titled Bad Magick suggests Jennings’ tenure with Universal is at an end. Their loss. Perhaps a tougher independent label like Bloodshot can serve as a more fruitful home.

Grey and Mofro popped into Lynagh’s in 2002 with their swampy Floridian soul and funk music and then spent most of the ensuing years establishing a devout fanbase in Louisville. A WoodSongs set last winter followed by a near sellout Saturday show at The Dame in February suggested Grey’s earthy deep Southern grooves are finally starting to sound sweet to Lexington.

2008’s ultra funky Orange Blossom album remains the most recent Grey/Mofro release. But a new vinyl only anthology called The Choice Cuts will hit stores in November.

And even though we’re referring to the show here as a double bill, the retro-rock minded Brooklyn blues/soul trio Earl Greyhound, which kind of sounds like a Muscle Shoals variation of early ’70s Black Sabbath, will open the evening. Dig it.

JJ Grey and Mofro, Shooter Jennings and the .357s and Earl Greyhound perform at 8 tonight at Buster’s Billiards’s and Backroom. Tickets are $17. Go to www.bustersbb.com.

silversun pickups

For the first band, it was homecoming of sorts. For the second, it was something akin to a metal-esque exorcism. For the third, it was a cheery though somewhat stifling way of saying hello.

That was the breakdown at Buster’s last night, as Monday played out with three popular indie bands, all of which were making Lexington debuts. We say indie here more as matter of reference. The new albums by Cage the Elephant, Manchester Orchestra and Silversun Pickups have all received a serious major label push. Still, all three bands possessed an immediacy far removed from corporate rock convention.

cage the elephant.

First up was Bowling Green’s Cage the Elephant, a feisty punk-pop band with a wiry lead singer named Matt Schultz that moaned, shouted and half-spoke his way through such retro-charged tunes as Back Against the Wall, Free Love and In One Ear. A taste of early ‘60s Stones surfaced here, a blast of Iggy Pop countered there. While there was a welcome punkish thud to Schultz’s singing, much of the 45 minute set seemed more accepting of pop inspiration than Cage the Elephant’s recent self-titled debut album. Plus, it was a blast to watch Schultz concede his delight in being “home” before stage diving into the crowd.

manchester orchestra

Atlanta’s Manchester Orchestra followed with a set full of more insular intensity than the evening’s other acts. Songs like Shake It Out and I’ve Got Friends also possessed a spiritual fire ignited by the high, tense tone of Andy Hull’s vocals, chunky guitar passages that bowed deeply to metal and a hardened percussive drive. But the set closing The Only One (performed as a trio piece with Hull, bassist Jonathan Conley and keyboardist/percussionist Chris Freeman) pinned a more human urgency upon such confessions. It was an intriguing though somewhat oppressive performance. Where Cage the Elephant presented its music as a sort of participatory brawl, Manchester Orchestra seemed remote. The members plowed through the set without saying a word to the crowd, waved goodbye and were gone.

Rounding out the evening was Los Angeles’ Silversun Pickups and a set of more pop-conscious material with a modest early ‘80s, post-New Wave feel in places. The quartet certainly knows well the way around a melodic hook. Perhaps too well. Once songs like Sort Of found a solid beat, they never let go. Add in the fact that Brian Aubert’s singing and rudimentary rhythm guitar phrasings were buried in a mix that oddly favored bass and drums and you had a performance that tended to drag.

But there were still fun surprises, like the set-opening Growing Old is Getting Old, which started out sounding like a sort of lo-fi Roxy Music before drummer Joe Lester set the tune up with a more streamlined groove

The evening also ran like clockwork. With set changes coming in well under the half hour mark, all three bands had their say and still got the crowd home by midnight. All Mondays should move along that briskly and efficiently.

bettye lavette.

Throughout her extraordinary 90 minute concert last night at the Singletary Center for the Arts, soul music empress Bettye LaVette regularly referenced two numbers. The first was 63, which reflects her age. The other was 46, which corresponds to the number of years she has been singing professionally, most of which have been to shamefully few ears.

Both numbers, however, were worn like badges of honor during the performance - testaments, really, to a sound that has endured through a generation of obscurity to become a voice full of rampant joy, drama and, of course, soul.

