swordfish

Profile: Robin Aigner (2010)

justinvellucci — Tue, 18 May 2010 03:04:05 +0000

Originally published in PopMatters May 14, 2010

Freddy’s Bar, a neighbourhood fixture at the corner of 6th and Dean in Prospect Parks, Brooklyn, a bar with mismatched pictures and collectibles on the walls, has been serving up drinks and entertainment for the better part of a century. A speak-easy during Prohibition, it grew into a favorite haunt for cops and Daily News reporters, both of whom worked across the street. In its current incarnation, under owner Frank Yost, it has become a magnet for an eclectic clientele: hipsters and bohemians, blue- and white-collar types, black and white, straight and gay.

Matt Kuhn had been working at Freddy’s as a bartender for about two years when, in 2001, he took over the responsibility of hosting an open-mic night in the bar’s back room, a small space with a stage and tables that accommodate 70. One night, Robin Aigner, an aspiring singer-songwriter who split her days between freelance copy-editing and waiting tables, saw an ad for the open-mic night on a utility pole and decided to try it out. She stepped onto the stage with her great uncle’s acoustic guitar. Kuhn instantly was transfixed.

“I just fell in love with her music right away,” said Kuhn, 38, of Park Slope, Brooklyn, who sat at a middle table in the crowd during the performance.

Robin Aigner

Bandito

(self-released; US: 26 Jan 2010)

Amazon

“Her voice was already there,” he said. “Her voice struck me as very pure, very unaffected. I described her voice, one night at open mic, and I think it still holds, as a nice, cozy blanket your grandmother knit, that you wrap yourself in. You could wrap yourself in her voice.”

After about five open-mic performances, Aigner got her own gig at the club, with proper billing.

“I was raised musically there,” said Aigner, now a freelance editor and writer living in a co-op in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. “That place gave me a lot of love and a lot of opportunity to be a less-experienced musician and have a place to play.”

Aigner would later flirt with New York City’s Old Time and anti-folk scenes, collaborate with many musicians near and far, release a few records and tour the countryside. She opened for Emmylou Harris in Nashville, helping to kick off the inaugural WMSN’s Music City Roots: Live from Loveless Cafe, a weekly concert series, and played festivals before thousands in Europe and Canada with the Crooked Jades. Back in her native New York, she played the likes of the Sidewalk Café, Banjo Jim’s, The Living Room, Jalopy and Pete’s Candy Store. She found herself near the center of a circle of musicians fascinated with recreating obscure bits of history through contemporary strains of music. Her star was slowly and, sometimes not so slowly, rising.

“When I started playing, I felt as if I had found my best friend. It was truly a renaissance,” Aigner told me. “I can surely go a day without listening to music. But, there is never a day when music is not running through my head. In fact, most of the time I’m dreaming with music in the background, so I almost always wake up with a song in my head.”

On Jan. 28, Aigner self-released the brilliant Bandito, her second solo record, a collection of engaging and emotive history-vignettes that blends Old Time folk, mid-century country-and-western and Eastern European music with the strains of the contemporary singer-songwriter. It also reveals a songwriter and performer at the top of her game. If there is any justice left in the American underground, music like this won’t be self-released for very long.

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Robin Aigner—now 5-foot-3, slender, with naturally curly, light brown hair, a winning grin and sparkly hazel eyes—was born at the Columbia Hospital for Women in Washington, D.C. at 2:05 p.m. on a Tuesday in April, an induced birth that lasted much longer than expected. Named for her grandmother, Rose, and her great-grandfather, Isaac, she was the younger of two children born to John and Sheila Aigner, parents and entrepreneurs who held various jobs and, at one point, ran a small café for a year in Provincetown, Mass. Her background, genetically speaking, is Russian and Hungarian and some of her family emigrated from the Old World to the U.S. during World War II.

Aigner moved frequently as a child, spending her first year in Falls Church, Va., her days as a toddler in Mount Vernon, N.Y., and her early elementary school years in Yonkers, N.Y.

“My earliest memory is the day my mom told me not to ride my tricycle on the grass, because it had rained and the grass was slippery,” Aigner recalled. “So I rode the bike on the grass. The next part of the story is told by my mom: My sister walked into the house carrying me; there was blood everywhere. My mom couldn’t figure out which one of us was bleeding. Turned out I had fallen off the bike, gotten a head wound, my first scar. It’s still there, above my eyebrow, reminding me that I don’t really listen to instructions—or that I’m independent.”

