Everybody's Working For The Weekend
It's the weekend, so let's get started. You don't need to go down to New Orleans to hear good music, JazzFest or not. This being Philly, it comes to you. (But if you want to hear Dan DeLuca, who IS in the Big Easy, drinking in Trombone Shorty, click this.)
Saturday night? Get up! How about the hardest working Afrobeat band, Antibalas? Coming to the TLA. Based in New York, put together from parts of King Chamgo, the Daktaris and the Soul Providers, these guys mix Nigerian beats, greasy U.S. soul and shakin Latin rhythms. Their site has news and sound clips from the new EP, Government Magic. Click "Che Che Cole (Makossa)" to hear for yourself.
Graham Parker at the Steel City Coffeehouse in Phoenixville. The former gas pump jockey is still pouring it all out. We go across the pond to Adventures of A University Finalist for some native Parkerilla:
Parker often becomes embroiled in comparisons with pub rock and the late 70s Canvey Island pub rock scene of Ian Dury (a wonderful songsmith in his own right) and Dr Feelgood which I find rather unfair. He creates a fantastically tight form of R & B with fluid rhythms, taut solos and an acerbic vocal style. Even nowadays, Parker continues to perform unabated by musical changes and still sounds as fresh and important as ever. You can find some of that heat here.
How about the Roches Saturday night at the Sellersville Theatre in ... Sellersville? This is from a loving blog called Shake Your Fist:
Friday night at The Unitarian Church there's a bill featuring the Lilys, locals who conjure some sort of Kinks/My Bloody Valentine/Mungo Jerry memory. But don't take my word. We'll pick up Eric at the Marathon Packs blog, who describes "With Candy" as one of his favorite three songs of the year. It's:
a psych-disco masterpiece that sounds like the theme song to the sitcom Lewis Carroll never got around to producing, without copping anything at all from the master of psych-disco, Of Montreal's Kevin Barnes. It's the type of song I'd love to hear performed live with "real" instrumentation, especially a full brass section on the chorus. It was hard to trace the imaginary lineage of (Kurt) Heasley's mutations, until, of course, I popped in Scary Monsters (Bowie's best, by the way) the other week, and well, "Ashes to Ashes" essentially did a fair amount of my thinking for me. It's not a direct line of course, and Bowie's tale is much more self-referential and dystopian, but the two just sound so similarly tweaked and spacy. Then, partially spurred by Simon Reynolds' post-punk book, I reapproached Duty Now for the Future, the point where Devo started their push for the mainstream with one foot still firmly in the "industrial grotesquerie" Reynolds writes about.
Not just a review, a fantastic journey. Hear here.
Citizen Cope, Friday night at the TLA. His web site offers a new acoustic-based mix of a"Bullet and a Target" and other radio-friendly songs, like "Hurricane Waters" for streaming. Bunch of video from the Carson Daly show to "Son's Gonna Rise." Is the D.C. guy, born Clarence Greenwood, as street as the way he says "heron" for "heroin?" Dunno. Berkeley Place is serving a sing-a-long Cope cover of Bob Marley's "Is This Love?"