Here's a post from our semi-regular music commentator Shannon Madden, a review a recent show. From Wednesday through Friday I'll be posting daily from AWP in Chicago. Do check here for regular updates--Kyle
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Friday January 23, at Washington, D.C.'s the Black Cat, Philadelphia's Hoots and Hellmouth opened for Junior League Band, a local D.C. favorite. Rooted in a very similar tradition that hearkens back to the coal-mining days of Appalachia, the bands are cut from the same cloth, but fashioned into two unique garments, each representing a different spin on the Bluegrass style.
Watching Hoots and Hellmouth prepare to begin their set was like watching a collection of weary travelers awaiting an indefinitely-delayed plane at an airport in Kentucky. Wearing ragamuffin flannel shirts and hats and well-worn t-shirts, they busied themselves tuning or just plain sitting, looking up periodically for the cue from the Black Cat staff to take their places.
When they got the high sign, the band gathered in a semi-circle, scattered across large plywood rectangles raised a few inches above the ground. Sean Hoots on lead guitar and vocals gave a nod, and the band went from zero-to-sixty, dispelling all lethargy from the room. Hoots, Andrew "Hellmouth" Gray on guitar, and Rob Berliner on mandolin played almost as one. Hoots reached within the depths of his vocal capacity and unfurled fiery spiritual-inspired lyrics that would have been right at home kicking off a barn-raising.
At first, the audience seemed stunned into immobility, not knowing how to take this unexpected electricity. However, like microwave popcorn, one-by-one, by-standers came alive, and soon the entire audience was moving together at a steady clip.
As the band finished their first number," What Good is Having Plowshares if You Can't Spend 'em," Hoots' pick went flying, landing somewhere back stage.
The only percussion came from the thunderous stomping of the band, eliminating the mystery of the wooden risers. Bob Beach provided a wind aspect on harmonica and flute, and his improvisation was featured prominently in several songs.
Later, the tone went from revivalist fervency to Hooverville hopeful, as Hellmouth sang of his dream house in a shack filled with dirty dishes and down-but-not-out dreams.
Many of the songs on the band's self-titled 2007 MAD Dragon Records release involve the dichotomous themes of passive discontent with the state of things and the power of hope and family to redeem. "Home for Supper," touches both the sad state of hunger and the satiating redemption of optimism.
To ensure that the tone of the room returned to a brighter note in preparation for Headliner Junior League, Hoots took it back up, and in a fit of passion, culminating with a melodic screech that rivaled James Brown's famous grunts.
By the end of the Hoots and Hellmouth set, anybody who could square dance was doing so. The band left plenty of energy in the room to keep the audience wanting more as the headliner prepared for their set.
Junior League's stage preparation was more kinetic, as the co-ed band added a few more eclectic layers of variation onto the bluegrass theme. Lead singer/songwriter, Lissy Rosemont, on the banjo, startled the audience turning the boil down to an energetic simmer with a slower pace and a mildly haunting legato vocal.
Rosemont has the presence of Feist with dark hair and fair skin, and a voice which brings to mind Blondie's Debbie Harry and occasionally Heart's Ann Wilson with the spirit of country songstress Allison Krauss, one of her biggest influences. This combination provided an unexpected twist in a band whose instrumentals could join the ranks of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band or Old Crow Medicine Show.
Georgia-raised Rosemont grew up in a household filled with music. Her mother played piano and her father is Hal Beaver of Hal Beaver and Blackgrass, who introduced her to the music of country greats such as Hank Williams, upon whose song "I Can't Help it if I'm Still in Love with You," she put her own feminine twist in the evening's set.
She herself has been playing music since she was a child, though she didn't start formally playing her current instrument of choice, the banjo, until 2006. In addition to taking cues from her parents, she has collaborated with her brother on tunes as well.
Junior League also boasts two violins. Zeb Bowles, the band's original fiddler has been a definitive force in the band since its inception. Featured artist Sadie Dingfelder has the tell-tale legato bow strokes of the classically trained violinist that she is, but masterfully morphed into a fiddle player throughout most of the show. She showcased her skills in medley of classic fiddle tunes, including the Charlie Daniels Band's, "Devil Went Down to Georgia," which the audience acknowledged with cheerful recognition. Fun fact: The fiddlers share a birthday, same day, same year. "How many bands do you know that have two violinists, both born on the same day?"Eli Cohn, on lead guitar, quipped. "One. The answer is one."
Martin Thomas, who was a sport about taking flack from the wise-cracking Cohn, played harmonica and even took lead vocals on the only song not led by Rosemont.