Her early musical diet consisted of music typical of the 1960s and 1970s: The Beatles, Chicago, The Eagles’ Hotel California. As a child, she memorized all the words to songs from her father’s collection of records – Harry Chapin, Jim Croce. But it wasn’t until much later that she would find a deep connection with music.

At 8, her parents divorced and, later, Aigner moved in with her mother in Hastings-On-Hudson, N.Y., a tree-lined suburb roughly 40 miles north of Manhattan.

She befriended a girl with an obscure interest in British rock. At 15, the two of them trekked to Europe, all goth outfits and new wave dance moves, and caught the Higsons playing in Brixton, England. Through another friend, she became inoculated with a taste for Jamaican music. Her palette, even at a young age, was diversified. But she was no songwriter.
Aigner went on to study analytical literature at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. but found the musical scene there lacking. Instead, she immersed herself in books – taking a class on James Joyce’s Ulysses, later dabbling in Ayn Rand – but found that no favorite authors floated to the surface.

“I think that, more than a particular story or book, I’m more intrigued by language,” she said.

A couple years after graduation, after traveling and working, briefly, at a bar in Nice, France, she found herself in New York City.

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In February 1992, Aigner was hired as an editorial assistant and coordinator of special projects for Turner Publishing. She spent exactly two years there, helping to run the office and review potential manuscripts and artwork, before landing a job as a promotional copywriter for Parade magazine. But it just didn’t fit.

“I cautiously approached the idea of completely changing the direction of my life,” Aigner said. “It took 3 or 4 months of pure misery to make the decision. But, once I had made the decision, I couldn’t get out of there fast enough …. I quit with no job prospect and felt totally free.”

She took a job waiting tables at a high-end Mexican restaurant – Mi Cocina – that sat a few blocks away from her West Village apartment. She worked to make her rent, then just $795 a month. She started writing and editing on a freelance basis for an eclectic mix of publications – Rolling Stone, Newsweek, Playboy, Psychology Today. Aigner did what she needed to do to survive.

She also threw herself into acting, studying at a West Village establishment dubbed HB Studios.

“I studied acting for a few years and finally came to the conclusion that in order to do it for a living, you had to love it, really love it, otherwise it would always be a battle for your self-esteem,” she said. “So I tapered off the acting, moved to Park Slope and these songs just kept popping into my head.”

She came to music late. While waiting tables at an expensive Italian restaurant in Brooklyn, she was overpowered with the inspiration to write a song. So, between taking orders and moving dishes, she’d jot down a lyric here, a lyric there. It took one night to write. The song became “Stone Cold Mamacita,” a stand-out on her debut record, Volksinger, and something of a minor hit in some Brooklyn circles.

“I’m a stone cold mamacita with an ex-pat hippie papa/ We gotta lot of terra cotta. We’re a long way from home,” it begins. “We live on wit and vino rojo in our orange El Camino/ Our perro’s name is Pedro and he’s a long way from home.”

Around this time, Aigner learned classical guitar and sight-reading, as well as took voice lessons. It was a brief foray into formal training. Shortly thereafter, she was writing full-fledged songs –“Black Star Cowboy,” “Elvis Impersonator” – and performances soon followed.

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In 2002, with an expanding repertoire of songs in her catalog and a growing number of performances under her belt, Aigner self-released Volksinger, a 15-track set of acoustic odes and historical ballads that owes as much to Gillian Welch and Leonard Cohen as it does to Joni Mitchell. It’s a beautiful introduction to a musician searching for her voice.

Within two years came Royal Pine, her duo with Brook Martinez, and two records steeped in Americana: 2004’s Chantytown and 2007’s ultra-limited Huasteca, which was recorded over the span of 10 hours. Both records flirted with Old Time music but also somehow hovered above it, challenging the form.

“Singing songs of Winnebagos and the 1977 blackout, Royal Pine is what would happen if The Mamas and The Papas merged with Loretta Lynn and picked up the ukulele,” one writer observed.

As Royal Pine toured the Southeast in 2005, they found themselves a spot performing live on the Knoxville, Tenn. station WDVX, which had drawn appearances from Elvis Perkins and Bela Fleck and the Flecktones. Matt Morelock worked the dials on future performances.

“ [Aigner] was a great, very intelligent talent,” said Morelock, 30, a Knoxville, Tenn. native who recently gave up radio broadcasting to open his own music shop. “She did not follow the same vocabulary of singer-songwriters I had on the show. She had her own vocabulary.”

She was also, Morelock stressed, a product of her environment.

“She’s one of the most New York City songwriters I’ve ever heard here, in the best way,” he said. “Because it’s such an international town [and] I guess I could call her a perfect exponent of New York City folk-writing.”

