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Music Features

Simbad

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PREVIEW He’s originally from France, currently living in East London, and his debut is out on a Swedish label — and his productions are just as cosmopolitan. Simbad, né Stanislas Renouf, may just be coming up on the underground dance radar with productions ranging from majestic house with Robert Owens to heavy broken beats with Steelo, but he has been doing his best to ignore genres and focus on "quality booty music" for almost a decade.

The just-released Supersonic Revelation for Stockholm’s Raw Fusion Records does a solid job of capturing Simbad’s various moods. The multi-instrumentalist has almost as many styles as he does nom de tunes and imprints where they’ve found a home: Mowgly for Freerange, Loose Ensemble for Foundation, and, together with long-time partner Fred McQuinn, Twitch, Heal, and Marathon Men for Earth Project, Key Recordings, and Chillifunk, respectively. In addition to the nuanced electronica and deep house tendencies explored on the 2005 Marathon Men album, Blessings (Chillifunk), Simbad’s solo effort includes a heavy dose of soul, as on the title track with Abdul Shyllon, with its quavering, pitch-bent synth line, easygoing hand claps, and multitracked vocals verging on doowop. Woe to the music store clerk who has to chose a genre for shelving this wide-ranging collection: just like his favorite type of party, Simbad’s productions are truly many-hued. "I love it when the crowd is mixed actually. That’s where it’s the best!" the DJ explained via e-mail, just after praising Japan for its outstanding clubs with their somewhat homogenous crowds. "Our Je Ne Sais Quoi party in London, the legendary Raw Fusion party in Stockholm, Turntables on the Hudson in NYC," he raves. "All nations represented and all booties mixed together equals the best vibes. Just bring your smile down and be open — your ass will follow!"

SIMBAD

Fri/21, 10 p.m., $15. Pink, 2925 16th St., SF. (415) 431-8889, www.pinksf.com

Dark days, indeed

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It used to be that staying up late was a real form of rebellion. An easy test of parental authority for kids, the act takes on an almost anti-capitalist character for young adults. After all, so-called nightlife doesn’t even begin until the 9-to-5 business day has locked its doors. Yet Capital has caught on, and it’s hard not to see the slippery transition from Happy Hour to late-night diner as just another set of cogs on the gear. Still, New York City has held true to its insomniac reputation, issuing the challenge to antisocial misfits to stay up later than a city that never sleeps. Which is why we must thank Religious Knives for giving us a look at what may be the last hour for the lost, wild, and wicked: dawn. Their new album, It’s After Dark (Troubleman), seethes with the deep fear of bleary-eyed wanderers, psychotic with sleep dep’, staring straight into the morning sun.

Religious Knives might almost be considered a sobering up — or hanging over — of guitar player Mike Bernstein and key coaxer Maya Miller’s previous band, Double Leopards. While Religious Knives originally transmitted some of the sonic wall of murk that its earlier incarnation was renowned for, the addition of Mouthus drummer Nate Nelson plunges the band headlong into its current rock sound. Nelson’s drumming has always suggested an equatorial influence, but with the dense shit-storm haze of his other project removed, his brilliant, if grooveless, polyrhythms are finally allowed to cut through. Though the signature Big Apple, bad-vibes drone still rears its head on much of Religious Knives’ diverse discography, the outfit’s atonal crooning, their scrapes and bangs of questionable origin, and their flea-market-Casio runs have all the makings of a neoclassic punk band.

On It’s After Dark, Religious Knives hovers between two sonic paradigms: there’s a classic leather-jacket dirge-punk that culls from Joy Division, Suicide, and even the Cramps, in addition to a basement-apartment dub sound that suggests a production credit split between Lee Perry and some suburban teen hooked on Wolf Eyes. These divergent tendencies are most apparent on the full-length’s first two tracks, but by the time a Bad Seeds-esque "The Sun" rolls around, one senses a whole genre being invented. In many ways the merging of the dark dub of yore and noise music of today is no stranger than the similar convergence that brought us dubstep.

If vibe has much to do with why people listen to music today, then people may enjoy a band that sounds as New York City as Jean Michel Basquiat wandering the Lower East Side ruins. The dense creep of Religious Knives makes at least a few parts of Brooklyn seem satisfyingly seedy.

RELIGIOUS KNIVES

Wed/19, 9:30 p.m., $6

Hemlock Tavern

1131 Polk, SF

www.hemlocktavern.com

Just like Honeydrips

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› johnny@sfbg.com

Word on the streets and between the cuddlecore sheets has it that the best lovesick songs of this young year can be found on the Honeydrips’ Here Comes the Future (Sincerely Yours). As winter gives way to spring, I’ll admit I’m sometimes turning to Mikael Carlsson’s tender tunes for that special bruised but hopeful feeling. The 10 tracks of tears this Göteborg, Sweden, troubadour has assembled push all the right sentimental buttons. They also touch some meta-referential ones: from its anonymously pretty one-off girl vocal to its invocation of a rock standard from the past, the Honeydrips’ "(Lack of) Love Will Tear Us Apart" is an introductory single in the vein of Saint Etienne’s bright orange-red puzzle piece of a debut 45, which translated the rural folk whine of Neil Young’s "Only Love Will Break Your Heart" into synth pop.

The Honeydrips’ album might be titled Here Comes the Future, but Carlsson repeatedly laces his melodies with lyrics that nod to the past. "I Wouldn’t Know What To Do" not only invokes Morrissey’s romantic twist on Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes in order to stake a claim for the clumsy and shy, it pairs it with a jingle-jangle, strum-along guitar sound that ambles just a little bit faster than the one Johnny Marr created for Morrissey’s lyrical trip to the YWCA.

Since both men specialize in Smiths-flavored Swedish it makes sense that Carlsson’s virgin visit to United States’ stages is as an opening act for Jens Lekman. One of the peaks of Lekman’s most recent album Night Falls over Kortedala (Secretly Canadian) is "Shirin," in which Lekman turns a haircut from a girl who has fled Iraq for Sweden into four minutes of pop-symphonic poignance. For half a year now, I’ve wondered why — with only one or two blog exceptions — the heaps of rave reviews for Night Falls over Kortedala have failed to link Lekman’s first-person lyrical address to a person cutting his hair with the one in Morrissey’s "Hairdresser on Fire."

Lekman’s "Shirin" is a sequel that might improve on its inspiration, right down to the political complications that he adds to original scenarist Morrissey’s exploration of the strangely intimate bond between hairstylist and client. In "Hairdresser on Fire," Morrissey milks the lines "There was a client/He made you nervous/And when he said, "I’m going to sue you"/I really felt for you" for their full humor and pathos. Lekman’s corollary in "Shirin" is the concluding couplet "What if it reaches the government / That you have a beauty salon in your own apartment?," a genuine worry that a falsetto harmony somewhat futilely tries to kiss away with the promise, "I won’t tell anyone."

Lekman is peerless at marrying music-hall melody to lyrical melancholy. While Carlsson’s rock-inflected, ultravivid scenes have biff-bang-pow impact, they haven’t reached the same swoon-worthy level of storytelling mastery. To be sure, even Lekman traffics in heart-on-sleeve proclamations best indulged in through headphones, rather than shared blushingly in stereo with sure-to-mock strangers. Put your headphones on so I can whisper this to you: not only is Lekman’s "Rocky Dennis’ Farewell Song" perhaps better than the unique movie — Peter Bogandovich’s 1985 Mask — that inspired it, it’s the closest anyone has come to the Motown and Philadelphia International majesty of Holland-Dozier-Holland, and the first part of the best pop mini-suite since the underrated British group Prefab Sprout’s ditties for Jesse James.

The Morrissey, Saint Etienne, and Prefab Sprout songs I’m citing all date from 1988 or 1990, which shows that what comes around goes around in terms of nostalgia-drenched indie pop trends. Lekman and newer Swedish groups such as the Honeydrips and their fellow current critic’s faves and Sincerely Yours label mates the Tough Alliance owe varying degrees of overt debt to music from that particular era, when anorak-clad innocence cautiously rubbed up against bell-bottomed rave psychedelia to the oft-sampled beat of James Brown’s signature "Funky Drummer."

No matter which way they tip their B-boy hats, the Tough Alliance look more like a Cute Alliance. Still, their particular sonic revision of the cusp years of the twentieth century’s final decades is the one with a little swagger and some sneers. (It also has the least emotional variety.) In comparison, Carlsson begins Here Comes the Future with "The Strangest Dream (Pt 1 & 2)," where his paralysis upon running into a friend’s rapist is only the first instance of impotence countered by some golden guitar chords fit for a heroic leading man. When he hesitates and runs away at the end of the song, that same heroic guitar motif nips mockingly at his heels.

