A Hawk and a Hacksaw, Phantahex and Fleet Street Klezmer Band @ Neurolux; Sun Blood Stories @ the Crux (6/6/13)

Initially, I'd thought about covering Sun Blood Stories' fundraiser show at the Crux; they're one of my favorite local bands right now, and I wanted to support their efforts to get their new album out.  In the end, however, this Neurolux show was too intriguing to pass up.  I mean, Phantahex and Fleet Street Klezmer Band on the same bill?  I had to hear how that would play out.

I counted about twenty-five people when I got to Neurolux.  I counted over fifty when the headliner, A Hawk and a Hacksaw, played.  Half of that number chose to hang out on the patio, but that still made for a decent enough audience.

Fleet Street Klezmer Band opened the show.  I've seen this group quite a few times and enjoyed each performance, so it surprises me that I hadn't noticed before how good a singer Shlomo Kostenko is.  That may be because their Romanian/Russian/gypsy tunes tend to call for a certain amiable roughness; they work better if he sounds like some dude from your village who just got up to sing a song.  Certain moments here, however, allowed Kostenko to show the power of his baritone moan--its strength, its range, its sonorousness.  Meanwhile, the rapport between his rock-steady strumming, Victoria Kostenko's gliding violin and Matthew Vorhies's jaunty accordion felt especially strong.  Drummer Alfonso Sanchez stumbled more than a few times but generally got back on the beat quick enough.  Last but not least, Cecilia Rinn pitched in with some pleasant finger cymbal and some lissome belly-dancing.

Phantahex played next.  In with the old, in with the new.  This set featured Tristan Andreas playing a monochord again as well as a continuation of the tuneful, rhythmic bent of this duo's Red Room set back in January.  The jittery, booming beats and the spare, somber melodies made the hisses and screeches stand in sharper relief.  Grant Olsen's detached, auto-tuned vocals made the mixture even more haunting.  Abrasive yet accessible.  Both cool as in brrr and cool as in whoa.

Next up was A Hawk and a Hacksaw.  This Albuquerque duo's ersatz, postmodern mashup of various world musics--Balkan, Klezmer, Arabian, a little Buddhist chant and taiko drumming (I think)--helped the pairing of such disparate openers make a bit more sense.  I wondered at first if this was all a big hipster joke--an evocation of community and solidarity undercut by a smug, savvier-than-thou obscurantism.  Heather Trost's frantic, zipping violin and Jeremy Barnes's scurrying accordion work did little to ease my misgivings, impressive though they both were.  However, as the set progressed from a stolid anthem to some lively, buzzing, poly-rhythmic material, they started to win me over.  It was as if they wanted to take you from an institutionalized or state-imposed vision of community to the flesh-and-blood experience of it.  Or maybe I just appreciate dance-beats much more than accordions.  In any case, the crowd was with them right from the start.  By A Hawk and a Hacksaw's encore, which they played unplugged among the people on the dance floor, I was with them too.

After the Neurolux show wrapped, I swung by the Crux in time to catch the tail-end of Sun Blood Stories' set.  The place was as crowded as I'd hoped, and the performance was as ass-whomping as I'd expected.  Some psychedelic montages courtesy of Jason Willford upped the intensity level a notch.  What with all the painted faces, all the roars of applause and all the used clothes, books and tapes on a table in the back, the band hopefully made enough money to get their new album, The Electric Years, out.  But even if they did, you should go to their web store and contribute because dammit, their very presence here makes this town twice as sexy.

You can find info on these acts on Facebook and elsewhere online.  If you like what you've read and would like to help keep it going, click the yellow "Give" button and donate whatever you can.  Even $5 would help. And special thanks to Tristan Andreas for looking up A Hawk and a Hacksaw's cimbalom and stroh violin on his smartphone.

Cloud/Splitter and Phantahex @ the Red Room (1/10/13)

Last Thursday was a good news/bad news day for me.  Bad news: I got laid off from my day job.  Good news: I won't need to get up at 5:30 a.m. anymore, I'll get to focus more on developing content for this blog (reviews, interviews, etc.) and I'll have more time to write non-blog-related stuff (stories, essays, etc.).  So really, I suppose that the good news far outweighs the bad.  Y'know, aside from that whole lack-of-steady-income thing...