Underneath all of this country, was Will Waikart on the skins, who occasionally added a border-line top-40 dance beat which gave some songs a re-mixed effect. Junior League's second full-length album, Mitchell Williams Fo' Govena, released September 2008, has been praised for its transition across a range of musical planes, from blues to alt-pop, appealing to a wide spectrum of listeners.
Junior League's tempo throughout their set was fluid, starting slow and long, speeding up, and dipping back down. The last song of the set was a lullaby. Lovers kissed and swayed and the over-served and exhausted struggled not to succumb to the soporific melody. Leaving the audience in a state of sleepy reverie, the band headed off the stage.
Moments later, Junior League took the stage once more for the encore, this time jump-starting everyone for the drive home, Hoots joined the ensemble, clanging a ceramic mug with a spoon in time to the music and adding his vocals to the chorus.
The bands have each cultivated a strong following through purely grassroots means. They are staying true to the commitment to play music for the love of it and continue to stay strongly connected to their fans.
Showing posts with label Shannon Madden. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Shannon Madden. Show all posts
Sunday, February 8, 2009
Monday, January 5, 2009
Musical Interlude with Guest Blogger Shannon Madden
I'm not going to talk writing today. Today's a day for listening to music.
Sometime this year, The Writer's Center will partner with the Songwriters' Association of Washington and offer workshops for budding songwriters. Sounds pretty interesting, doesn't it? Well, in light of that piece of news, I've decided it might be kind of cool to have a discussion on music here at First Person Plural, particularly local bands that are the musical equivalent of writers: working hard in (sometimes) obscurity. Luckily for me, Shannon Madden, a writer and music-lover who recently moved to D.C., contacted me. In fact, it was my conversation with her that sparked this idea. Anyway, here's Shannon Madden on a local band:
Tom McBride and The Whig Party
Last month, Tom McBride and the Whig Party played under a canopy of white Christmas lights and a wreath on the stage at Iota. This club-and-cafe is an intimate venue, and except for anyone standing behind the large partition in the middle of the room, the view is up close and personal, and it was a pretty good crowd for a Tuesday. Around 10:30 pm, a collection of five musicians took the stage, all dressed in variations on a business casual theme, as if they had all left the office to meet up for an after-work jam session.
The band’s founder is front man Tom McBride, originally from Boston, who assembled the Whig Party from exceptional musicians hailing from Rockville, Maryland, who are all connected through some channel stemming from their high school or college days.
The band has a distinctly southern vibe, no doubt owed in part to the time McBride spent as a student at Tennessee’s Vanderbilt University. The music picks up influences starting somewhere in the bluegrass tradition of the Smokey Mountains, traveling down through the hills to Nashville with its sliding melodies, galloping country-western cadences and the slow rhythm of the blues, and dipping as far south as the Louisiana Bayou with some light Zydeco.
The Whig Party has the same kind of dichotomously serious and playful dynamic as the Charlottesville-based Dave Matthews Band. Drummer Andrew Toussaint and Jason Mattis, on bass, laid the foundation and commanded the rhythm of the room, moving handily from swing time, to Zydeco, to the deliberate down-beats of their blues numbers.
On top of that foundation was the interplay between three very talented musicians. McBride showed his chops on the guitar with assurance, barely glancing down to see what he was doing. Chad Fisk had a similar command of the keyboard, and Colin Crawford on the alto sax conjured the same kind of soul as that of the late LeRoi Moore of Dave Matthews. There were significant and pleasurable stretches of pure instrumentals, allowing the three to show off their individual and collaborative abilities.
Smooth and consistent, McBride’s voice is multi-dimensional and occasionally seems to change as the textures of his songs do. You can listen to it here:
During certain moments, his vocal tone suggests hints of Eddie Vedder, Chris Cornell, James Blunt, and even Kurt Cobain. His deep voice ascends and descends masterfully.
McBride is also a gifted poet. Read his stuff here. Not afraid to test the vocabularies of his listeners, he tells musical tales that exercise the imagination, and tempt the brain to intellectualize and interpret, though the power of the music allows the mind to save the over-thinking for the silence that inevitably follows a night of good music.
Like those of our greatest folk singers, McBride’s topics run the gamut from bar fights to serial killers to the passing of loved ones. “Revelry” and “Headed For” are both examples of stories that roll along steadily and have the trappings of a plot, but which reach philosophical depths, similar to Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane” or Neil Young’s “Barstool Blues.”
The pieces offer so much more than the regular heartbreak and lust to which so many singers often turn, though when he does visit these themes, his take on them is more articulate than that of many of his contemporaries.