Jill Andrews, a singer-songwriter who played guitar and sang in the Everybodyfields and now fronts a band bearing her name, met Aigner about five years ago when Royal Pine was playing a dancehall. Despite her inclination to stay away from performers after their sets, she struck up a conversation.

The two soon became friends and collaborators, with Andrews singing harmony with Aigner and Royal Pine. Andrew’s hometown of Johnson City, Tenn. and “a wrong turn” toward a North Carolina music festival later surfaced in Aigner’s lyrics.

Andrews calls Aigner’s music mysterious.

“It’s kind of like reading a detective novel,” said Andrews, 29, of Knoxville, Tenn. “She takes a character and paints a really vivid picture of their life. That’s what she does best, I think.”

“I just love Robin’s songs, they’re so different than anybody else’s songs,” she added. “The way she describes the characters in her stories is just really quirky. It’s just different. She really has a way with words.”

Aigner also was winning over some members of the press.

“Robin Aigner is one of New York’s finest singer-songwriters,” the blog Good Music New York wrote at the time Royal Pine formed. “Armed only with her wry wit, poetic lyrics and melancholy guitar, [she can] captivate a crowd of rowdy frat kids and quiet them down to listen to her sing.”

In 2006, the website Treble named Aigner one of the top, overlooked female artists in the country.

In the summer of 2003, Aigner traveled with a group of musicians from the string band Luminescent Orchestrii, a forerunner in New York City’s Balkan music scene, to Romania to study Eastern European music at a local festival.

One night, in the tiny village of Czavas in Transylvania, they took a horse-drawn carriage up a hillside towards a picnic where music was being played. Once the horses grew tired, they walked the rest of the way. On the hilltop, locals cooked meat and bacon – really, chunks of lard—and Aigner and her friends soaked it all in.

Word quickly circulated that a group of American musicians was in town so a concert of Old Time American music was thrown together at the village hall. Aigner sang and played ukulele.

“Robin knew lots of Old Time songs and it was great having her with us,” said Rima Fand, 39, of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, whose resume includes Luminescent Orchetrii, the indo-pop band Church of Betty and the a capella women’s vocal quartet Lîla.

“The audience spoke no English, so they had someone translating everything we were saying into Hungarian,” Fand said. “I remember we were talking about the song ‘Cluck Ol’ Hen.’ We said that it was a song about thanking the chickens for laying eggs. When it was translated, we saw all the old Hungarian ladies nodding their heads knowingly. It was a great moment.”

One night, walking down the hillside, Aigner taught Fand the old gospel tune “Warfare” and together they sang it as a friend played harmonica. Music was everywhere.

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The song begins with an acoustic guitar, jazzy and hushed, slowly shuffling as a violin weeps and, faintly, someone runs their fingers over the keys of a piano. Then, the listener gets invited in on the secret.

“I’ve been to the Campbell Apartment/ at the invitation of F.D.R./ I’m the only one who knows where he goes when he parks his car,” Aigner sings, her voice fragile yet flirtatious and sensual. “A house is not a home/ and Winters cannot hold a candle to my throne.”

This song, which opens Bandito, is “Pearl Polly Adler,” an homage to a New York City Madame whose houses of ill repute served the gangsters of her day, and it’s just the beginning of a record filled with beautiful and illuminating moments.

Bandito is the kind of record that is not listened to, but discovered. It alternates between lush arrangements for violin, bass and Rhodes and devastatingly spare acoustic numbers like “Great Molasses Disaster.” It is one of the finest records you will hear this year.

It is also a record clearly informed by the works of Piñataland, a Brooklyn-based Old World orchestrette with whom Aigner has collaborated. Their full-length debut, the brilliant Songs for the Forgotten Future Vol. 1, set the bar for local musicians attempting to capture the luster of a lost world, an American history somehow running below the surface of things. Aigner cites them as an influence and their fingerprints are all over Bandito, whose history-infused song-stories pack a punch that make the tracks on Volksinger or Royal Pine’s two discs seem like pencil sketches or works-in-progress by comparison. It’s that good.

The whole record was recorded in two to three weeks at Seaside Lounge, predominantly, and Wombat Studios, both in Brooklyn. The musicians Aigner collaborated with on the record, including the breathtaking violinist Caroline Shaw, worked largely without musical charts.

“There had been no prior collaboration,” Aigner said. “They all, including the percussionist, just came in and instantly got it. Especially Caroline, she really understood the music on a very deep – and also a surface – level.”

The songs, most of them written in 2008 and 2009, achieved a magical kind of glow in the studio, one that would be difficult to reproduce on stage.

