ARCHERS OF LOAF REISSUES

BAND OF OUTSIDERS

Revisiting the revamped back catalogue of ‘90s indie contenders Archers of Loaf

By: MATT ASHARE |
Published: August 15, 2012 http://www2.the-burg.com/entertainment/music/

UNDERGROUND HEROES: The Archers  thrived on controlled chaos and skewed hooks .

From 1993, when they got off to a promising start with their debut album on the now defunct but then rather hip indie label Alias, until their break up just five years later, with four solid full-lengths under their collective belt, North Carolina's Archers of Loaf were more or less permanently stuck somewhere just shy of a mainstream breakthrough. A band of outsiders with indie cred and a sound that split the difference between the serrated edge of Nirvana grunge and the skewed slacker smarts of Pavement, the Archers were a perennial insiders’ favorite for most likely to succeed. . . next time. But next time never arrived, and the band quietly disbanded, leaving frontman Eric Bachmann with an intensely loyal cult following of fans more than willing to follow him onto somewhat rootsier, if no less challenging, musical terrain with his de-facto solo project Crooked Fingers, an endeavor that's proven to be a more comfortable fit for the coarse-voiced, idiosyncratic romantic than the more collaborative clamor that embodied the Archers.

       For those of us who believed in the Archers, reveled in the controlled chaos and hyperactive hooks of their best songs, and hoped in vain for the one big single that might put them over the top, it's been gratifying to see Bachmann blossom into a formidable singer-songwriter with Crooked Fingers, as he's tapped into a broader audience that encompasses a segment of the Americana crowd. And, in retrospect, the very idea of Archers of Loaf as a "mainstream" band, while amusing, now seems fairly absurd. They weren't Weezer, or even Nada Surf (for those of you who remember their short-lived tenure at the top of the pops). Neat and tidy singalong choruses just weren't an Archers’ specialty. And Bachmann was no more comfortable with tongue-in-cheek irony than he was with feigned sincerity.

       While Stephen Malkmus was happy to openly poke fun at alt-rock megastars Smashing Pumpkins and Stone Temple Pilots in the last verse of Pavement’s classic "Range Life," Bachmann had a more nuanced take on the state of affairs in alternative nation circa ’95. "They caught and drowned the frontman/Of the world's worst rock and roll band," he hoarsely intones in the opening lines of "The Greatest of All Time," a dystopian allegory about the nature of post-Nirvana rock stardom that builds to the blustery chant, "The underground is overcrowded."

       At the time, it was one of the more keen, if subtle, observations about what transpires when it suddenly becomes fashionable to be unfashioned and a fist-pumping arena-rock band like STP feel the need to gild their bio with a story about meeting at a Black Flag show, as if they too were part of some mythically cool "underground." At least, that's how I read it. And, as a devastatingly accurate one liner, it resonates to this day.

Archers of Loaf, All the Nations Airports (Remastered) (Merge)

With Crooked Fingers, Bachmann has found a home at Merge Records, a North Carolina indie that's both big enough to reach out to his gradually growing fanbase, and homegrown enough to accommodate his musical eccentricities. Indeed, Merge probably would have been a perfect fit for the Archers back in the day. So it's no small consolation that the rights to the Archers' back catalog now rest with Merge, who just put the finishing touches on a fairly elaborate reissue campaign that includes expanded versions of all four of the band's studio albums. To mark the recent completion of the project —the revamped versions of All the Nations Airports and White Trash Heroes, the band's final two albums, came out last week — the Archers are even playing a few select reunion shows through the end of August.

Archers of Loaf, White Trash Heroes (Remastered) (Merge)

       In too many cases, the “deluxe,” “remastered” reissue with new liner notes and photos, and a few bonus tracks has become something of a bad joke that reeks of a last gasp attempt by the record industry to squeeze a bit more cash out of the CD market before the current business model collapses. But Merge has done a particularly admirable job of bringing back into print relevant titles by compelling artists who were never quite popular enough for a larger label to invest in. Mostly recently, along with the complete Archers of Loaf catalog, Merge has re-released crucial, formative, and otherwise unavailable material by Dinosaur Jr. and by Sugar, a trio fronted by Hüsker Dü singer/guitarist Bob Mould in the ’90s.

