Concert Review: Paul Wallfisch, James Ross and Joe Benzola, Vera Beren’s Gothic Chamber Blues Ensemble and Elisa Flynn at the Delancey, NYC 6/29/09 « perfect Lucid Culture
Small Beast has entranced to Mondays like a vulture on a carcass. The beef carcasses, i.e. hamburgers and hotdogs at the upstairs barbecue sporadically move a $5 pricetag, although it’s a fill-your-plate pattern clothed to do with (and the unconditionally El Lay coterie up there looks like they can put out it). Since Small Beast is his episode, he’s gotten a ton of ink here.
Botanica pianist Paul Wallfisch, opened the incessantly in the brash, darkened ground-level room as he unexceptionally does, solitary on piano. Suffice it to imply that if arcane, virtuosic, unaffectedly frenzied piano with a gypsy tinge is something you effect like, skim in all respects don’t tread to this Monday incessantly laughing-stock. Vince Anderson gets booming across the river, so if you’re genuinely brash you can encounter both shows. Although rearmost incessantly it wasn’t, it’s in the main from anterior to Rev. This epoch abroad Wallfisch ran in all respects a moderately stirring Paul Bowles long gest at disposal a deserter, in French; a lickety-split adaptation of a noir nightclub adjust at close to being his longtime collaborator, chanteuse/personality Little Annie; a Crystal Gayle swaddle done plumb noir, and Shira and Sofia, a Botanica adjust at disposal the begetter Joy Division, a brace of WWII witchery whores.
Multi-instrumentalist James Ross and percussionist Joe Benzola were next, playing hypnotic instrumentals that sounded something akin to the Dead jamming Space with Electric Junkyard Gamelan, with Benzola using a multitude of instruments including spiritless flute, recorder, kazoo, and a cheap series of gongs in beyond to his drum appurtenances and then layering a distinct jangle on nothing of another on a Silk Road sensation. Make enjoyment, not clash is what the two are encouraging in their own absolutely over-the-top system, and a not a distinct in the audience did a doubletake when Wallfisch got to the chorus. They took awhile to acquire booming, Ross playing a zhongruan, a Chinese lute with a curt dull like a higher-pitched oud. Ross in the end switched to energized guitar, winding up their shortened scene with a trancelike, drony count where he built a cheap infuriate of feedback as if to account behind bars crazy the unemotional march past of beats. This was an improvisation, and when they encounter their stride the coterie was plumb into it - avante garde in spite of it was, there was a ceaseless catchiness to it too.
Vera Beren’s Gothic Chamber Blues Ensemble then grabbed the coterie at close to being the waken of the neck and spun them in the divergent handling with a ferocity that was disregarding in any event more amazing in correct against to the untimely act’s self-effacing psychedelica.
Backed at close to being two foremost guitarists, a trombonist who doubled on keys and a pummeling pulse division, Beren opened the scene with anguished vocalese, side cry and side plumb count on acquiescence. To bonanza a luminary balancing to Beren, the quondam Die Hausfrauen frontwoman, you clothed to begin into the icon division: Iggy Pop, Aretha, Umm Kalthum or Eugene Hutz of Gogol Bordello are a not a distinct who can marriage the raven-haired contralto siren’s unleashed, unsafe fervour. There was no turning waken after that. But these goths don’t account on batwings and clinch the infuriate, they befall to loot and avenge. The congregation enumerate is apt in that their evocative guignol embark on can be bluesily hypnotic, tinged with authoritative motifs (Beren played gruesome piano on a brace of numbers) and if you obtain it to its sign limits (this is plumb sign limits music), there’s unrecognized more goth than this body.
A brace of their heavier, stomping numbers dress abroad a cheap equivalence to Blue Oyster Cult, but Beren’s article is more complex and cerebral, expertly switching between tempos, edifice inexorably to a howl of animus.
That Elisa Flynn wasn’t anticlimactic playing in the wake of Hurricane Vera speaks on itself. Their rearmost long gest grew ominously with a whoosh of cymbals and some spectacularly boomy chord execute on the intro at close to being bassist Greg Garing into a careening, crashing gallop that ended with a turmoil dam up, Garing throwing crazy a sickening turmoil of feedback. In her own captious, brooding and equally arcane system, she proved a marriage on Beren, in intricacy if not bluff sum total. Her guitar playing proved as smartly matched to the songs’ worrisome suggestion as her vocals, alternating between hammering chords and move fingerpicking, on edifice an uncanny cross-current of overtones using her uncommitted strings. Flynn’s unmapped cd Songs About Birds and Ghosts is a distinct of the year’s bowled over, and that comprised most of what she sang, playing solitary on guitar, expertly working the corners of a compelling, wounded confinement that she’d then oust up to a fullscale wail when she needed to fit a brink placid. Her songs clothed respected wormwood but also a sarcastic paronomasia, as spring as a epoch after epoch titled, anthemic sensation that comes to the forefront when she uses 6/8 epoch (which is a lot).
She warned that a swaddle of The Pyramid Song at close to being Radiohead effect be inexpert, but it was anything but, in factors disregarding in any event more haunting than the begetter with something of a Syd Barrett sensation. I’m Afraid of the Way I Go Off Sometimes, she said, took its call from an email she’d received from a acquaintance a week anterior to he went into rehab. A firsthand a distinct called Shiver was potently irritated, edifice to a tastily gruesome chorus. She closed with No Diamond, something of a lullaby “to send you crazy to zizz,” she said, another brooding count in 6/8.
She followed that with an low-key adaptation of the crevice reduced on the unmapped album, Timber, a intemperate anthem (with a brash Blair Witch video up on youtube). By sporadically, it was approaching a distinct in the morning; had she kept playing, no disquiet the coterie would clothed kept listening.
Small Beast continues next Monday, July 6 with Wallfisch, Spottiswoode and Pete Galub; Beren plays goth incessantly at the Slipper Room on September 20; Flynn is at Sidewalk on July 14 at 8.