“They never sounded as good prior to making the album as they do now,” Aigner said. “[It’s] kind of a curse because, when I play them solo, I want to hear all that amazing instrumentation that happened in the studio.”

At the time the record was released, Aigner was enraptured by Rufus Wainwright, listening to the Avett Brothers and Bombadil, and citing John Prine’s Diamonds In The Rough as one of her favorite records. But, she stressed, she does not have a voracious appetite for music. But it’s always there in her head, waiting.

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Curtis Eller grew up in Detroit and participated in musical theater in Michigan and Chapel Hill, N.C. for the better part of a decade before moving to New York City in 1995.

In 1997, Eller, whose father taught him to play bluegrass-style banjo when he was 13, began to perform live around town. Three full-length records and two EPs followed, each of them offering passionate takes on tales from the distant and not so distant past. In his lyrics, John Wilkes Booth and Stephen Foster rubbed elbows with Elvis.

Eller can’t remember the first time he met Aigner, with whom he has collaborated as a solo musician and with Piñataland.

“She’s just one of those people that was always there,” said Eller, 40, now of Astoria, Queens. “She was always popping up. She was either in the gig or at the gig of the people I was playing with. It was one of those New York things. You knew you were at the right gig if she was there.”

But, Eller stresses, neither he nor Aigner are icons of New York’s Old Time scene. Instead, they form a circle with bands like Piñataland and Kill Henry Sugar that make new music about old tales.

“For some reason, there are several of us that started mining this strange, historical stuff all at the same time and found each other at gigs,” Eller said. “It was a weird shadow that fell on songwriters at once.”

Eller also had something of a friendly competition with Aigner.

Both had heard stories about “The Great Molasses Disaster of 1919,” when, according to Aigner, a huge stationary tank of molasses in Boston exploded on an unusually hot day in December, killing people and toppling the El tracks.

“I had been wanting to write a song about that event for a year or two and had been struggling,” Aigner said. “Then I heard Curtis wanted to write a song about it, so I knew I had to get shaking. It was a showdown!”

Aigner won; the song, a touching piece set to carefully plucked acoustic guitar, closes Bandito.

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Though Aigner’s catalog features its share of historical narratives, there is also, as is often the case with singer-songwriters, a trace of autobiography.

“See You Around,” the “relationship song” on Bandito, tells the story, in first-person, of a musician whose lover is not pledging enough of himself to their relationship. In it, her vulnerability can be disarming.

“I can make a meal for a king/ sing a tune about any damn thing/ You would know all of these things/ if you were around,” she sings, trying to fight off the broken heart. “Sometimes, I can’t even recall your look/ Sometimes, I erase you from the phone book.”

Aigner said the song, which is pulled from real-life experiences, details the ambiguous nature of a new relationship. She also admits there are traces of her life – and the lives of her friends and family – in her story-songs. Sometimes, it’s the little details, like her fascination with Mason jars, or those of a friend, like the lyrical reference to a hat from the blind man in Denver. But other feelings loom larger.

“You know, I think we are all lonely at some point – we are all constantly looking for things,” Aigner said. “So, there is pretty much always a restlessness in the characters in my songs and a loneliness. There is also a lot of mystery, because I like mysteries. My personal life is woven into the songs, almost always.”

And the intensity with which she throws herself into her craft is starting to get attention.

“She has a very strong focus when she’s singing,” said Kuhn, the Brooklyn bartender who was struck by Aigner’s music nearly a decade ago. “She’s in it. She’s completely in it when she’s up there. And you can see it.”

–30–

Review: Sarah Jaffe – Suburban Nature

justinvellucci — Tue, 18 May 2010 02:49:35 +0000

Originally published in American Songwriter May 4, 2010

Sarah Jaffe
Suburban Nature
Kirtland Records
Rating:

It unfolds in careful steps: drummer Jeff Ryan’s simple 1-2-3-4 count-off, the soft but persistent shuffle of an acoustic guitar, the poppy electric bass, the gradual rising of a violinist and cellist rhythmically sawing their strings. Then, Sarah Jaffe sings and “Clementine,” the third track off “Suburban Nature, instantly takes on a new dimension, that of a 23-year-old singer-songwriter writing confessions about love of the broken or breaking variety.

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“50 states, 50 lines, 50 cryin’ all the times, 50 boys, 50 lies, 50 ‘I’m gonna change my mind’s’/ Change my mind, I change my mind/ Now, I feel indifferent,” she sings, her voice almost warbling with emotion. “We were young, we were young, we were young, we didn’t care/ Is it gone? Is it gone? Is it flowing in the air?/ Change my mind, I change my mind/ Now, I feel indifferent.”