A harsher variant of that electric guitar motif flares forth on Here Comes the Future‘s next song, "Trying Something New," where the lyric nudges the listener that it knows about a secret place for love, much like Petula Clark once did, albeit less boisterously. It’s followed by yet another fresh expansion of the same guitar sound — an effect a bit like a new level of petals appearing on an unpruned flower — in "Fall from a Height," where Carlsson calls upon some well-placed snippets of sampled movie dialogue to add tinges of childhood existential crisis and teen angst (the latter element taken from Rebel Without a Cause, no less).

When Carlsson reaches Here Comes the Future‘s title track, it’s no surprise that it’s as much about resisting the lure of memory as it is about facing the unavoidable. A bell-clear melody similar to the kind that Amy Linton used to write and record for the Aisler’s Set answers him each time he claims that he wouldn’t turn back time if he could. The same push-pull between nostalgia and fantasy is taken to extremes two songs later in the album’s finale, as Carlsson’s closing sentiments are washed away by waves of synth pop. Ending the album as he began it, with a dream, he imagines a day centuries from now, but unsurprisingly, it’s a past-obsessed corner of that day, in which some archaeologist discovers the last remaining trace of his life. Even less surprisingly, that last remaining trace is a romantic one. What would love be, anyway, without the promise of eternity? *

JENS LEKMAN plus THE HONEYDRIPS

Sat/22, 9 pm; $18

Bimbo’s 365 Club

1025 Columbus, SF

(415) 474-0365

www.bimbos365club.com

JENS LEKMAN

Sun/23, 9 p.m.; $12–$14

Bottom of the Hill

1333 17th Street, SF

(415) 621-4455

www.bottomofthehill.com

Alone again, or

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In memoriam: Ike Turner, Buddy Miles, Teo Macero, and Arthur Lee

"Music won’t have no race, only space…." — an eternal lyric sung by that titanic philosopher Marvin Gaye, echoing many other dusky voices, from that of pioneer Afronaut Estevanico the Black, whose exploits across the sixteenth century, proto–American West supersede words, to the United Kingdom’s newest alt-country composer Lightspeed Champion. This sensibility is at the core of the Afro-Baroque aesthetic currently being revived as Arthurian legend — King Arthur Lee, that is. From punk-haired black girls in East New York City digging his hybrid soul on the subway through their iPods, to the foremost articulators of the genre’s lush, neoclassical Afropean clash — his Los Angelean heir Stew and the Houston-born boy-king Devonte Hynes, aka Lightspeed Champion — the Arthurly is wrecked no mo’. And it’s way past prime time for the original Love man to be honored on the black-hand side.

PASSING PHASES AND STAGES


The lure of fair Europa held sway over Arthur Lee’s next-gen singer-songwriter from Crenshaw-Adams in South Central Los Angeles: Stew. No more "California Dreamin’" or uneasy rock for this brer who eschewed his colored cloister for liberation abroad. Only Stew’s Negro Problem followed him to Western Europe and then to Gotham, where he’s brought it to the Great White Way in the format of Passing Strange (2007). What makes this choreo-poem Afro-Baroque is that at this play’s core it’s a conjure of sacrifice — lush and hybridized sonic bleeding for those Negro chillun who are nominally free but not weightless enough to swing a ride on ancient Kemet’s Ark of a Million Years.

Akin to Lightspeed Champion, Stew is the product of a God-fearing background and is prone to vanguard aesthetic allusions in parallel to his younger counterpart’s preoccupations with a blend of meditation, country, gospel, punk, Rocky Horror, French minimalist composer Alain Goraguer, and my friend Galt MacDermot’s Afro-fusionist musical score for Hair. The elder art-punk Stew can go head-to-head with the Afro-punk whippersnapper over Arthurly’s thorny crown, and nothing goes over so well during Passing Strange as the first act sequence when two costars, Daniel Breaker’s Youth and Eisa Davis’s Mother, enact their tense separation in homage to European avant-garde cinema.

Yass y’all, Passing Strange, which was incubated at the Berkeley Repertory Theater and Sundance Institute, is a bona fide masterpiece, yet not without flaw. On the structural tip, even with the move from downtown to midtown requiring a tightening up of the boho flow, the second "abroad" act still lacks a satisfying resolution and includes less of Stew’s meta-Pentecostal exhortations and fourth wall–smashing. And some aspects of the play are problematic, mostly on the score of gender politricks. On Broadway, Davis’s embodiment of her Mother role seems whittled down somehow — but I ain’t gon’ get into the thick of what goes on between black men and they mamas. Then there’s the grumbling from my historian sibling and others about the play’s valorizing of the second act’s European muses above the sacred black feminine. The title is derived from Shakespeare’s Othello, and after almost two decades of experience observing America’s black rock scene, it has struck me repeatedly the degree to which many black male rockers feel they can only truly rock by acquiring a baby mama who resembles Joni Mitchell circa 1970 or, nowadays, Feist. This, even when these black Atlantic boys believe Monika Danneman murdered their beloved Saint Jimi!

Still, Stew’s genius doesn’t make me want to put the hoodoo on him or Passing Strange. Rather, when he exhorts freedom from the podium with Arthur’s Little Red Book, Stew makes me wanna holler in Little Richard’s whoo-hoo! and reach back to my Baptist pastor granddaddy’s church in Georgia for my pious MLK Jr. hand fan with the wavy popsicle stick handle.

To wit: I have seen Passing Strange several times since being taken to see it for my birthday last spring at the Public Theatre (Mayday! Mayday!). While I applaud its leap to Broadway as a lifelong supporter of black difference and arts, my obsession with it is purely personal. Aside from Stevie Wonder at a distance, whose mother died a month before mine in 2006, no one feels my pain nor comes as close to articuutf8g the loss as Stew’s play. A mid-Atlantic chile from the opposite coast, I, like Stew, come from a restrictive Christian background — A.M.E. partisans on the maternal side and preaching as virtual family biniss on the paternal — that would condemn and cast me out for my atheism. Like me at an Allmans concert, Passing Strange is a spook in the Broadway buttermilk, probing the deep history of rock ‘n’ roll incubation and conservatism in the black church.

Although Stew’s a decade older than I, I also spent my youth in the ’70s plotting how to dance my way out of the constrictions of the black bourgeoisie horrorshow. And I loved punk and other subcultural provocations for the anarchic possibilities they presented in terms of society and style. Above all, I, too, long mistook songs for love — until now, when I’m in the grips of a hurt that music ultimately cannot heal. But while I appreciate my education abroad, I differ from Stew on the Europa-as-Utopia tip. Nothing breeds contempt like familiarity.

MR. MIDDLE PASSAGE


Stew’s alter-ego, Youth, comments that, "America can’t deal with freaky Negroes!" So there’s always been black in the Union Jack, leastways when it comes to rock ‘n’ roll — from Brian Jones’s ace boon Jimi Hendrix through to today’s new eccentric Lightspeed Champion. The UK has been perennially more hospitable to creative Africans who would be free, despite Ruth Owen of Mama Shamone’s faintly damning radio doc of last year, which took the pulse of the black rock orbit on both sides of the Atlantic.

Lightspeed Champion reminds me less of this ‘n’ that name-checked Britpopper than Modesto’s recently retired armchair critic of freeway flight and exurban strip-mall anomie: Granddaddy’s Jason Lytle. Perhaps this cracked Americana element stole into the proceedings since Hynes recorded his solo debut in Omaha amongst the cabal of Bright Eyes’ Saddle Creek-dippers, but it seems such wry "from inside the scene looking out" songs as "Everyone I Know Is Listening to Crunk" suggest the subjectivity of a disaffected young man looking for a room of his own far from the urban, madding crowd of druggies, chavs, and black authenticity dealers that surround its narrator. Like Lytle’s renovation of country and western — with an emphasis on restoring the western part of the early twentieth century modern genre from the perspective of what happens when America’s run out of room for expansion — Lightspeed Champion’s brand of high lonesome is borne out of England’s dreaming during the insular nation’s nightmarish era of being "overrun" by immigrants, urban blight, and various forms of terrorism.