As a singer, LaVette’s voice often sailed into wondrous tailspins. In its quieter, torchier moments, as in a long lost 1971 Elton John tune called Talking Old Soldiers, it reached a plateau full of longing and desperation that seemed to glide in mid air before it cracked - not through technical deficiencies but through purposeful pacing - into shards of raw and revealing emotion. Add in the tune’s storyline of age and loneliness and you had some serious tear-swelling music on your hands.

On an altogether different plain, LaVette was also as funky as all get out, turning such unlikely tunes as Don Henley’s You Don’t Know Me At All into emancipating groove exercises full of sass and defiance.

Both songs also reflected the wildly varied scope of contemporary fare that make up LaVette’s repertoire today. The show opening rock and soul party piece, The Stealer, was penned back in 1971 by the British rock brigade Free. The equally earthy Joy, of course, came from Americana queen Lucinda Williams. The one-two encore punch of the empowering Sleep to Dream and the a capella affirmation I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got? Those were tunes by Sinead O’Connor and Fiona Apple, respectively.

Only the autobiographical Before the Money Came, co-penned by Patterson Hood of the Drive-By Truckers, came from LaVette’s own hand. But, really, all of these songs became her own. Even the Sam Cooke soul classic A Change is Gonna Come, a tune she performed at President Obama’s inauguration even though it equally addressed her own career renaissance, became part of LaVette’s regal, gracious and endearing performance persona.

jason aldean.

On any other night at Applebee’s Park, the game would have been called and the crowd would have been sent home in search of alternate entertainment. Not last night, though. With the heavens open for business thanks to a prolonged rainstorm that managed to last almost the exact length of the sold out Alltech Fortnight Festival opening night concert by country stars Jason Aldean and Miranda Lambert, the park became a sort of homey Woodstock

In short, the show went on, the rain came down and the audience and artists made the best of it.

Let’s say this up front: standing in the rain for roughly three hours can’t help but detract from the definition and depth in even the best of performances. It is certainly no one’s fault that it poured. There is, similarly, no blame to be dispensed over the fact that the storm steadily intensified as the evening wore on until it became the clear that the flashes of light in the sky weren’t stage effects. No one - not Aldean, not Lambert - can beat those odds. I sat through the Rolling Stones at Churchill Downs almost three years ago to the day. Same thing happened. They couldn’t beat the rains either.

Aldean seemed genuinely amazed at the sight. “Only in Kentucky will you find this many rednecks standing in the rain.” That prompted two similarly soaked patrons standing nearby to look each other and wonder if they had just been paid a compliment or not.

To his credit, Aldean came with best of intentions - that, and a smoky Southern singing voice that wrapped around hard electric material like the show opening Wide Open, the more summery country sway of the huge radio hit Big Green Tractor (dispensed with, curiously, early into the set) and a pop-savvy cover of Tom Petty’s I Won’t Back Down. It was all as safe as could be, especially when Aldean fell back upon ballads (Why) and lighter country-pop fare (Amarillo Sky) that would have been suitable moodpieces for a clear autumn evening. But in the midst of last night’s monsoon conditions, the tunes’ intimacy seemed unavoidably remote.

miranda lambert.

Lambert took a vastly more unapologetic approach, stuffing her set full of rock oldies by The Faces, Joan Jett and, when the weather took a decided turn for the worse, a hearty cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Have You Ever Seen the Rain.

It was also crossroads time for the singer. Her third album, Revolution, hits stores next week and broadens her stylistic scope with tunes by such Americana greats as John Prine, Fred Eaglesmith and Julie Miller. Little of that came into play last night, however, as Lambert’s pounded her way through a fearsome electric set that was country in only the most coincidental instances.

This was loud, ceremonial but still quite earnest rock ‘n roll at work. Whether she was dancing in the rain beside a Mohawk-ed bassist with a Who t-shirt, constructing a boozy sing-a-long for Jett’s I Love Rock and Roll or whipping up her own electric fury with the set closing Gunpowder and Lead, Lambert was out to prove she was by far the bigger of the storms to hit town last night.