Then, a break, and the strings, instant of plucking out the rhythm, softly exhale and follow Jaffe’s voice.

“All that time, wasted/ I wish I was a little more delicate,” she laments. “I wish my, I wish my/ I wish my, I wish my/ I wish my name was Clementine.”

Suburban Nature is not Jaffe’s first record; that honor instead going to the six-song Even Born Again EP, from August 2008. But Suburban Nature, her full-length debut, announces
the Denton, Texas-based musician’s arrival as a force on the folk-pop scene in a big way, offering up 13 gems that could make even a hardened critic start throwing around terms like “the next big thing.”

The record begins, appropriately, only with Jaffe’s acoustic guitar and a double-tracked vocal.

“My heart pretends not to know how it ends/ Yes, hello, self-esteem/ We shall finally be free/ Before you go,” Jaffe sings, repeating the last line as if it were an epiphany, a kind of release.

The drummer rolls in on the snare and the song suddenly expands: all pounding percussion – if producer John Congleton mic’ed that kick drum, he deserves royalties on this record or some sort of monument in his name –and Robert Gomez’s crunching electric guitar.

It’s a format to which Jaffe returns frequently on the record – the listener thinks they’re getting a tender acoustic ballad about a rupturing relationship and the scene swings to the left or right to
include Kris Youmans’ or Becki Howard’s weeping strings or the stomping of a full band or a pop chorus that is so incredibly catchy you can’t imagine why someone hasn’t written it already.

There are, of course, quieter moments on the 46-minute disc, tracks like “Stay With Me,” where Jaffe pleads with a lover to embrace her while also acknowledging all the complications and cracked emotions a romantic relationship can bring. Or, there’s the deceptively simple “Wreaking Havoc,” where a skeletal descent on acoustic guitar is accented only by Jaffe’s voice, the lush weeping of strings and, later, quiet, inverted loops of swirling sound.

“You do it just to spite, you know it makes me cry/ I know what makes you cry, melodramatic life,” she sings. “We’re wreaking havoc, let’s give our problems a name/ We both like pain.”

The record, though largely driven by acoustic guitar, offers some eclectic scenery – the dramatic, even cinematic, sweep of “Better Than Nothing,” where Jaffe wails during choruses over a rollicking
backbeat, strings, angelic backing vocals and piano; the gloomy, almost drone-like, plodding and phantom electric guitar of “Pretender;” the playful romp of the closing “Perfect Plan,” where Jaffe’s bridges feature a piano and acoustic guitar rolling over thumping punches for the drum kit.

The record’s first single, “Vulnerable,” is straight-forward indie-pop and that’s meant in the best possible way. The song is almost one continuous verse — the walking, 4/4 drum line, the driving but subtle guitar, Jaffe’s love-lorn lyrics, the occasional interjection of shakers or what sounds like a vibraphone.

“Wake me up/ Just to call me Sleeping Beauty,” she sings, over a whisper of herself in the background. “Oh, fine, that’s fine/ I got my hands up, I’m feeling vulnerable.”

Jaffe’s voice is the record’s constant. It’s a tender but flexible vehicle for the stories she portrays: it whispers, it wails, it wavers and breaks with an emotion or the sharp pain of a biting lyric. Though
her songs may place her among indie-rock’s crowd of singer-songwriters fond of the acoustic guitar, her voice also is somehow bigger than that scene. Like Ellliott Smith, perhaps, her acoustic songs have a broader appeal and you could just as easily hear Natalie Merchant or Bjork in her singing as you could Joanna Newsom. This record is not for obscurists.

A performer who already seems to have recognized Jaffe’s budding songwriting and aching, though catchy, songs is Norah Jones, no small name herself, who asked Jaffe to tour with her earlier this year. It’s not difficult to imagine Jaffe being pulled into a wider field of view through those live appearances, much the way acoustic troubadour Amos Lee was thrust into the limelight when he opened for Jones a few years ago and had his own collection of soulful songs to share.

Jaffe has said she wanted Suburban Nature to be true to her song’s live nature but more layered than Even Born Again, an intimate little record that had its share of beautiful moments. On the title
track of that EP, Jaffe did away with words entirely, singing in falsetto over ascending strings, the moment bordering on the transcendent. That EP was no minor accomplishment.

And it’s been two good years for Sarah Jaffe since that EP was quietly released. She’s got an ambitious, eye-opening new record, the critics are paying attention and the sky, suddenly, must seem infinite.” With a record as good as this, she deserves everything that’s coming to her.