       It’s comforting to have these albums back in the proverbial record-store bin, if only because so much of what continues to bubble up from the overcrowded underground owes more than a little to the above-mentioned artists. (Upon hearing a 1992 Sugar single for the first time, a friend of mine remarked, somewhat incredulously, “This is exactly what Foo Fighters sound like.”) In the case of the Archers of Loaf, it’s particularly gratifying to have their albums back, complete with revamped artwork and each with a bonus CD of mostly demos and b-sides, because Bachmann has continued to grow artistically and has found a sustainable niche that continues to expand. With the benefit of hindsight, you can see how he was working toward what would become Crooked Fingers on All the Nations Airports and White Trash Heroes, specifically on what are essentially solo tracks like “Chumming the Ocean,” a poignant track from “Airports” where he accompanies himself on piano and sounds like he’s choking on his own voice as he spins a poetic yarn about a drowned fisherman. “The deep is in riot,” he sings, “The coastline is quiet/Asleep and divided in bands/While beer halls all revel/Drunk and disheveled/Helplessly wading/The diver is down.”

      More typical are bash-and-pop rockers like the churning “Strangled by the Stereo Wire,” the rush and churn of hammered drums and buzzing guitars offsetting Bachmann’s characteristically dark visions. And then there are those tracks, like the intriguingly melodic, cleverly titled “After the Last Laugh,” that maybe coulda been hit single material, if only Bachmann had dialed back the darkness and discord a notch or two. But then, Archers of Loaf wouldn’t have been Archers of Loaf. And that would have been a shame.  

OLD CROW MEDICINE SHOW INTERVIEW

STRINGS 'N THINGS

Old Crow Medicine Show bring their old-time stylings back to Virginia

By: MATT ASHARE |
Published: August 15, 2012 http://www2.the-burg.com/entertainment/music/

UNPLUGGED IN: Old Crow  keep the energy high acoustically.

From the foot-stomping fiddling of the raucous "Carry Me Back to Virginia," to the folksy acoustic guitar strums of the Dylanesque "Ain't It Enough," to the bittersweet harmonies of the ruminative "Ways of Man," Old Crow Medicine Show's new Carry Me Back (ATO) delivers twelve tunes that, as the title hints, carry the band way, way back through decades and decades of American popular song. Indeed, if it weren't for the crisp production, one could easily mistake just about any of the tracks here for a long-lost field recording of an Appalachian string-band hootenanny, replete with dueling banjos and thumping upright bass, as well as plenty of fleet-fingered clawhammer picking and a touch of sonorous accordion flexing. Just strings and things that you don't gotta plug in. 

The Old Crow boys – multi-instrumentalists Critter Fuqua, Ketch Secor, Chance McCoy, and Gill Landry, along with bassist Morgan Jahnig and "guitjo" player Kevin Hayes – have been putting their own often revved-up spin on folk genres that pre-date the electrified dawn of rock and roll for nearly 15 years. But the band's real roots go back further, to the early days of the alt-rock ’90s, when Fuqua and Secor, two of the last remaining members of the original line-up of a band that's seen a number of players come and go, began their musical partnership. They were both junior high schoolers in Harrisonburg, VA, and, as Fuqua recalls from a tour stop in Vermont, old-time string-band music wasn't on their radar just yet.

“I grew up with the same kind of stuff in my household that most kids my age did," he says. "And I really wasn't that different from most of my classmates. My parents listened to Neil Diamond, the Beatles, the Kingston Trio, and NPR. I was into Nirvana, Guns N’ Roses, and skateboarding. And Nirvana was really the biggest influence Ketch and I shared when we were 13 or 14. But then we started listening to Bob Dylan and I think that made us want to dig back further into the music that influenced him."

While there are echoes of early Dylan in the Old Crow repertoire, the only real vestige of Nirvana rests in the energy and attitude the band bring to the table, particularly when they're playing live, which they'll do Friday in Salem and Sunday in Charlottesville. "We may not sound like Nirvana," Fuqua readily admits, "but the drive is in there."

Fuqua and Secor's formal introduction to the musical styles they'd go on to pursue with Old Crow came by way of West Virginia's Augusta Heritage Music Center. "He went for old time banjo and I went for blues guitar," Fuqua recounts. "And we both just caught the bug."

Back in Harrisonburg, the duo hooked up with Robert St. Ours, a fellow Virginian who'd go on to start the like-minded Charlottesville string band, the Hackensaw Boys. And, happily, they found themselves in the midst of a growing scene of musicians who'd unplugged and found inspiration in old American folk idioms. "When the band we had with Robert broke up, we started the Crow and he went on to the Hackensaw Boys. . . There was just a real resurgence of that kind of music in Virginia for young people at the time."