It is rather fascinating that Texas-born Hynes should have escaped parochial black American life due to his itinerant parents’ lifestyle only to seek out Omaha-as-omphalos for requisite head space to craft his new opus, Falling Off the Lavender Bridge (Domino). Why? Precisely because it’s his attaining maturity in England that permitted Hynes to become the swooning, anxious, vulnerable almost to the point of fey version of black manhood that pervades his finely wrought songs. His brand of Afro iconoclasm — which got him signed as a Test Icicle at 19 and now gets him fêted for sepia twang in his early 20s — would have encountered far more roadblocks on American shores where young black males are required to be consistently hard and never punks (catch the final season of The Wire). Plus ça change, eh, Josephine et Jimmy? Of course, Hynes’s will-to-flight was telegraphed from childhood when he penned a comic about a superhero from Planet Voltarz whose power derived from wielding mathematical equations. The superhero’s moniker? Lightspeed Champion, whose power in maturity will likely rest on "touring until I die."

When he performed at that East Village hip cloister Mercury Lounge before a small fawning audience sporting about — a record — six Negroes, the fur-helmeted Champion in David Ruffin’s black glasses, a self-willed superhero and Urkel-in-Little Richard’s hairpiece, seemed to be signaling that the secret power propelling him out of the dystopic urban milieu he described was not merely blowing up in America but striving to refine a hyperliterate and well-enunciated language to get his Romantic apologias across. And don’t let the widescreen alt-country symphony "Galaxy of the Lost" fool you — our Devonte’s still black enough for ya, with his disc being inspired by a lot of hip-hop and by closing his debut with an ode to his Mama: "No Surprise (For Wendela)." If Falling Off the Lavender Bridge does the biniss projected, this postmodern Professor Longhair is on his way. Watch his space.

Despite the decades of separation, Stew and his fellow black Atlantic jumper Lightspeed Champion are both still seeking newer sonic horizons, even as that campaigning purveyor of "Them Changes," B-rack Obama, is traveling electric miles to paint the White House black.

San Francisco Contemporary Music Players

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PREVIEW While electronics have transformed the very core of contemporary dance music, rap, and pop, so-called art music of the concert hall persuasion still centers on acoustic instruments reverberating in real time. But some of the earliest feats of sound manipulation, predating the Beatles’ trippy tape loops and even the ’60s soul tracks destined for an afterlife in eternal sampledom, were achieved by German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, who was decidedly not a populist. In current terms, "electronic" music tends to denote the limitless reorganization of beats and breaks, but Stockhausen dispensed with regular rhythms altogether, turning his attention to the most basic components of sound itself, using now-primitive equipment to generate sine waves and splice magnetic tape. The most famous result of his experiments, aside from a nod from the Fab Four on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s, may be the 40-minute tape-based work Kontakte, for piano, percussion, and electronics, premiered in 1960. Pianist Julie Steinberg, who also moonlights as a percussionist for this performance by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, emphasizes the prohibitive complexity of performing Kontakte live. "We have to know the electronics perfectly," she says of playing along with Stockhausen’s original four-channel futuristic noise collage, now a digital version realized by a sound projectionist as the performers play. Conceived in recognition of the late composer’s 80th birthday by percussionist Willie Winant, whose cutting-edge creds include work with Mr. Bungle, John Zorn, Sonic Youth, Wilco, and the Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, this is a rare realization of what Winant calls "a masterwork" and a "seminal piece."

SAN FRANCISCO CONTEMPORARY MUSIC PLAYERS Mon/17, preconcert talk 7:15 p.m., concert 8 p.m.; $10–$27; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF; 978-ARTS, www.sfcmp.org

Reveille in reverb

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The first thing fans will notice about Beach House’s second album, Devotion (Carpark), is that it hews to the same gauzy sonic architecture of their 2006 eponymous debut. An elegant combination of keyboard beats, organ drones, apparitional electric slide guitar, and Victoria Legrand’s molasses vocals gave Beach House a golden glow that sent music scribes running to their thesaurus for "autumnal" synonyms. These elements sound thicker on Devotion, though a few spins down the line it becomes apparent that the difference lies more in the compositions themselves than in any studio trickery.

This isn’t a small distinction, given our tendency to fetishize certain sounds. Phil Spector productions, Dusty Springfield laments, and Lee Hazelwood bonanzas all have brilliant surfaces, but they also have the depth of classical songwriting, complete with bridges, vamps, and theatrical flourishes. Legrand, the niece of French film composer Michel Legrand, grew up in a musical atmosphere. The two of us have a phone date, but work and a sick dog interfere, leaving her to e-mail me from her Baltimore home about her glam-rocking father ("My papa wore tight purple satin pants, with hair down to ‘there’<0x2009>") and her studies at Paris’s International Theatre School Jacques Lecoq ("I was trained classically, and I know Alex [Scally, her Beach House bandmate] also has an affinity towards the classical, old-fashioned world, so I think it’s a given we’d be into the Zombies and . . . watered-down show-tune buildups").

And so we get a folded gem like Devotion‘s "Heart of Chambers," in which Legrand breathily asks, "Would you be my longtime baby?" On "Holy Dances," a drowsy, shaker-spurred verse flowers into the sunburst of Scally’s arpeggios. The centerpiece chorus of "All the Years" echoes with the same kind of distant regret running through the best of old girl-group records. Still, the purest pleasure on Devotion might be its sole cover, a version of Daniel Johnston’s "Some Things Last a Long Time": Beach House distills the song to a plucked melody, lolling drum beat — it’s like listening to a "Be My Baby" single at 33 rpm — and Legrand’s barely there inflection. "We felt compelled by the fragile essence of the song and merely wanted to capture it, if only for a brief moment," she writes.

Across Devotion, Legrand’s phrasing emerges as a major shaping force. She knows how to pause — inserting the breath before the chorus in "Turtle Island" and a delicious lingering note over at the end of "You Came to Me." And her sometimes slumberous drawl gives the 1960s pop orchestrations a European edge — Nico comes to mind — and from that same era Legrand also seems to have picked up the special knowledge that spelling a word out, as with "D.A.R.L.I.N.G.," always makes it sexier.

"We don’t have full rock band power, but that can also be detrimental to songwriting," Legrand writes. "Being a duo enables us to start simply and build from there." It also allows the twosome to maintain a key measure of intimacy. Though their preproduced effects emulate yesteryear’s studio magic, listeners never lose sight of the modest means of this music. Devotion‘s cover image strikes a similar balance, signaling formality — Legrand and Scally sit at a candlelit table — while admitting a homegrown touch: the album’s title is spelled out in a cake’s icing, and Legrand’s casual bare foot peeks out at the bottom of the frame.

If Beach House established the group’s palette, Devotion sees the duo working more confidently with the brush. When I describe some of the new disc’s brightest passages as "Technicolor moments" to Legrand, she replies: "I personally heard Technicolor in ‘Turtle Island’ during the bridge because all of a sudden the voices burst out, and it feels literally like paint and light are bursting through . . . a soft burst like a bubble in slow motion." That beats "autumnal" any day.

BEACH HOUSE

With Anaura and Best Wishes

Sat/15, 10 p.m., $12

Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF

www.bottomofthehill.com

Freedom is a ’69 Dodge

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When searching for recent signs of life in and recognition of country music’s biracial heritage beneath the rhinestone crust of NashVegas culture, I became an unwitting fan of Tupelo, Miss., singer-songwriter Paul Thorn via his "Mission Temple Fireworks Stand," as covered by Sawyer Brown with black sacred-steel whiz kid Robert Randolph. Then there were the good words passed on from Thorn’s participation last year at a Birmingham, Ala., medicine show for my friend Scott Boyer of Cowboy. Nor does it hurt that my all-time hero, Kris Kristofferson, has claimed, "Paul Thorn may be the best-kept secret in the music business. He and writing partner Billy Maddox turn out songs like a Mississippi Leiber and Stoller that put me in mind of Harry Crews’s creations — absolutely Southern, absolutely original." And when I finally caught up with this paragon last month at Manhattan’s Living Room, it was clear from the intimate set that Thorn lived up to the promise.