Profile: The Wingdale Community Singers (2010)

justinvellucci — Tue, 18 May 2010 02:41:03 +0000

Originally published in Brooklyn Rail May 2010

Spirit Duplicator, the second record from Brooklyn quartet the Wingdale Community Singers, begins with an enticing simulacrum—not a chord strummed on an acoustic guitar but the naked skeleton of notes that would seem to form that chord. There’s the thrum-thrum of the low E string, followed by hammered-on notes on higher strings, two extremes without the cement between the poles to set them to a fixed place.

“I am nowhere tonight/On the interstate west/Where the sodium lights/Meet the vanishing stars,” singer Hannah Marcus laments as she plucks out the notes. “A whole country out there/Branded with signs/Cut through with roads/And some of them are mine.”

The song, however, is anything but fragile, instead developing into a kind of verbal confrontation between David Grubbs’s crunching electric guitar and the honey-sweet vocal harmonies of Marcus, Nina Katchadourian, and Rick Moody.

As Marcus continues, Katchadourian and Moody interject their own backing narratives. Then, over Grubbs’s guitar and a simple line played by drummer Charles Burst, they all join in together: “I’m in the mood to drive/Get in the car and drive/I’m in the mood to drive.” The moment defines a modus operandi: Welcome to your escape.

Moody and Marcus formed the Wingdale Community Singers eight years ago as an exercise in pre-rock Old Time music. But Moody, an author by trade, undermined the wholesomeness of the group’s image by christening them with a name referencing a New York psychiatric hospital. Grubbs, a seasoned avant-rock musician and Brooklyn College professor, joined the Wingdales around 2003, and the trio released its self-titled debut on Plain Recordings shortly thereafter. Katchadourian, a visual artist and singer-songwriter in her own right, joined in 2006, and Spirit Duplicator was released on Scarlet Shame Records last October.

The Wingdale Community Singers’ eponymous debut seemed to take pride in its eclectic borders. It was heartbreaking (“Bigger Ocean”) but rambunctious (“Fishnet Stockings”), reverent (“Holy Virgin Star”) but also playful (“Dirty Little Dog”). The record had a stand-out single that never was (the beautiful “Blue Daisy”), and a killer closing track (the elegiac “Indira’s Lost and Found”)—in which Moody’s breathy singing over an emotive piano figure could be interpreted as either a parent watching a child grow up and move out on her own or a parent lamenting a child whose life was taken too soon. Devastating stuff. This wasn’t quite folk, but something more like “urban country,” a tag that critics tossed around.

Despite how well the trio collaborated—their harmonies can literally summon chills—it was still possible to pick out the individual contributions, like Grubbs’s glassy post-rock guitar playing or, on the guitar squalor that opens “Dog In Winter,” hints of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, a band that Marcus has worked with.

On Spirit Duplicator, the Wingdale Community Singers have become, in a sense, more communal. Sometimes it’s tough to tell who is and isn’t singing, or whose guitar has taken center stage, without consulting the liner notes. The record has more than its fair share of memory-burning songs—“I’m in the Mood (To Drive),” “Pofilia,” “My Les Paul,” the Django-jazziness of “Rancho de la Muerta,” the upbeat a cappella tune “On the Carousel,” to name a few—but the whole thing feels more like a collaboration than a group of musicians playing each other’s tunes. Leading into the album-closing “Death Is Only a Dream,” the song “The Sleepers on the Block” ends with a simple line that, repeated by the whole group over slide guitar and slowly climaxing percussion, turns into an incantation: “Make this chilly bedroom warm.”

“[Spirit Duplicator] is a lot different in terms of the songwriting,” said Moody, who moved to Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, from Hoboken 18 years ago. “There’s a lot of growth, I think, and the arrangements are much more sophisticated. We took more time and were more confident. But I think it’s evidently the same band, in that there is still a lot of pre-rock music undergirding the whole.”

The Wingdales are, of course, subject to the kinds of gossip that accompany any band with “names” attached to it. There are stories of reckless touring, the group’s devotion to Scientology, the intra-band marriages and resulting intra-band divorces. And is there any truth to the rumor that they had a song chosen as the American entry in a Eurovision contest? The group is happy to leave that mystery unresolved.

Right now, what seems to be on their mind most is a third album. Each member has different answers about how close that record is to fruition, but demos are beginning to surface. On one, provided by Moody, the band sounds in top form, wandering through a vocal and acoustic-guitar maze titled “So What.”