Beyond Virginia's borders, there were broader signs of a renewed interest in old-time music, spurred on by the release of Dylan's "Bootleg Series" recordings, which began with the first three volumes in 1991, and The Anthology of American Folk Music, a six-CD collection of folk music originally released by Harry Smith between 1927 and 1932, compiled on vinyl by Smithsonian Folkways in 1952, and then reissued in 1997 to much acclaim. But the real tipping point came in 2000, with the arrival of the soundtrack to the film O Brother, Where Art Thou?, a compilation of trad country, gospel, and bluegrass that topped the charts with multi-platinum sales, and went on to win several Grammys, including album of the year.

"We were playing that kind of music before O Brother came out, but that was when the industry finally started to notice that there was a big audience for it," Fuqua says. "I don't think it was ever a conscious decision for us to stop listening to rock and roll and play old-time music. And, for me, it really wasn't that big of a jump. I look at us as a link in a chain. You've got the old time fiddlers and the English and Irish ballads, and then the progression to bluegrass and Ralph Stanley and Earl Scruggs, all the way on up to the Grateful Dead and Dylan. It's a progression of artists who keep going back to the sources and making it new in some way, and then newer artists start there and reach back to the some of the same sources to make it new again. We took Nirvana and the other music we grew up with, and reached back to all this great old-time fiddle and folk music, and whatever else we could find, and tried to make it our own. We just played what we loved to play and, in an organic way, it turned into what we do now."

        Just don't ask Fuqua to put any labels on what it is that Old Crow do. "I don't know," he laughs. "My job is to play. I think you have to realize that this stuff was just music back in the day. There was no label for it, especially for the artists. So I don't worry about labels too much. And I really don't know what you'd call Old Crow.” 

        (Old Crow Medicine Show and the Lumineers perform this Friday, August 17, at 8 p.m. at the Salem Civic Center, 1001 Roanoke Blvd., Salem, VA; tickets $35.)

        (Old Crow Medicine Show, the Lumineers, and Pokey LaFarge and the South City Three perform this Sunday, August 19, at 7 p.m. at nTelos Wireless Pavilion, 700 East Main Street, Charlottesville, VA; tickets $38.)

KASEY CHAMBERS

COVER GIRL

Kasey Chambers kicks back with some alt-country comforts on Storybook

By: MATT ASHARE |
Published: August 8, 2012 http://www2.the-burg.com/

On Storybook, Chambers  has fun with some of her favorite songs.

The Hank Williams standard "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," Suzanne Vega's folk-pop classic "Luka," and the Cyndi Lauper mega-hit "True Colors" are three of the more instantly recognizable tracks on Storybook (Sugar Hill), the new album by Australian songstress Kasey Chambers. Americana enthusiasts will more than likely find plenty of other familiar titles here, from the Bakersfield swing of Gram Parsons' "Return of the Grievous Angel" and the spare ruminations of Steve Earle's "Nothing But a Child," to the two-stepping swagger of Lucinda Williams’ "Happy Woman Blues" and the playful roadhouse strut of John Prine's "Leave the Lights On." While there are a couple of relative obscurities – "Everything's Turning To White," a tragic elegy written by fellow Aussie Paul Kelly, is the first that comes to mind — it doesn't take long to figure out that Chambers has taken the liberty on Storybook to set her pen aside for a spell and take a stab at some of her favorite songs written by other artists.

       As Chambers charmingly puts it, by way of introducing the disc's final cut, a lovely live recording of Patti Griffin's poetic "Top of the World," "Bear with me. I really don't know this song very well. But I've been dying to play it. . ." No worries there: Chambers' rendition may not be as pitch-perfect smooth as the Griffin original, but she more than makes up for that with her soulful delivery, bringing just enough grit to bear to an open-ended lyric like "I wished I'd had known you/I wished I'd had shown you/All the things that I was on the inside" to make it feel devastatingly personal.

       It's not particularly easy to get the green light to make an album of all covers. And it's certainly not always advisable. For most serious artists, it's a privilege that's earned, in large part by testing your own talents and proving you can stand on your own as a songwriter. That's something Chambers unquestionably achieved over the past dozen years on her home turf, where she's widely regarded as Australia's reigning country music star. She's never quite broken through here in the States, although she came close in 2000, after her solo debut The Captain, which featured the living-legend husband-and-wife team of Buddy and June Miller in supporting roles, went double platinum in Australia, and Lucinda Williams was kind enough to bring her along on a U.S tour.  Prior to that, Chambers had spent over a decade cutting her teeth as a frontwoman with the Dead Ringer Band, a family affair that also featured her parents and older brother. So it's fairly safe to say that Chambers, who headlines the Birchmere in Alexandria, VA, on August 10th, has paid her dues­ – that she's well within her rights to cadge from the canon and indulge in what might otherwise be considered a mere vanity project.