The goodwill extends to Thorn’s eighth album, A Long Way from Tupelo (on his Perpetual Obscurity imprint), although it gets off to an underwhelming start. Openers "Lucky 7 Ranch" and "Everybody Wishes" sound like subpar Bruce Springsteen — sans polemical stridency. Yet the slow-building, smoldering third cut gets to the heart of Thorn’s voice. "A Woman to Love" is an instant soul classic, and a great retro-nuevo standard for the postmodern South. His muse proceeds to get happy on the funky gospel of "I’m Still Here" and the passionate, torchy "Burnin’ Blue." Grammy darling and rockist hard-liver Amy Winehouse could make hay from "Crutches" — and should be encouraged to heed its message closely. And even soul twangmaster Travis Tritt’s recent The Storm (Category 5, 2007) could have been improved by including a cover of Thorn’s title track with its brimstone-full blues-rock power and tale of illicit romance. Thorn, raised by a preacher father in the Church of God, gets back to sanctified roots on "What Have You Done to Lift Somebody Up." Yass, y’all, the song comes quick with the holiness as it spreads a simple message of human kindness. Tupelo is an interesting case of an album getting stronger as it goes on, instead of kicking off with the expected fury. The later songs are suffused with soul and spirituality, as well as Thorn’s lyrical mix of home folks’ vernacular and trademark offbeat tragicomedy previously seen on beloved Thorn compositions like "Burn Down the Trailer Park." And the references to other artists demonstrate his creative possibilities and reach across roots-regarding genres. In this tricky transatlantic cultural moment, Thorn seems poised to emerge strong from his decade of steady toil at the margins of assorted scenes, including the Americana ghetto. Whereas in the past he has benefited from rich mentoring — friend and collaborator Delbert McClinton, Police manager Miles Copeland, late outsider artist the Rev. Howard Finster — Thorn may finally make it big purely on the strength of what’s unique to him. He charmingly makes his down-home allegiances plain by donning a Piggly Wiggly muscle T on Tupelo‘s back cover.

Thorn is prescient and fortunate enough to be releasing this effort amid what’s starting to look like another boom of magnificent Southern expression and genius — as demonstrated by a range of recent releases from Donnie, überATL-ien Janelle Monáe, Thorn’s homeboys the North Mississippi All-Stars, current toast Bettye LaVette, her producers the Drive-by Truckers, and Gnarls Barkley. Yes, such industry moves as appearances at South by Southwest and a Late Night with Conan O’Brien debut await Thorn this month, but what ultimately seems likely to put him across is the flexibility to open for and vibe with Toby Keith while reifying the wisdom of a black roadside Pentecostal preacher.

Right now, in their desperation, the music business and the scenes that orbit it seem more open to sounds beyond the overprocessed mainstream — even if the art boasts elements that tend to induce coastal prejudice like Thorn’s thick-as-molasses accent and his statement to Lone Star Music that "my music’s kind of like going to church with a six-pack." As for me, I’ll be down at the Piggly Wiggly preparing to tote a bouquet of pig’s feet and some RC Cola to this Renaissance man’s South by Southwest show.

PAUL THORN

March 25, 8 p.m., $15–$17

Little Fox Theatre

2215 Broadway, Redwood City

(650) 369-4119

www.foxdream.com

Big “Footprints”

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Since its inception in 2004, the SFJAZZ Collective has changed out six of its eight original members. But now in the midst of its fifth season, the band sounds and, more importantly, interacts more cohesively than ever.

"All the people we’ve had, have been very beneficial to the band," says pianist and original member Renee Rosnes, during a recent rehearsal at the Masonic Auditorium. "They just bring another color to the music." Veteran saxophonist Joe Lovano, who joined last summer and replaced Joshua Redman, now nominally serves as resident sage, the position formerly held by vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson. Also last summer, youthful Stephon Harris took Hutcherson’s slot, and this spring trombonist Robin Eubanks was added for the San Francisco residency and both the national and European tours. Despite the shifts, the ensemble’s firepower hasn’t diminished and the members are especially eager to tackle Wayne Shorter’s quixotic music, which they’ll be playing along with their own.

Saxophonist Shorter’s career has evolved from writing and playing on the front line of hard-bop standard-bearing Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers to a similar position with Miles Davis’s great shape-shifting quintet of the early ’60s. While playing with Davis, Shorter compiled one of the most distinguished solo careers ever with an incomparable series of albums on Blue Note (1964’s JuJu and Night Dreamer and 1965’s The All Seeing Eye) that forever cemented his stature as a major composer. Subsequent turns as the cofounder of Weather Report and now the leader of an exquisite quartet have simply embellished Shorter’s reputation.

Rosnes considers her time playing with Shorter a revelation. "It was such an impactful experience," Rosnes explains. "The intensity and passion that he played with literally took my breath away."

On the brief 1988 tour that took the all-star band through the United States and Europe, Rosnes played a nightly duet with Shorter on his Brazilian ballad "Diana." "There was complete spontaneity from night to night. He cherishes a lot of freedom within the music, and that really opened up my mind," she says.

Since each Collective member arranges a tune from the season’s composer, Rosnes has written the chart for "Diana" as well as Shorter’s classic "Footprints." Other arrangements include "Armageddon" by saxophonist Miguel Zenón, "Aung San Suu Kyi" by trumpeter Dave Douglas, "El Gaucho" by bassist Matt Penman, "Yes or No" by drummer Eric Harland, and "Infant Eyes" by saxophonist Lovano. Rosnes says the arrangements give the band a more personal voice, which is appropriate when considering Shorter’s considerable body of work. "He plays life," Rosnes says, "through his horn."

SFJAZZ COLLECTIVE

Sat/15, 8 p.m., $34–<\d>$52

Zellerbach Hall

UC Berkeley, near Bancroft at Telegraph, Berk.

www.calperfs.berkeley.edu

Dress sharp

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REVIEW Don’t tell anyone, but I have a secret fetish. Nothing turns me on like a new pair of shoes, and few bring me to shoegasm like sexy stilettos. So I put on my favorite pair of Gucci patent-leather tuxedo shoes and headed down to Stiletto, clubutante Parker Day’s arty party at Asia SF, in search of the perfect footwear.

Day named the night after the seductive heels, but it also alludes to the discreetly slim knife — both of which are deadly in the hands of the Pam Anderson B-movie character Barb Wire. "It’s sharp and it’s sexy," Day said. "It gets to the point." But it was The Warriors, a 1979 cult classic about New York City street gangs at war, that set the theme for that night’s party. As footage from the film was projected onto a side wall, the music morphed genres, from hip-hop and hit pop to electronic and indie-rock remixes for an audience as diverse as The Warriors‘s cast — and equally reminiscent of the early-’80s Big Apple. Fab Five Freddy, Blondie, and Madonna occupy the same turf without incident.

The crowd’s footwear was just as varied, but cowboy boots and Converse All-Stars were the most heavily represented in The Warriors–inspired fashion show. Taking cues from the movie, models worked leather vests and gunmetal belts into fierce ensembles, which they paraded down the runway like gangsters. A bit later, audience members were able to participate in a Warriors–themed costume contest. Not to ruffle anyone’s fab feathers, but I think my own shoes were the ultimate winners.

STILETTO

Third Friday of the month, 10 p.m.–3 a.m., $8

Asia SF

201 Ninth St, SF

http://www.myspace.com/stilettosf

Spundae 15-Year Anniversary

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PREVIEW When they founded Spundae in 1993, Peter Beckers and Guiv Naimi pioneered America’s electronic superclub a full two years before New York’s legendary (and sadly departed) Twilo. The duo managed to mix distinguished San Francisco talent — Jerry Bonham, Jondi and Spesh, Alain Octavo, Scott Carelli — with international superstars such as Pete Tong, Felix da Housecat, DJ Tiesto, Armin van Buuren, and Christopher Lawrence. After all the downs (a partnership-turned-rivalry with UK superclub Godskitchen, a stalled record label) and ups (an offshoot in Los Angeles, a partnership with luxurious Ruby Skye, international acclaim), Spundae stands firm as a distinctly American dance music bastion. Sasha and Digweed’s upcoming stop in late April demonstrates Spundae’s undiminished drawing power.

To celebrate 15 years of success, Spundae attracts (what else?) local and international talent for a two-day celebration. Qoöl masterminds Jondi and Spesh prepare the opening course of progressive house on Thursday, setting the table for two young coheadliners: Canadian Deadmau5, who creates a signature sound by pouring energy into coolly-synthed numbers and epic electro productions; and Brit James Zabiela, who combines glitchy effects and acid bass lines with nuanced drum patterns that betray a leaning toward intricate, sound-warping gear.

San Francisco takes the stage Friday, as longtime Spundae resident Alain Octavo and promoter extraordinaire Dr. Syd Gris fill the floors early with house and progressive trance. Reigning "Best American DJs" Josh Gabriel and Dave Dresden blend popular rock remixes, euphoric vocal tracks, and grittier, techno-based projections into a four-hour headlining set sure to showcase why they’ve become international favorites.