As the show progressed, the band stayed definitively cool. Fisk wore shades throughout the evening as he tickled the ivories of two keyboards, and McBride barely broke a sweat as he traversed the fingerboard of his guitar. Plenty of smiles were exchanged by the band-mates and the fun they were having on stage permeated the audience, keeping the night-owls entertained until past midnight on a weeknight.
In the spirit of Christmas, half of all proceeds from the evening went to Bread for the City, a food bank that serves the less-fortunate of the DC metro area.
Anyone who wants to hear a local DC band with copious talent and minimal pretense needs to check these guys out while they are still playing small local clubs without exorbitant ticket prices, because this band is going places. Their album drops in February.
Sometime this year, The Writer's Center will partner with the Songwriters' Association of Washington and offer workshops for budding songwriters. Sounds pretty interesting, doesn't it? Well, in light of that piece of news, I've decided it might be kind of cool to have a discussion on music here at First Person Plural, particularly local bands that are the musical equivalent of writers: working hard in (sometimes) obscurity. Luckily for me, Shannon Madden, a writer and music-lover who recently moved to D.C., contacted me. In fact, it was my conversation with her that sparked this idea. Anyway, here's Shannon Madden on a local band:
Tom McBride and The Whig Party
Last month, Tom McBride and the Whig Party played under a canopy of white Christmas lights and a wreath on the stage at Iota. This club-and-cafe is an intimate venue, and except for anyone standing behind the large partition in the middle of the room, the view is up close and personal, and it was a pretty good crowd for a Tuesday. Around 10:30 pm, a collection of five musicians took the stage, all dressed in variations on a business casual theme, as if they had all left the office to meet up for an after-work jam session.
The band’s founder is front man Tom McBride, originally from Boston, who assembled the Whig Party from exceptional musicians hailing from Rockville, Maryland, who are all connected through some channel stemming from their high school or college days.
The band has a distinctly southern vibe, no doubt owed in part to the time McBride spent as a student at Tennessee’s Vanderbilt University. The music picks up influences starting somewhere in the bluegrass tradition of the Smokey Mountains, traveling down through the hills to Nashville with its sliding melodies, galloping country-western cadences and the slow rhythm of the blues, and dipping as far south as the Louisiana Bayou with some light Zydeco.
The Whig Party has the same kind of dichotomously serious and playful dynamic as the Charlottesville-based Dave Matthews Band. Drummer Andrew Toussaint and Jason Mattis, on bass, laid the foundation and commanded the rhythm of the room, moving handily from swing time, to Zydeco, to the deliberate down-beats of their blues numbers.
On top of that foundation was the interplay between three very talented musicians. McBride showed his chops on the guitar with assurance, barely glancing down to see what he was doing. Chad Fisk had a similar command of the keyboard, and Colin Crawford on the alto sax conjured the same kind of soul as that of the late LeRoi Moore of Dave Matthews. There were significant and pleasurable stretches of pure instrumentals, allowing the three to show off their individual and collaborative abilities.
Smooth and consistent, McBride’s voice is multi-dimensional and occasionally seems to change as the textures of his songs do. You can listen to it here:
During certain moments, his vocal tone suggests hints of Eddie Vedder, Chris Cornell, James Blunt, and even Kurt Cobain. His deep voice ascends and descends masterfully.
McBride is also a gifted poet. Read his stuff here. Not afraid to test the vocabularies of his listeners, he tells musical tales that exercise the imagination, and tempt the brain to intellectualize and interpret, though the power of the music allows the mind to save the over-thinking for the silence that inevitably follows a night of good music.
Like those of our greatest folk singers, McBride’s topics run the gamut from bar fights to serial killers to the passing of loved ones. “Revelry” and “Headed For” are both examples of stories that roll along steadily and have the trappings of a plot, but which reach philosophical depths, similar to Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane” or Neil Young’s “Barstool Blues.”
The pieces offer so much more than the regular heartbreak and lust to which so many singers often turn, though when he does visit these themes, his take on them is more articulate than that of many of his contemporaries.
As the show progressed, the band stayed definitively cool. Fisk wore shades throughout the evening as he tickled the ivories of two keyboards, and McBride barely broke a sweat as he traversed the fingerboard of his guitar. Plenty of smiles were exchanged by the band-mates and the fun they were having on stage permeated the audience, keeping the night-owls entertained until past midnight on a weeknight.
In the spirit of Christmas, half of all proceeds from the evening went to Bread for the City, a food bank that serves the less-fortunate of the DC metro area.
Anyone who wants to hear a local DC band with copious talent and minimal pretense needs to check these guys out while they are still playing small local clubs without exorbitant ticket prices, because this band is going places. Their album drops in February.
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