       That said, Storybook doesn’t come across as anything even remotely resembling a grand statement of artistic purpose. And the only element that appears to tie the album together thematically is Chambers’ personal fondness for the material. To paraphrase her intro to “Top of the World,” these are simply 15 tunes she’s been dying to record – songs that are part of her own storybook in the sense that they’re each uniquely woven into the fabric of her own identity as a singer and a songwriter.

       And that’s a big part of what makes Storybook such a pleasure. Chambers doesn’t go out of her way to radically reinvent or reinterpret the 15 songs she chooses to take on. She’s more or less just having a good old time, even on a track as softly somber as Gillian Welch’s “Orphan Girl.” She’s bold enough to take certain liberties with “True Colors,” nudging it onto folksier roots terrain that suits her style. But her “Luka” — a storyteller’s song that’s right up Chambers’ alley — gets a fairly straight reading.  (It should be noted that five of the disc’s tracks, including the live Griffin cover, Lauper’s “True Colors,” and Paul Kelly’s "Everything's Turning To White," were previously released on various EPs dating all the way back to 2000.)

       It’s probably worth asking whether or not there’s much point in covering a signature song like “Luka” if you’re not reworking it. But, again, one of the strengths of Storybook is that Chambers doesn’t strain to make each and every track here her own. Instead, she achieves something quite a bit more sublime by conveying the solace and thrill she’s taken from these songs, and returning the favor by imparting subtle emotional shadings of her own. Besides, while “Luka” isn’t what you’d call a deep cut, it hasn’t exactly been in heavy rotation for the past two decades. And I, for one, was happy to rediscover “Guilty,” a dark tale of turbulent romance from Matthew Ryan’s mostly forgotten 1997 debut, dusted off by Chambers and rocked up with churning guitars and a muscular backbeat.

       That’s the sort of unexpected gift an album like Storybook can deliver. And, if the name Kasey Chambers is still new to you, Storybook provides a seductive slice of mostly familiar countrified comforts that may just draw you deeper into her back catalogue. It may not be particularly profound, but it’s a good time. And, ultimately, there’s really nothing wrong with that.  

WEBB WILDER INTERVIEW

ROCK AND ROLES

Webb Wilder brings his inimitable persona and roots rocking Beatnecks to the Ellington

By: MATT ASHARE |
Published: August 03, 2012 http://www2.the-burg.com/entertainment/2012/aug/03/webb-wilder

AMERICANA ORIGINAL:: Wilder is a consummate cult artist.

While it would be a stretch to call Webb Wilder a true renaissance man — or much of a household name — the bespectacled, western-styled, roots 'n' schlock rocker has amassed quite an eclectic resume in his three-plus decade career. From starring in amusingly titled, independently produced b-movies ("Webb Wilder, Pvt. Eye: The Saucer's Reign" and "Horror Hayride" were two of his earliest acting forays) to serving as one of the first satellite radio DJs on XM, the self-appointed "Last of the Full Grown Men" has managed to keep his fans entertained on a number of fronts since he first hit the ground chugging on a mix of high-octane rockabilly, surf guitar riffery, and wry humor with his 1986's debut "It Came From Nashville." Indeed, Wilder, who headlines the Ellington this Saturday, might best be described as a consummate cult artist – a performer who's more than made up for his lack of mainstream commercial success by cultivating a committed fanbase of Webbaphiles large enough to support an annual Webb Fest every October in Bowling Green, Kentucky.

        A genuine Americana original, the super sardonic Wilder owes his super-sardonic stage persona in large part to the detective role he created for himself in "The Saucer's Reign," and his relative obscurity to the simple fact that, as a rock-loving dude in Nashville, he was never country enough to make it on Music Row. Like Steve Earle, whose "The Devil's Right Hand" he covered on that first album, along with tunes by Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, and Steve Forbert, he's just never quite fit the mass-market mold.

       Or, maybe he's just never been the right guy in the right place at the right time to fully break through. "You know," he says, with characteristic understatement, "I'm 58 years old and I think I'm slowly learning how this business works. I've always had a number of influences and I've addressed them in different ways. We probably had a pretty focused attack back in the day of having these quirky, rootsy films and quirky, rootsy music to go along with 'em. And then the band morphed into addressing the music we had grown up playing, which is more of a Stonesy, crunchy rock and roll. Along the way there have been ballads and blues and country songs. The problem is, people in the business wanted you to be one thing and do one thing. Yet all the records I grew up loving were very eclectic. On a Beatles album, you'd get something really rocking and loud followed by something soft and tender. And that influenced me more than anything. I just have a hard time making an album any other way. I'm sure that eclecticism has bitten me on the backside more than a few times."