SPUNDAE 15-YEAR ANNIVERSARY Thurs/6, 9 p.m.–2 a.m., with James Zabiela, DeadMau5, and Jondi

and Spesh, $15; Fri/7, 9 p.m.–4 a.m., with Josh Gabriel and Dave Dresden, Syd Gris, and Alain Octavio,

$20 ($30 for both days). Ruby Skye, 420 Mason, SF. (415) 693-0777, www.spundae.com

Free birds

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George Sheehan, in his best-selling 1975 book of jogging-inspired philosophy, Running and Being: The Total Experience (Second Wind II), describes the endurance runner as being "twice born." The second life is the runner’s internal struggle — a gauntlet of pain, failure, and disappointment that ultimately becomes the necessary condition for hope. While not exactly an advertisement for sneakers, Sheehan’s maxim illustrates something important about the Black Swans: they aren’t the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down; they’re the medicine itself, a soulful salve pursuing internal aberrations because there’s something redemptive in their delivery, something undeniably good for you.

For his own part, songwriter Jerry DiCicca isn’t a runner. "I’m a relentless pacer," he confesses in an e-mail interview, "and a bad chess player," proving that the author of such doleful laments as "Who Will Walk in the Darkness with You" is not without humor after all. In fact, he’s far from a self-absorbed, journal-burning auteur. "I really care about the words, but I’m pretty sure if I moaned the menu of White Castle in a minor key backed by Noel [Sayre]’s violin, the effect wouldn’t be much different for most people."

It has been a bearish couple of years for the Black Swans. In late 2006 they released Sex Brain (Bwatue), an EP’s worth of variations on themes of a venal nature. After touring and getting "weirded out by some small labels that acted gross," they were able to remix a record originally made in 2005, and Change! (La Société Expéditionnaire) found its way into the light last November.

As we have learned, sustained struggle can be illuminating, so to call Change! a dark record is to deny its resolve, its reconciliation with psychic disfigurement. Melancholy airs are staked by arrangements that patiently wait on DiCicca’s mossy cant — "I sound like a narcoleptic caveman," he writes. On "Hope Island" he seems at peace with isolation so pure that it could have been the one true condition of his life. "Shake," a laconic waltz whose delicate piano figure trades with ocean-size guitar surges and Sayre’s tawny violin, exemplifies one of the band’s most enduring strengths: space — a slowly passing landscape that allows for breathing room and time to think. The Desire-era Dylan vibe comes courtesy of Sayre, who channels Scarlet Rivera better than anyone in or outside of Columbus, Ohio.

DiCicca is no Dylan dilettante. Last fall he lectured a 500-level class at Ohio State University on the bard’s career between Infidels (Columbia, 1983) and Time out of Mind (Columbia, 1997). He passed out pretzel rods to the class because, he writes, "I like to eat pretzels when I listen to Bob." Does he have further aspirations in the ivory tower? "I’m hardly a scholar," he observes, "just a semi-autistic windbag that convinced a professor otherwise."

Three records into their discography — Who Will Walk in the Darkness with You came out in 2004 on the Delmore Recording Society imprint — the Black Swans have proved their craftsmanship, one that does not feel overparented or overdetermined. Enter the artwork on the vinyl versions of Change!, each of which sports a custom sleeve painted by artists at ARC North, a Creativity Explored–like art studio for people with disabilities in Columbus. "I’ve purchased paintings by ARC artists because they seem freer, with less mimicry," writes DiCicca. "That’s what I aspire to — well, who wouldn’t?" On a recent visit to Aquarius Records, the bins offered a copy whose palate of serene colors — cornflower, aquamarine, a touch of navy — are swirled violently onto the paper, leaving gauzy, haphazard brushstrokes. A storm has come to a tranquil sea — or has just gone.

BLACK SWANS

With Oxbow and Pillars of Silence

Tues/11, 9 p.m., $8

12 Galaxies

2565 Mission, SF

(415) 970-9777

www.12galaxies.com

Say hello to my little Ferrari

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Every time I hear a Giorgio Moroder track, I am transported back to an exclusive Miami disco in the early ’80s. I’m Cuban drug lord Tony Montana, in my white polyester suit, disco dancing with the robotic, all-bangs, ultrablond Elvira Hancock. Her heavily stylized and mechanical moves are only bolstered by her last three nose-powdering bathroom trips.

Fast-forward to a recent Saturday night at sleek Italo-disco night Ferrari, a monthly fundraiser for volunteer-based, DIY station 93.7 FM West Add Radio at Deco Lounge. While drug cartel members, big-name celebrities, and models were noticeably absent, the club — still in its infancy and more baby powder than coca powder — is still very insider-y, attracting a notable crew of local DJs, promoters, and scene makers.

Hitting the dance floor, I was surrounded by a who’s who of San Francisco party throwers like Parker Day (Stiletto), Rchrd Oh?! (Hold Yr Horses, Lights down Low), and Juanita More (Trannyshack, Booty Call) among a mixed crowd of Mission kids, gay Tenderloin hipsters, and drag queens, all bumping on the dance floor to every conceivable disco subgenre — whether it was Italo, Euro, or Hi-NRG from assorted decades.

DJs Christopher Vick (Gemini, Paradise), Jordan (House Parties), Nicky B (Electric Boogie), and Connor and Primo (Night Beat), who mix more obscure ’80s dance artists Klein and MBO with innovator Donna Summer, describe their records simply as "robot rock."

As I passed a couple of girls dancing like automatons — with blond, heavy-on-the-bangs hair — I prepared to mourn the day this club is discovered by Bridgette and Tunnel. Maybe promoters can hire a machine gun–wielding security team to keep out the riffraff. But disco’s inherent inclusivity, bringing everyone together for an orgy of music and revelry, means biting the bullet and passing on the ammunition.

FERRARI

Second Saturdays, 10 p.m.–2 a.m., $5

Deco Lounge

510 Larkin, SF

(415) 346-2025, www.decosf.com

A band apart

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There’s never been any doubt pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba could play. The 44-year-old Cuban émigré has been a highly favored sideman to top-shelf jazz leaders since landing in the United States some 15 years ago. He’s also had a steady recording contract with Blue Note and leads his own trios, which he dominates with an imposing virtuosity, an exacting sense of Cuban musical history, and a tense, brooding personality.

Now Rubalcaba has an exciting new quintet with a striking potential for challenging even his outsize talent. Culled from New York City’s best young players, his combo could be one of those very special groups whose exceptional parts create an even greater whole. Together almost a year, they’ve just released their first record, Avatar (Blue Note) and are embarking on their first West Coast tour, playing at both Yoshi’s locations over the course of a week. Avatar includes three compositions by saxophonist Yosvany Terry, whom Rubalcaba knew from their youth in Havana, Cuba, and who brings a modern, angular urbanity to the jazz traditions they are both well acquainted with. Trumpeter Mike Rodriquez played with Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra and has become one of the most sought-after young players in jazz. Bassist Matt Brewer had been with saxophonist Greg Osby’s group and suggested the stunning drummer Marcus Gilmore. Brewer and Gilmore are still in their 20s and bring a vibrant, youthful energy to the group that complements Rubalcaba’s old-world, old-soul vibe. Avatar nods to Rubalcaba’s Latin-classical side, closing with his arrangement of Preludio Corto no. 2 for Piano by the Cuban composer Alejandro García Caturla, but the disc also showcases Terry’s funky "Hip Side," Brewer’s meditative "Aspiring to Normalcy," and Horace Silver’s enduring ballad "Peace."

It’s a riveting recording — and the combo’s live performances promise to be equally compelling. Of late, few major jazz ensembles stay together long enough to create really unique sounds and sensibilities. This particular quintet could have that kind of staying power.

GONZALO RUBALCABA

Mon/10–March 12, 8 and 10 p.m., $20–$24

Yoshi’s San Francisco

1330 Fillmore, SF

Also March 13–15, 8 and 10 p.m.; March 16, 7 and 9 p.m., $12–$22

Yoshi’s

510 Embarcadero West, Oakl.

(510) 238-9200, www.yoshis.com

World of echo

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It’s been 20 years since My Bloody Valentine released their breakthrough album, Isn’t Anything (Creation) — long enough for it to be wound up in a younger generation’s musical DNA. For how frequently the band is referenced by both musicians and critics, the rich double-sidedness of MBV’s peculiar attack often gets simplified as "swooning" and "ethereal." Erstwhile Deerhunter vocalist Bradford Cox is one of the few shoegaze suitors who seems clued in to the searing — and often distressing — tensions that distinguish My Bloody Valentine from followers like Slowdive and Ride. In Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel (Kranky), his first official release as Atlas Sound, Cox has worked out an exquisite combination of shoegaze and laptop pop, a fucked-up beauty waiting to be adored.

A self-described "queer art punk," the young Atlantan first turned heads for his Internet indiscretions and outré performances with Deerhunter. The words Cox used to describe author Dennis Cooper in ANP Quarterly may as well be his own propulsive mantra: "The only thing he does to infuriate so many people is to write honestly, expressing things that most people would prefer to stay far under the surface."