Anyway, this show caught my interest because it featured Cloud/Splitter, a new local electronica group whose music I had checked out on ReverbNation and liked very much.  I'd missed their Liquid show on December 21st--and, judging from the pictures that the band has on their Facebook page, that gig was really something--so I didn't want to let this opportunity pass by.

I counted about thirteen people when I got down to the Red Room.  The crowd would build to about twenty by the time that Cloud/Splitter played.  Modest, but not too bad when one considers the crapload of snow that got dumped on Boise earlier in the day.

Local experimental duo Phantahex kicked off the night's music.  This set showed off some new wrinkles to this group's sound.  Gone was Tristan Andreas's monochord; in were some slinky, steady-grooving beats.  In addition to these change-ups, Andreas and partner Grant Olsen harnessed their blaring, droning, wailing synthesizers to material far more pop-like than I'd heard from them in the past.  Their haunting, otherworldly tunes called to mind Brian Eno at times, Tangerine Dream at others, Gary Numan and Trent Reznor at others.  No matter how disquieting the music became, however, Andreas and Olsen still managed to work in a light, playful touch.  Substantially more interesting and pleasurable than Blurred-Vision.

Cloud/Splitter played next and lived up to the promise of their recordings.  Ashley Rose Smith's bewitching wail led the listener into the waves of driving, funky beats, mind-warping synthesizer sounds (courtesy of Malik Knoll) and elegant, chiming guitar (courtesy of Krispen Hartung).  When paired with some projections of wavy, translucent lines and shapes, the sensuousness of the music was overpowering--kinda like Collide but not nearly as corny.  Happily, the Red Room received an influx of twenty-somethings during this set who were more than willing to get their groove on.

You can find info on these groups on Facebook and elsewhere online.

Tartufi, Red Hands Black Feet and Phantahex @ Neurolux (8/28/12)

Tartufi's solid performance at the Crux on Sunday got me curious to see what they'd do with this headlining gig, but what really attracted me to this show was Red Hands Black Feet.  They've been busy lately: they returned from a successful first tour earlier this month, and they're working to get their first album released soon.  With this big a head of steam worked up, no way was I gonna miss their first proper gig since they got back.

I counted about twenty people inside when I showed up with a friend.  That number would almost triple by the time that Red Hands Black Feet took the stage.

First up this night was Phantahex a.k.a. Tristan Andreas and Grant Olsen.  Their fascinating, slightly ominous experimental music sounded more aggressive and dissonant than I remember it sounding at Tom Grainey's.  Perhaps they just didn't want to sound like dithering wimps next to the other two acts.  In any case, Tristan Andreas stroked and banged out some Industrial-strength buzzsaw noise, deceptively soothing riffs and disorienting, polyrhythmic loops on his monochord.  Grant Olsen's synthesizer set-up rippled and blared.  Some of the crowd clearly wasn't feeling this stuff (including my friend), but I liked it fine.

Red Hands Black Feet took the stage next.  As with Finn Riggins, touring seems to have done this group a lot of good: Eric Larson and Jake Myers' intertwining guitars, Joseph Myers's basslines and Jessica Johnson's drumming all showed an astonishing increase in finesse while retaining their fundamental raw power.  The already strong rapport between the four members seemed to have reached an almost subliminal level.  The crowd moved in close and cheered wildly, and not without good reason: in its own unassuming way, this set was almost as powerful as their Treefort performance.

For their headlining set, Tartufi played much of the same material from last Sunday's set at the Crux but with greater intensity and impact.  You could maybe chalk that up to a mixture of the Neurolux's sound system, a desire to show up the openers and the adulation of the larger crowd.  In any case, their bright, airy guitar, their tough, twangy bass and their kinetic drums all sounded in top form.  Not only that, I could actually hear the lyrics on a couple of songs (including an encore number which they once again invited Lisa Simpson from Finn Riggins to sing on).  Didn't sound too bad at all, if maybe a bit ungainly (it's kinda hard to shoehorn "From the fish fields of the north Pacific" into a soothing, ambient tune).

You can find info on Red Hands Black Feet and Tartufi on Facebook and elsewhere online.  Special thanks to Eric Gilbert and Radio Boise.