       Wilder’s also got a penchant for performing novelty numbers, in very best sense of the term, the most well-known of which, the circus-themed "Human Cannonball," was actually the one and only single from the 1989 major-label album he recorded for Island, "Hybrid Vigor." And, along with mixing plenty of thoughtful covers into his live sets, he's more than a little partial to peppering his shows with seemingly stream-of-conscious pontifications, skewed words of wisdom, and comic catchphrases. The Webb Credo, as it's known to his fans, is quintessentially Wilderian: "Work hard, rock hard, sleep hard, grow big, wear glasses if you need 'em."

       And therein lies a big part of Wilder’s ultimate appeal: he may take his music very seriously, but not at the expense of having a good laugh. “We love to confuse people, right down to the band name, the Beatnecks. It's really been a problem at times. I mean, I had a manager who used to say it wrong, so it must be problematic. Still, it’s a nice play on words if you get it.”

       But if you really want to distill the Wilder aesthetic down to one line that “gets it,” it would have to be his twist on the classic Blues Brothers riff about playing country and western. Or, as Webb likes to put it, "We play both kinds of music: rock and roll."

It’s a joke that he and the Beatnecks have taken to heart. “We really do distinguish between rock, and rock and roll. I suppose it may be a bit snobbish, because there is some good rock music. Like ‘I Can See For Miles’ by the Who, I love it, but it does not roll. It's rock. The Stones, on the other hand, are what I think we're like at our best, which is a roots band for rock fans and a rock band for roots fans, because their rock always has a roll. Even a band as heavy as AC/DC have it; it’s what I like to call ‘jackhammer swing.’ That swing is the one element that’s at the heart of all the music I love.”

     (Webb Wilder and the Beatnecks perform on Saturday, August 4, at 8:30 p.m.at the Ellington, 421 Rivermont Avenue, Lynchburg; tickets $20 in advance, $25 at the door)

NEW MULTITUDES

Jay Farrar, Jim James, Anders Parker, and Will Johnson celebrate Woody Guthrie’s centennial

By Matt Ashare

New Multitudes, New Multitudes (Rounder)

It’s hard to imagine that Son Volt singer/guitarist Jay Farrar and My Morning Jacket frontman Jim James (a/k/a Yim Yames) weren’t at least thinking about the current state of affairs in this country when they were invited, along with Anders Parker (Varnaline) and Will Johnson (Centro-matic), to cull through the vast archive of unpublished Woody Guthrie lyrics by his daughter Nora. The idea was for the four alt-country fellow travelers to join forces on an album that would bring those lyrics to musical life to mark the centennial celebration of Woody’s birth year.

         That year has come. And the album, New Multitudes, has arrived with fairly minimal hype at a time when Occupy Wall Street is still going strong, during a week that began with seemingly tone-deaf Republican presidential hopeful making news with a rather bone-headed remark at the Daytona 500. In case you haven’t heard, when asked if he followed auto racing, Mitt Romney responded, “Not as closely as some of the most ardent fans. But I have some great friends that are NASCAR team owners.” Maybe he was just kidding. But given the size of his bank account, not to mention his Super PAC, it’s not all that funny.

         So whether or not Farrar, James, Parker, and Johnson, who are touring under the moniker New Multitudes, meant to drop a populist smartbomb in the midst of a our on-going recession and one of the nastiest political climates in recent memory, they’ve succeeded. Because, while the real Woody Guthrie was a complicated artist who wrote all kinds of songs, the mythical Woody Guthrie lives on as the activist Dust Bowl Troubadour who penned “This Land Is Our Land,” scrawled “This machine kills fascists” on his guitar, and, in contemporary parlance, trumpeted the cause of the 99%.

         Farrar and his crew aren’t the first songwriters to be given access to the Guthrie archives. Jeff Tweedy, Farrar’s former bandmate in Uncle Tupelo, and his band Wilco, joined forces with British punk-folkster Billy Bragg on two albums that set unpublished Guthrie lyrics to music, 1998’s Mermaid Avenue and 2000’s Mermaid Avenue Vol. II. And Guthrie’s been a major influence on socially conscious artist since Bob Dylan first coopted the Dust Bowl Troubadour mantle back in his freewheeling folk days. Clash rabble-rouser Joe Strummer originally dubbed himself Woody Mellor in Guthrie’s honor. And Bruce Springsteen, an avowed Guthrie acolyte, has been known to pull out “This Land Is Your Land” from time to time, most memorably on his album Live 1975-1985.