The track begins with Marcus singing, over quiet acoustic guitar, about a group having a great friend they’ve just lost. “And I realized that everything, everything is just how you decide it,” she sings over what sounds like a muted trumpet or saxophone. Two minutes in, the piece suddenly shifts, with multiple vocal melodies and, eventually, a poppy, even Beatlesque bridge giving way to a choir of unaccompanied voices singing repeatedly, “So what?” The piece ends in full band mode, with Marcus hitting falsetto notes over a powerful backbeat. This new recording shows a melodic expansiveness only hinted at on the Wingdales’ earlier work.

But when can listeners expect the new record?

“I’d guess that two-thirds of [the third record] is written, but we want to have the whole enchilada more than ready before even talking about [going into] the studio,” said Grubbs, who lives in Clinton Hill.

In the best Old Time tradition, the Wingdale Community Singers write about what’s around them—people and places of New York City, bike-shop boys and Korean groceries and a bar called Doc’s where you can weep over a shot of tequila. But occasionally, they drop references that could be read autobiographically.

On The Wingdale Community Singers, it was a contribution from Grubbs that stood out for what it said (or didn’t say) about the singer-songwriter himself. That song was “Family Plot, Mayfield Kentucky,” a track with a guitar line as haunted as that cemetery at midnight. “The statues defend the dead from our kind,” Grubbs sings. “Shield the dust, the harmless dust/From anguish, grief, inhumanity.” The song could have come right off Grubbs’s solo record A Guess at the Riddle. But it ultimately reveals little—and besides, Grubbs was born and bred in Louisville, Kentucky, not Mayfield.

A similar claim could be made for Marcus, who lives in East Williamsburg, and the song “Montreal,” from Spirit Duplicator.

“My earliest musical memory—I shit you not—is a dream I had when I was five, where the bust of Beethoven popped up in a coffin and sang me a song with the lyrics, ‘A kiss on the lips and I die if I will,’” she said. “It had a very particular melody, which I remembered and mined for a song called ‘Vampire Snowman,’ which I recorded with Mark Kozelek [of Red House Painters and Sun Kil Moon] in 1991. Some people from Godspeed You! Black Emperor were apparently listening to that recording in their van on tour in Germany somewhere and decided to ask me to join them on a leg of the tour. I’ve since made two albums with folks from that band at their recording studio in Montreal.”

“A sewage plant that’s always spewing/Just ten blocks from this park bench/Some nights it smells like cherry candy/Just to cover up the stench,” Marcus sings on the track, over piano and Tianna Kennedy’s cello. “But Montreal is so much cleaner/People take care of their trash/And the rent is so much cheaper/You get more for your cash.”

It’s so tender and caring that it could be a love song, and the Wingdale Community Singers flesh out the proceedings with three vocal narratives; only Grubbs is absent.

But is it autobiography?

“My songwriting is basically all autobiographical, because I don’t have the discipline to keep myself out of the picture,” Marcus said. “[But] ‘Montreal,’ for instance, is actually primarily inspired by a friend of mine who moved to Montreal for a while. She’s back now, by the way.”

Maybe the sense of mystery and intrigue the band creates, after all, is more enticing than the truths they seek to report, much as it’s more inviting to introduce your newest record with a phantom chord than one that’s easily strummed.

Profile: The ‘Antique-Garde’ Songwriters of New York City (2010)

justinvellucci — Tue, 18 May 2010 02:26:24 +0000

Originally published in American Songwriter March 30, 2010

“The future’s eternally bankrupt but history provides”

Winter was hard on New York City. February 27, a Saturday, started before dawn for Erik Della Penna of Kill Henry Sugar, who rode the A train from his Central Park West apartment to 176th Street to walk across the George Washington Bridge, meet his sister for a ride and trek to Paramus, New Jersey, to take his weekly course in anatomy at Bergen Community College.

A bridge worker told him three-foot snowdrifts blocked the footpath on the bridge; once the man passed, Della Penna disregarded him, slipping through an unlocked gate. Then, halfway across the bridge, after pulling his knees up into his chest to plant his feet into the thigh-high mounds of snow, the sun still rising and the temperature lingering somewhere above freezing, he encountered the bridge workers. And they were less than pleased to see him.

“I was stopped by bridge staff, who held me ‘til two NYPD squad cars came,” Della Penna said. “The officers demanded I walk back the way I came, while they drove behind me – on I-95 – with lights spinning and megaphone blaring.”

Later that night, no worse for the wear, he entered Barbés, the intimate Park Slope, Brooklyn club that has become a second home for Kill Henry Sugar, soaking in the opening acts – the as-yet-unnamed jazz duo of Steve Ulrich and Itamar Ziegler, and blues guitarist Mamie Minch. Sometime around 10:15 p.m., Kill Henry Sugar – Della Penna and drummer Dean Sharenow – took the stage, a platform, really, officially launching this celebration to mark the release of its new record, Hot Messiah.