While Cox’s transgressions have previously edged up to mawkishness, Let the Blind channels his confessional tendencies into a newly retrospective shape. Atlas Sound’s source material, aesthetic means, and subject are inextricable from one another in the same manner as Jonathan Caouette’s first-person film, Tarnation (2003). Much glitchier than Deerhunter’s Cryptograms (Kranky, 2007), the Atlas Sound home recordings are almost exclusively about the soul-baring, delicious isolation of being alone in your adolescence. Cox has described "Quarantined" as being about children with AIDS, though the main refrain, "I am waiting to be changed," resonates with Morrissey-like wistfulness.

The music on Let the Blind drifts uneasily between bliss and terror, the heavily doctored mélange of glockenspiels and guitars conjuring a narcoleptic glow. Drone pieces like "Small Horror" and "On Guard" concentrate on specific intense emotions, while fuller arrangements like "River Card" and "Bite Marks" entangle youthful romantic obsession in soft-hewn bass melodies and howling vocals. The shoegaze textures may be Cox’s equivalent of Proust’s madeleine, but it’s in the treated, divested vocal tracking that Let the Blind achieves its deepest immersions.

On "Winter Vacation," the chords seem to be pulling each other apart, reaching for different resolutions — so too with the rest of the album’s balancing act of sensuousness and numbness — though never so far apart as we think. Cox has written extensively about aiming for catharsis on his heavily trafficked blog, but Let the Blind comes off more as a prismatic refracting of past intensity and indolence. It’s teenage confusion done in Technicolor, and that ought to be enough to change more than a few kids’ lives.

ATLAS SOUND

With White Rainbow and Valet

Sat/8, 10 p.m., $10

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF

www.bottomofthehill.com, deerhuntertheband.blogspot.com

Borts Minorts

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PREVIEW Leap year is here! Looking for a suitably unusual event to celebrate this once-every-four-years occurrence? I strongly suggest scampering over to the Hemlock Tavern for a Club Chuckles lineup that’s poised to scramble the brain of any comedy connoisseur. Headliners Borts Minorts defy simple description. See, there’s this guy in a hooded white unitard and a headset mic who sings and flails and contorts — he might be an alien or an android, but it’s doubtful anything but an actual human would be able to bring such pure and bizarre joy to the stage. Equally enthusiastic are the Borts backup dancers, who flaunt leotards and fishnets (and the occasional pair of lederhosen), and whose energetic choreography demonstrates limber limbs and an admirable appreciation of jazz hands. Borts’s music is similarly befuddling, in the best possible way — a combination of samples, keyboards, horns, drums, theremin, slide whistles, a single-stringed bass made out of a snow ski, and god knows what else, but I guarantee you’ll not see anything as sense-assaultingly entertaining this leap year, or any other year. Local duo Ramshackle Romeos render classics like "Feelings" with nearly as many instruments as a full orchestra (including a mean musical saw), and comedians Drennon Davis and Alex Koll rock the mic between musical numbers.

BORTS MINORTS With Drennon Davis, Alex Koll, and Ramshackle Romeos. Fri/29, 9:30 p.m., $8. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. (415) 923-0923, www.hemlocktavern.com

Holly Cole

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PREVIEW If voice has a color, Holly Cole’s gleams like rich, burnished copper. A jazzy postmodern chanteuse with a sensual, sultry bent, the Canadian performer stops into Yoshi’s San Francisco during her first United States tour in six years. Her current trio includes longtime pianist Aaron Davis, bassist Marc Rogers, and saxophonist John Johnson.

Cole has a stylish new self-titled album (Koch) in tow, recorded in New York with a nonet headed by bassist and coproducer Greg Cohen. Cohen plays music across the board, having toured with both Ornette Coleman’s free-jazz ensembles and Woody Allen’s New Orleans–style group, and he’s also worked with more eccentric pop songwriters like Tom Waits and Elvis Costello, both of whom Cole has favored on past releases like her 1995 Tom Waits tribute album, Temptation (Metro Blue/Blue Note). Gil Goldstein arranged 6 of the new recording’s 11 tunes, an eclectic bag of standards ranging from Johnny Mercer and Henry Mancini’s "Charade" to Cole Porter’s "It’s All Right with Me." At times buoyant and swinging, the record also shows Cole at her most hauntingly intimate.

Although Cole has been making outstanding records for several years, Holly Cole is the first to be domestically distributed since 1997’s pop-slanted Dark Dear Heart (Metro Blue), which included two originals, the title tune by reclusive singer-songwriter Mary Margaret O’Hara, and songs by Joni Mitchell and Sheryl Crow, among others. Cole first made her mark with savvy versions of torchy jazz standards like "Don’t Smoke in Bed," but like all great vocalists, she inhabits everything she sings: from Brian Wilson’s "God Only Knows" (off Shade [Alert, 2003]) to Stephen Sondheim’s "Loving You" (from Romantically Helpless [EMI, 2000]). Her lush, purring tones, subtle phrasing, and soulful empathy always take the songs beyond simple interpretation. Much like a great actor, Cole never lets you see the craft but reveals the shadowy dimensions of character and the essential details of the story.

HOLLY COLE Tues/4, 8 and 10 p.m., $16–$20. Yoshi’s San Francisco, 1330 Fillmore, SF. (415) 655-5600, sf.yoshis.com

Feels like the first time

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At first listen, I thought Oakland’s Long Thaw approached their straight-up hard rock with ironic jokiness. After all, this clever bunch sport names like Chile Valentine (né Benjamin Prewitt), Diego Snake (a.k.a. Dan Brubaker), and Mr. Forever (born André Zivkovich). Their humor meter defaults to squirm-inducing sexual innuendos, and as Snake puts it, they believe there are "enough hair farmers out there that like to just sit down with a beer and listen to some dude rock."

Well, the joke’s on me, and I thought wrong: file Long Thaw’s heavy sound somewhere between the Melvins and Triclops! and never doubt the band would treat music with sardonic carelessness.

Back in December, when I first saw the combo play, I didn’t expect much, except that I might get bored, and if so, I could kill time in the Stork Club back room by pouring $10 into a pinball machine. My low expectations paid off: not only was I not bored; I was fully entertained by Long Thaw’s classic twin-guitar attack and speedy riff trading, heavy bottom-end drum fills, and soaring, operatic vocals. As much as its members have absorbed the ideas of proto- and post-punk, the band’s economy and aggression compositionally refer more directly to 1980s hardcore and ’90s alternative rock.

Long Thaw formed at the intersection of two Bay Area bands: Boyjazz and Stay Gold Pony Boy. Eager to try his hand at writing and playing his own songs, guitarist Forever got his chance when, he says, "literally within a month I got dumped and I bailed out of Boyjazz." Snake brought some riffs to Forever’s attention, and they clicked enough for the two to start a new project, joined by friends and colleagues DeSoto Vice (Szymon Sipowski) on bass and Savannah Black (Jenya Chernoff) on drums. After a year of auditioning vocalists, Long Thaw found Chile Valentine and came out of its ice age.

Being a classically trained vocalist, Valentine can pitch it high and sustain the notes: he’s turned out to be the icing on the group’s hard-rock cake. In just one year, during which his voice flipped between sounding too over the top and too reined in, Valentine went from singing at karaoke bars to warbling on local stages. "Overall," Forever says, sitting down with the rest of the band at Soundwave Studios, "if [Valentine] weren’t singing, we wouldn’t get the Iron Maiden and Dio comparisons." Sure, Valentine’s amusingly metalesque voice hooks you, but the band’s rhythmic clip and dueling riffs, as well as catchy choruses and bridges, keep you around.

Judge for yourself on the new self-released EP Feels Natural, and notice how well the band fits into the current pop cycle, in which hard rock is undergoing its seeming once-a-decade revival in the form of Queens of the Stone Age and spin-off Eagles of Death Metal. Here in the Bay, Long Thaw’s music seems surprisingly fresh, especially as a muscular counterpoint to the foppish twee-ness of a certain segment of the indie underground. If you came of age during the late ’80s and early ’90s, and the sounds burned in your brain are those of Dinosaur Jr., Soundgarden, Mudhoney, and Jesus Lizard, you’ll enjoy Long Thaw’s old-school rock ‘n’ roll, played anew.