         But New Multitudes, through no fault of their own, have arrived at a time when simply invoking the legacy of Woody Guthrie carries a moral weight that would be difficult to quantify. To their credit, though, they don’t get mired in anything too heavy handedly dogmatic or overtly preachy. Farrar kicks off the album with the meditative “Hoping Machine,” a slow building rocker he delivers with characteristic world-weariness as he winds his way through lyrics like “Word is the music and the people are the song” until his fellow singers join in on the open-ended punch line “Out of order,” a sentiment that could apply to just about anything in the broken-down world the song inhabits.

         Elsewhere, Parker, who played with Farrar in the band Gob Iron, takes the lead on the acoustic “Fly High,” a straightforwardly folky, poetic rumination on a troubled romance sung from the window seat of cross-country flight. And, Johnson is at the helm for the album’s hardest hitting number, the unmistakably Springsteen-styled “V.D. City,” a place populated by skid row denizens where “nobody knows you by name,” harmonicas blare, and overdriven guitars tangle a friendly fight to an anthemic finish.

It’s James who tackles what might be the album’s most outwardly partisan tune, the spare, fragile, and bluesy “My Revolutionary Mind,” a forlorn love ballad or sorts that culminates around a gently sung, if somewhat bemusing chorus: “I need a progressive woman/I need an awfully liberal woman/I need a socially conscious woman/To ease my revolutionary mind.” And Farrar manages with relative ease to invest the disc’s simple title track with a solemnity of a secular prayer. Against a backdrop of strummed acoustic guitars, he intones “Gonna win my battle for peace,” “Gonna build my world over,” “Gonna build my world with love,” turning what sound like scribbled thoughts into a coherent and powerful statement of purpose.

That said, the real strength of New Multitudes is the balance Farrar, James, Parker, and Johnson bring to the project, both in terms of the music they’ve set Guthrie’s words to, and the glimpses we’re given into Guthrie’s world. There are deep thoughts, dark images, and serious moments here. But there are also bright spots like R.E.M.-ish jangle of “Old L.A.,” an ode to an oft maligned city sung by Parker in a manner that brings to mind Michael Stipe. And just having the opportunity to hear Farrar and James spar on guitar should be enough to bring a smile to the face of contemporary Americana fans.

It’s hard to know exactly what Farrar, James, Parker, and Johnson went digging for when Guthrie’s notebooks were open to them. But they appear to have found it.      

MATISYAHU

SPIRITUALIZED: Matsiyahu aims to transcend genre on his slick new Spark Seeker

By: MATT ASHARE |
Published: July 25, 2012 http://www2.the-burg.com/entertainment

TO BEARD OR NO TO BEARD: That is the question for Matisyahu

A little over six months ago, Matisyahu, the reggae-inflected rapper who'd been openly flaunting his devotion to orthodox Judaism since the start of his musical career in 2005, sent a missive to his fans. He employed what's fast become the preferred means of mass communication for hip artists. He Tweeted, presumably not on the Sabbath. "No more Chassidic reggae superstar," he began. "Sorry folks, all you get is me." Included was a fresh photo of the singer without the traditional long beard and unshorn hair that had become a Matisyahu trademark.

It looked as if the Pennsylvania-born Phish-head, who'd dropped out of his Westchester, New York high school before getting his act together in Israel, reclaiming his Jewish roots, and launching his musical career from Brooklyn in full Chassidic garb, had taken the first steps toward secularizing himself.

       Not coincidentally, Matisyahu, who'd relocated to LA, was also gearing up for the release of his fourth studio album, Spark Seeker, a slickly produced, big-budget, multi-national operation overseen by proven hitmaker Koool Kojak, a dude who has also worked with the mainstreamed stars Nicki Minaj and Key$a. Matisyahu, it appeared, was ready to move on to a new stage in his career. As he Tweeted, "Get ready for an amazing year filled with musical rebirth. And for those concerned with my naked face, don't worry. . . you haven't seen the last of my facial hair."

       I can't remember the last time there was something even remotely resembling a stir over the status of an artist's beard, unless you count the possibly apocryphal incident when Gillette offered ZZ Top frontman Billy Gibbons a large pile of cash to take a razor to his face. Then again, I'm fairly certain that, prior to Matisyahu's emergence, there weren't many opportunities to string together the words "Chassidic reggae superstar" outside of an imagined SNL skit or, perhaps, a discarded Sascha Baron Cohen film treatment.