LONG THAW

March 2, 4 p.m., call for price

Stork Club

2330 Telegraph, Oakl.

(510) 444-6174

www.storkcluboakland.com

Elastic band

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After struggling to settle into a listening routine with Dig That Treasure (Asthmatic Kitty), the sprightly debut from Bay Area trio Cryptacize, I decided to take the recording for a walk. Buoyed by the sudden spring weather, I floated down Harrison to the candy-striped fuzz of "Heaven Is Human," and before long, found certain street noises complementarily weaving their way into the track. "Bells are ringing / Gates are singing," Nedelle Torrisi coos on "Cosmic Sing-A-Long," before bandmate Chris Cohen joins to harmonize on the gentle rallying cry, "Every note is an unfinished song."

Cryptacize’s numbers are arranged as twisty medleys, their frequent stops and starts redolent of the impressionistic fragrance of melody. Torrisi and Cohen previously explored similarly horizontal song structures together in the Curtains, but the addition of percussionist Michael Carreira — who plays drums as if he were painting — and proper duets lend Cryptacize a markedly easygoing, domestic air. Sharp melodic inversions and time changes are softened by Torrisi’s and Cohen’s disarmingly sweet voices and a general balancing of tunefulness with cacophony.

As with Cohen’s earlier band Deerhoof, Cryptacize strives for the development of a private musical language rather than the typical filtering of influences. "We never really jam," Cohen e-mails from his Oakland home, "but some songs are sections designated as free tempo so we [just have to] follow each other’s movements out of the corners of our eyes. There are also parts where we improvise on a specific theme or riff, but these moments are built into a song." This kind of programmed free association is especially evident on more mosaic pieces like "Heaven Is Human," but instead of resulting in free-jazz confusion or Deerhoof density, Cryptacize’s wide-eyed stitch often seems like the score to an imaginary musical.

Part of this stems from the album’s isoutf8g production, in which the multiplicity of the compositional elements plays against a sparing sound. The overdubs are few and far between, and the silences many. "Hearing parts separately was important to us for this album. We wanted the listener to have lots of empty space," writes Cohen. Even on thicker-sounding productions like "We’ll Never Dream Again," the two guitar tracks are panned to either side, emphasizing the song’s moving parts on headphones.

One can be forgiven for picturing a stage while listening to these wide expanses. It’s there in the plaintive opening of "The Shape Above," the pitched mood swings on "How Did the Actor Laugh?," contemplative confessionals like "Water Witching Wishes," and the outstretched verses of "Stop Watch." When I ask Cohen about it, he fills me in on his and Torrisi’s youthful exposure to musical theater and sings the praises of Leonard Bernstein. "Mike actually isn’t a big fan of show tunes, although we did turn him on to our favorite, West Side Story, when we were on tour in October," Cohen e-mails, before explaining the theatrical roots of the disc’s inviting title: his father, an aspiring collegiate composer, cowrote a musical review of the same name. He lent the title to Cryptacize "cautiously," Cohen continues, "warning us that his cowriters might sue us!"

Legal proceedings notwithstanding, Cryptacize has all the qualifications to reinvent the rock opera. In the meantime, the band is readying Dig That Treasure‘s prismatic pop for the road, angling for bewitchment. "Since we don’t exactly bombard the audience with volume," writes Cohen, "Nedelle has developed a set of hand movements to hypnotize them."

CRYPTACIZE

With Why? and Dose One

March 6, 9 p.m., $13

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

www.musichallsf.com

On like him

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I’m typing this with one hand, because I’m patting myself on the back with the other. According to Eddi Projex himself, I’m the first writer to ever interview him, back in 2003 when he was a member of Hittaz on tha Payroll, who’d just released their retail debut, Ghetto Storm (Hitta). It was the tail end of the Bay’s turn-of-the-century commercial drought, yet the group — including Polo, Curcinado, and Fletchberg Slim — sold almost 4,000 copies. On April 6, 2005, I wrote a Guardian piece on Projex when he had a BET video hit with "Drank-A-Lot," featuring his former mentor Numskull and Money B.

Now here we are again, and while I claim no credit for Projex’s success, I can’t help feeling gratified. I knew he just needed a shot and he got one: his Bedrock-produced single, "On like Me," was one of the hottest Bay records of 2007, despite the increasing difficulty of getting local music on the radio. Showcasing the skillful hook-writing evident on Ghetto and "Drank," "On like Me" confirms Projex’s status as one of the top three post–Mistah FAB Oakland rappers, along with Beeda Weeda and J-Stalin.

"I’ve always jumped on the hook," says Projex. "That’s the most important part of the song. You could be the rawest verse-writing nigga ever, but if you ain’t got the catchy hook, the raps don’t mean shit."

At that time, hyphy was heavy, he recalls: "I almost bit. I took the beat to the studio, got to talking about shakin’ dreds, and D-Kash [who signed Eddi to Hi-Speed Records] says, ‘Eddi, that ain’t you.’ So I went to my car, put the CD in, and blasted it. And I just started rappin’: ‘Candy on the paint / Chrome on the feet / Is anybody out there on like me?’ I took that bit for the hook, put everything together. Called that nigga the next morning — check this out! He was, like, ‘Yeah!‘

"FAB was, like, let me hear that," Projex continues. "Then he called me, like, ‘Eddi, this the one!’ He played it that Friday on Yellow Bus Radio."

"The response was crazy," Mistah FAB confirms. "Rick Lee from KMEL gave it a chance, then Mind Motion. It just took off."

Unfortunately, Projex wasn’t prepared to consolidate his success. "Album was nowhere near done," he concedes. "I just had a song on the radio. It jumped off, and I wasn’t ready for it." It wasn’t until the end of the year that Projex dropped his album, Now or Never (Hi-Speed/Payroll), which includes the "On like Me" remix with FAB and Too $hort as well as new singles, "Wiggleman," produced by Bedrock, and "Breezy," produced by the Mekanix and highlighting Keak da Sneak.

While Now brims over with grimy street raps, it also shows Projex’s deeper side, reflected in such tracks as the love song "I’m Feeling You," the politically minded "That’s Right," and the homage to family life, "Grown Man."

"My grandma love that song," Projex says of "Grown Man." "I’m not afraid to say I got a wife and kids. I’m still a player though. But I try to make music that everybody listens to. I’m a well-rounded dude." Though the tracks are way more gangsta, those numbers make Now arguably the most lyrically substantial street record since FAB’s Baydestrian (Faeva Afta/SMC, 2007).

What makes Projex’s positive songs so powerful, moreover, is his undeniable street cred. The 26-year-old rapper, born Eddie Scott, hails from East Oakland’s Stonehurst district, a.k.a. Stone City.

"That’s the last turf in East Oakland besides Sobrante, on the border of San Leandro," he explains. "Basically the 100s. That’s the first place I seen rocks selling, sold a rock, whatever. When Stone City was created, there wasn’t no rolling 100s. Then everybody came together to rep the 100s."

Wanting to set him on the right path, Projex’s mother sent him to Berkeley High School to pursue a promising football career, which was cut short by a shattered ankle. In his sophomore year, he dropped out to sell crack in Stone City and hooked up with Hittaz on tha Payroll, who became Numskull’s crew when the Luniz broke up.

By the time he was 18, Projex was traveling across the country with Numskull, from Los Angeles to New York City, rubbing shoulders with elite rappers like Xzibit, Jayo Felony, and Wu-Tang Clan. Though he and Numskull have since parted ways, Projex remains grateful for the experience, which separates him from the majority of his peers, many of whom have yet to venture East.

"I’ve seen the light, so I want that back," Projex says. "But this time I’m going to be in that light. I still got my Hitta roots, but I’m trying to make music for the masses. I’m trying to go putf8um and make millions."

Noise Pop 2008

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Noise Pop: Dancing in a crafty place

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We all know the dance floor can be a dangerous place. What with all of those flailing limbs, gyrating pelvises, and spastic movements, total chaos can and does easily ensue. Thanks to Canadian electro phenomenon MSTRKRFT — who seem to have everyone and their baby’s mama getting down — club violence has taken on a whole new meaning with the murderous single "Street Justice," off their seething debut, The Looks (Last Gang, 2006). Urgent, screeching-siren guitars squeal under the thumping bass and the ominous chant "This is a killing on the dance floor," conveying the imminent threat of sonic carnage and giving the notion of "killing it" a threatening new meaning.