       There is a largely underground scene of devout Jewish musicians centered around Brooklyn and the indie label Jdub, which is where Matisyahu got his start. But it's safe to say that, until now, dude's pretty much had the stage to himself, so to speak. If that's occasionally made Matisyahu, who peppers his raps with Hebrew prayers, a little Yiddish here and there, and plenty of allusions to the Old Testament, seem like something of a novelty act, then so be it. Clearly, his spiritual message has continued to resonate, particularly with various tribes in the land of jam-banding, where transcendence through sound and a certain open-ended positivity are the coin of the realm, whatever one's musical or religious persuasion may be. No surprise then that this weekend's FloydFest, an eclectic, four-day roots 'n jam celebration in Floyd, Virginia, that runs through July 29th, is one of the first stops on Matisyahu's Spark Seeker tour. He's scheduled to be one of the Saturday headliners.

Matisyahu, Spark Seeker (Fallen Sparks)

As for the album Spark Seeker, it's not quite the departure that Matisyahu's change in grooming habits might suggest. Recorded in both in Israel and LA, it's more transitional than transformative, more Los Angelian than Brooklynite, and, despite the singer's Jamaican-inflected delivery, more West Coast hip-pop than Trenchtown Jamaica. The disc opens with a snippet of a Hebrew prayer that gives way to some very Middle Eastern sounding Arabic instrumentation, a nod in the general direction of the mostly unstated panculturalism that Matisyahu embodies. But the track, "Crossroads," quickly gives way to a propulsive hip-hop groove, with Matisyahu throwing down defiant rhymes with what could be vaguely veiled references to the Holy Land. "These lies have got me tired/I'm free falling, I'm done stalling/I'm done crawling up this mountain top/I won't stop 'til I manifest my crop." His voice, surrounded by a complex array of synths and sequencers, is joined by a chorus of background vocalists as he delivers the sort of anodyne chorus that's become his stock in trade: "Crossroads, one million miles/I'm kicking up dirt when I fly by."

       It's about as workaday as a Justin Timberlake refrain — and as a singer, Matisyahu’s no Justin Timberlake. So, even if Matisyahu wants to insist that "I've come back to take the music back," he's really not breaking any new ground here. Indeed the disc's first single, the reggae-styled, electronified "Sunshine," with its touches of echoey dub production, rests on the rather generic chorus, "Reach for the sky/Keep your eye on the prize/Forever in my mind/Be my golden sunshine." You don't have to be a Biblical scholar to come up with lines like that. Any self-help book would pretty much do the trick.

       On the other hand, if Matisyahu's intent with Spark Seeker was to find a more mainstream approach that would accommodate his idiosyncrasies, he succeeded. Tracks like "Sunshine" and "Crossroads" are offset by deeper, more religiously inspired cuts like the freewheeling "Tel Avin'n." A breezy ode to Israel's most cosmopolitan city, it finds him getting back to the Book, calling out to the "Moshiach" (the Hebrew word for "messiah"), and stopping mid-song to recite the first verse of one of the holiest of Jewish prayers in Hebrew.

       The only real misstep, if you could call it that, is "Buffalo Soldier," a tribute to Bob Marley that's not the Bob Marley song, but that quotes liberally from the original. Matisyahu's smart enough to bring rapper Shyne aboard to handle rhymes like "Buffalo soldier/No, I'm not a Rasta/Used to be a mobster/Burning up the block, bro." Matisyahu picks up the flow with some of his semi-Biblical wordifying ("Went running away to the cave/Went in a slave and came out all flames”). But his cred as a rapper takes a major hit when Shyne shows up for the final few verses and simply shreds as he offers a timely take on a message Marley might appreciate. "I shot the sheriff, the D.A., and the deputy/Sorry Al Sharpton, I don't need you to lecture me/Maybe I'll stop talking about guns/When you talk about the fund that they cut for the youth." Maybe it's time for Matisyahu to bring back the beard.

WHOABEAR

ORIGINAL PROGRAMMING

Whoabear dive into the deep end of electronica

By: MATT ASHARE |
Published: July 25, 2012

WHO: Whoabear and Red Rattles

WHEN: July 27, 10 p.m.

WHERE: Bull Branch, 109 11^th Street, Lynchburg, VA

COVER: Free, call (434) 847-8477

THREE OF A KIND: Dillard, Dodson, and Penkert at play.

Right around this time last year, Beau Dodson was sitting rather pretty with what most young musicians in town would consider a good gig, as the latest in a string of drummers who'd signed on to back veteran singer/songwriter David Sickman in the Bell Weather States. Dodson and the band's other two principals, bassist Adam Penkert and keyboardist Andrew Dillard, were forging a strong musical bond, and

Sickman, who'd made a name for himself as a founding member of the Charlottesville roots group the Hackensaw Boys a decade earlier, was using his old connections to generate a steady stream of gigs. Nothing to complain about.

       But just a few short months later, all that changed when Sickman rejoined the Hackensaw Boys, the Bell Weather States were put on indefinite hiatus, and Dillard, Dodson, and Penkert found themselves stuck without anyone to front the formidable musical force they'd become. There was, however, a silver lining of sorts: Dodson had a backlog of songs he'd been working on for several years, and he'd had a chance to perform a few of them at what turned out to be one of the last Bell Weather shows.

       "I sat on those songs for four or five years," Dodson recounts. "And then one of our shows in November at Rivermont Pizza got a little out of hand. . ."

       "We took a break outside," Penkert interjects with a puckish laugh. "And when we came back in I told Beau to start rapping. I took over on drums, and David was playing bass."

       "We had so much fun with it," Dodson continues. "And I remember on our way out of there Adam just said to me, 'Man, we gotta do something with this stuff.'"

       What they began to do with that "stuff" — mixing elements of rap, rock, and electronica — may have seemed like a major left turn for three guys who'd found a peaceful, easy Americana feel playing trad instruments with Sickman. But it rapidly evolved into a coherent, if somewhat quixotic, vision that coalesced around the trio’s deep appreciation of groove, with Dillard manning a growing arsenal of synths and sequencers, Penkert taking over on drums, and the long-maned, tattoo'd Dodson emerging as a fierce frontman. Indeed, they finished recording the three tracks for their self-released debut EP Hold Me, I'm Fascinating, and even completed a video for the electro-rap-rocking cut "The Day the Board Game Died,” before they finally managed to settle on a name for the band: Whoabear.

       Jump ahead to a humid Saturday afternoon in July. Whoabear are gearing up for their fifth gig, a show this Friday at Bull Branch. The EP's been mastered, pressed, and packaged, replete with an official Whoabear logo — a rough black-and-white drawing of roaring bear head. There's merch too, including rubber Whoabear wristbands, paper Whoabear masks, and even a complete Whoabear "care package," along with a solid ReverbNation website (http://www.reverbnation.com/whoabear), a YouTube "intro" to the band (http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?

v=uzUrdGpFgmA), and, of course, the video for "The Day the Board Game Died" (http://www.google.com/url), which has the look and feel of a "Sabotage"-style Beastie Boys production.

       Dillard, Dodson, and Penkert are sweating it out on a couple of makeshift benches, waiting to shoot their second video in the middle of what they refer to as "Sickman's farm," a small piece of land littered with random piles of wood and populated by a small cadre of goats who seem intent on eating just about anything that won't bite back. It’s a rather paradoxically pastoral setting for a trio who, with the exception of live drums, have essentially eschewed organic instrumentation for the tools of techno. But the members of Whoabear don’t make any clear-cut distinctions between the two.

“It's hard to really say what it is that we do,” offers Penkert.

“I've gotten to the point where when people ask what we do, I just say alternative-infused dance music,” Dillard suggests. “Basically, we've all been live players and now we're getting into sequencing and electronics. But everything I do when we play is live. So it's always a little different.”

Penkert nods and adds, “We all have jam roots and a lot of times I feel like we get going and then everything still comes together organically.”

That’s perhaps best reflected in the dramatic leaps of genre the band accomplishes in just three tracks on Hold Me, I’m Fascinating. Dub-inflected keys and a vaguely reggae beat lay the foundation for rapid-fire rapping on “25 Happy Street,” a track that works itself up to an aggro climax that’s heavy without the metal. “Long Time” rides a pair of glitch-pop synth lines into a prog-rocking chorus as Dodson delivers what amounts to a straight-up love letter, half-rapped/half-sung. And, “The Day the Board Game Died” is a throttling techno thrasher with melodic respites that serve as a base for intriguing internal monologue, a bit of mischief Dodson says was inspired by nothing more than a boring night alone at home.

“It’s about a guy's conscience catching up with him,” he explains. “I don't even know what he did. I'm big on user interpretation. I don't know what any of it means. It could mean a million things and that's kind of cool to me. Someone told me that the title meant a lot to him. And I was like, it's just a play on the title ‘The Day the Music Died.’ It's kind of like the board game dies and electronic music takes over.”

And yet, Whoabear haven’t been entirely taken over by electronics. As Dodson is happy to point out, “Every show's different, every song ends up different, the words are different each time. Nothing ever ends up the same and that's part of the fun.”

“A lot of that stems from David,” Dillard says of their former Bell Weather Statesman. “He led us off on all kinds of tangents we weren't expecting when we played shows. And, he was instrumental in getting us to this point. We played over a hundred shows with him. Basically, he showed us what was possible and now we're taking it from there.”