Made up of JFK, the bass player of now-defunct electrorock outfit Death from Above 1979, and Al-P, DFA 1979 producer and a former member of quirky electric pop combo Girlsareshort, these two have perfected a mix of raw, hormone-heightening, boogie-worthy beats with a savage rock sensibility. With a sound that nods to house legends Daft Punk but without their asexual austerity, JFK and Al-P combine electro-fueled urban grit with sultry rock ‘n’ roll, appealing equally to dance diehards and of-the-moment musical opportunists. Masquerading in stage attire as evil as their thumping racket, MSTRKRFT have been known to don gold spray-painted hockey masks as they man the decks, a sinister look that’s more Jason Voorhees than Gallic space visitor. Liberally passing Crown Royal bottles around onstage, this sensual duo liven up their club appearances with their naughty golden dancers, who wear the signature masks and little else, making steamy remixes like "Sexy Results" that move beyond pure aural fantasy. (Hayley Elisabeth Kaufman)

MSTRKRFT

With LA Riots, Lazaro Casanova, and Sleazemore

March 1, 9 p.m., $20

Mighty

119 Utah, SF

(415) 626-7001

www.mighty119.com

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Noise Pop: Do’s and the Don’ts

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San Francisco’s Dont’s are JJ Don’t (bass), Ken Don’t (drums), Jonny Don’t (vocals), and Joey Don’t (guitar), but as with the Beatles, a fifth Don’t looms like a specter. In this case it’s the Mountain Don’t, a fearsome triumph of mixology that involves a shot of vodka, one of Robitussin, a touch of absinthe, and a splash of Mountain Dew Code Red. It is the band’s go-to tipple, and given that most of the Dont’s songwriting occurs during bouts of improvisation after too much of it, the drink is easily as influential on their sound as, say, kraut rock.

The influence question is unusually tricky with the quartet, who cut their second self-released LP, Inner El Camino, last year at John Vanderslice’s Tiny Telephone studio. While the Dont’s exercise many familiar art rock themes — the pinched vocals and twee urbanity of the Talking Heads in "Measure Up" and the beat-driven guitar warfare, DFA-style, of "Blahblahblah" — their methods for getting to them are so anathema to that scene that the whole connection becomes flimsy. Improv rock — to the degree to which these guys take it (lyrics too are made up midsession) — is supposed to be fumbly jam-band stuff.

Joey Don’t, for one, doesn’t buy that line in rock’s sand. "I don’t subscribe to the aesthetics people place between hippies and avant-gardists," he remarked by e-mail. "I like the Grateful Dead as much as I like Can." The good part is that the Dont’s don’t have to be right: they just have to be willful. The music runs its own show, and a tangible sense of liberation crackles across Inner El Camino. It comes up again in Ken Don’t’s description of recent rehearsals: "We’re experimenting with MIDI guitars, drum triggers … our trademark bullhorn miasma. We don’t know where any of that will lead, and frankly, we don’t care."

THE DONT’S

With the High Violets and the Union Trade

Feb. 29, 5 p.m., free

Parkside

1600 17th St., SF

(415) 503-0393

www.theeparkside.com

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Noise Pop: Joy Rides and Darby Crash test dummies

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In the current glut of music biopics and documentaries, it seems any band or scene worth its salt in influence and innovation is fair game for the big screen. Chalk it up to corporate tie-ins or affordable filmmaking equipment, Behind the Music or DIY videozines, but chances are your favorite group will someday make it to a theater near you. Eschewing polished product for its annual film program, the Noise Pop festival spotlights several ragtag productions focused on left-of-the-dial music legends.

To begin with the cream of the crop, Chris Bagley and Kim Shively’s Wesley Willis’s Joy Rides balances a measured introduction with an intimate appreciation of the titular hero. The film will inevitably be compared to In the Realms of the Unreal (2004) and The Devil and Daniel Johnston (2006) for its profile of an outsider artist and its clever animations of Willis’s colorful cityscapes, but Willis was simply too one of a kind for Joy Rides to be anything but. Willis’s music and art flowed directly from the outsize personality of the hulking Chicagoan, who was raised in the projects. Bagley and Shively evidently spent a lot of time filming Willis in the years before his 2003 death, and their movie is much the better for Willis’s constant jiving, affable head butts, and offhand bouts of inspired wordplay.

Not that all of Joy Rides goes down so easy. It’s wincingly uncomfortable to watch Willis, who was a diagnosed schizophrenic, knock himself upside the head while trying to "get the demons out," and some of the film’s talking heads veer dangerously close to "magical black man" territory. But there’s a discernible difference between transparency and exploitation, and Joy Rides decidedly sways toward the former. Bagley and Shively had Willis create the documentary’s credits sequences, which seems emblematic of a broader mutual appreciation. Given Willis’s prolificacy, it’s no surprise he would want a hand in the film: the next time I encounter creative restlessness, I’ll be sure to think of Willis’s maxim "The joyride keeps my ass busy."

Darby Crash was similarly driven during his brief life, but the punk vocalist’s ferocity is blunted by biopic clichés in the weirdly saccharine What We Do Is Secret. Rodger Grossman’s film follows the course of Crash’s five-year plan, which took him from high school dropout to rock ‘n’ roll suicide. The director catches some of the excitement of the Germs’ hopelessly abbreviated sets and lucks out in a nice performance by Bijou Phillips as bassist Lorna Doom, but his tendency toward sitcomish lighting and confessional monologues sinks the band’s fire in a morass of conventionality. The original Germs recently tapped Crash impersonator Shane West for a cash-in tour, proving that some legacies are never safe.

A pair of low-key documentaries cast a wider net in their hard-rock forays, with varying results. Such Hawks, Such Hounds profiles a few of the most vibrant interpreters of heavy music (Comets on Fire, Dead Meadow, Om) but without much purpose. Filmmaker John Srebalus floats between interviews with divergent bands without offering any of the categorizing insights or personal passion that made Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey (2006) such a hit.

Joe Losurdo and Christina Tillman’s documentary You Weren’t There, on the other hand, is a thrillingly exhaustive survey of early Chicago punk. Viewers may not be familiar with outfits like Strike Under and Silver Abuse, but the documentary’s detailed time line and great stock of interviews and primary documents thoroughly pinpoint that most elusive beast of rock music: the scene. Whether parsing overlapping band lineups, defunct venues, or long-out-of-print zines and records, You Weren’t There strays from the master narrative of punk, recovering a local history no less vibrant for staying below the radar.

The Jamie Kennedy vehicle Heckler chooses the route of takedown rather than appreciation, serving up a feature-length revenge act on critics — the title fudges the film’s true target. As strangely compelling as it is to watch the likes of Jewel and Henry Winkler spill their guts, Heckler is too indulgent of its interviewees’ bipolar bursts of insecurity and bullying to shape much of an, er, critique. This just in: bloggers take cheap shots at celebrities! Then again, no one likes a … you know how it goes.

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Noise Pop: Running with Wale

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Back in 2006, when Washington DC music veteran Ronald "Dig Dug" Dixon, of legendary go-go band the Northeast Groovers (NEG), first got wind that some rap upstart named Wale (pronounced Wah-lay) had not only sampled NEG’s music without permission but also jacked Dixon’s stage name for his single’s title and refrain, he was not happy. But when Dixon learned that Wale also hailed from the nation’s capital, better known for its go-go scene than its hip-hop, and that the single "Dig Dug" was in fact a heartfelt homage to both NEG and go-go, all bad vibes soon subsided and the young hip-hop hopeful got his elder’s blessing.

In the two years since, Wale’s career has taken off at an accelerated pace. The unsigned artist performed at last year’s MTV Video Music Awards, appeared on the cover of Urb, and gathered countless other write-ups and gushing features in such publications as XXL, Rolling Stone, the Washington Post, and Entertainment Weekly, which honored him as one of the top eight new faces to watch this year. And Wale, who has rightfully dubbed himself "the ambassador of rap for the capital," seems poised to live up to all this hype, especially since last July’s mixtape 100 Miles and Running caught the attention and respect of one Mark Ronson (Amy Winehouse, Lily Allen), who has since produced the still-unsigned rapper.

Wale, who performs at Mighty on Feb. 29 as part of Noise Pop, is taking all of this in stride. Speaking recently by phone as he drove around Los Angeles with his manager, the MC — who was born Olubowale Folarin 23 years ago in DC to Nigerian immigrant parents — proclaimed confidently that talent is what got him to the position he’s in today.

"Lucky?" he asked, somewhat surprised when I questioned him about the recent hype and accolades bestowed on him. "Lucky? That implies that I don’t have talent. I do. And that comes first. And after that, there is some luck….

"My manager is good at his job."

And what label will the much-sought-after artist sign with? "Actually, I may not even sign with a label. I may not need to…. Just wait and see how it goes," said the ambassador, who seems destined to put DC firmly on the rap map.

WALE

With Trackademicks and Nick Catchdubs

Feb. 29, 9 p.m., $15–$20

Mighty

119 Utah, SF

(415) 626-7001

www.mighty119.com

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