They entertained the packed, standing-room-only crowd for more than 90 minutes, playing 18 songs, all told, many of them from Hot Messiah. They covered Fats Waller and sang a cappella on “London Town.” On some songs, like “Bewildered” and “Against The Stars,” Sharenow stepped out from behind the drum kit to strum Della Penna’s Dobro guitar through Ulrich’s brown tweed amp as Della Penna, clad in a suit jacket, sang, his eyes occasionally closing to punctuate an emotion.

“I’m bewildered at you, bewildered at me/ the way of the world, including the sea/ Bewildered at creatures deep under the waves/ The way of our life and how it behaves,” Della Penna began, singing in his comfortable baritone in front of red curtains and under an antique tin ceiling, the setting more a parlor room than a rock club. “I’m bewildered how people manage to survive/ the way that they live, the way that they drive/ their cars on the road, like they’re invincible/ as if death is a magnet and closer they’re pulled.”

“It felt great,” Della Penna said afterwards. “We played and it could have happened anywhere, in any era. The fact that we had amplification was negligible. It could have happened anywhere. It could have happened around a fire in 1910, February 27. And that’s what I love about it, the primalness of it.”

“What was really nice about the show was I was instantly reminded, not only of how much satisfaction I get to play Kill Henry Sugar music … but, because of who we’d invited to play, I had such a fantastic time watching the other bands play,” Sharenow said. “It turned into an engaging evening of music, which I think doesn’t happen that much or happen that much in New York. It’s nice … for a lot of people to come out to a little club in Brooklyn to have a communal experience with music.”

Kill Henry Sugar helps form a New York City circle with Piñataland, Curtis Eller and Robin Aigner, indie musicians whose work is deeply informed by history and frequently feature historical events as the inspiration and content for their emotive song-vignettes. The Village Voice, writing about one of the bands, defined their sound, appropriately, perhaps, as “antique-garde.”

“This fascination with history, with the manipulation of history, the poetry, I guess, is alive,” Aigner said. ‘[There’s] just an incredibly deep appreciation for each other’s craft.”

What they’re doing is not, by any means, new.

There are contemporary, history-focused acts such as the Decemberists, of course, and legitimate Old Time acts focusing on Old Time themes. But, modern-era artists as diverse as Bob Dylan, Frank Black, Gordon Lightfoot and Iron Maiden have written history songs, said Doug Stone of Piñataland. And that says nothing of the long folk tradition of storytelling, or of storytellers working in verse dating back to Homer. This microcosm of New Yorkers, however, some full-time musicians, some part-time, wears its allegiance to history and all the magic and context it entails as a kind of badge of honor, as an identifying marker, a matter of allegiance.

These musicians frequently have shared live bills and performed together on stage, often at regular haunts such as Barbés, whose proprietor also books ethnic and World music. They have appeared on each other’s records and helped promote each other’s work. In interviews, they cite each other as influences.

“Oddly, my very first New York City show was with Piñataland at The Sidewalk Café,” Eller said. “Neither of us was writing the kind of tunes we’re writing now but, years later, we discovered that we’d dug our way down into the same mineshaft. It’s nice to have company down here.”

2010 is the unofficial year of the “antique-garde.” It started on January 28 with the release of Robin Aigner’s Bandito and continued in February with the release of Kill Henry Sugar’s highly anticipated Hot Messiah. Before the year ends, Piñataland and Curtis Eller will both issue new records, as will Piñataland’s David Wechsler under the project name Tyranny of Dave. If there is any time to take a closer look at the micro-scene, to place them and their work under the microscope, it is now.

Kill Henry Sugar

Dean Sharenow, one-half of the spare folk duo Kill Henry Sugar, is a third-generation New Yorker with Russian roots and, though he spent his high school years out in Arizona, he frequently trekked back to the East Coast to visit his sister, and perform and record in New York City as a teenager.

A drummer since the age of seven, Sharenow formally returned to the city, finding a place in the East Village, in 1988, at age 19, and threw himself into record engineering, a passion nurtured by his brother-in-law, Mike Rogers, who got him involved at D&D Recording on West 37th Street.

“D&D turned out a ton of rock, dance, and hip-hop, and was one of the centers of New York music in the 1980s,” said Sharenow, 40, a full-time musician, producer and sometimes-Web designer who lives on the Upper West Side, Manhattan. “I suppose it was partially through my work there that I discovered my real interests lay in the 1880s.”

Even then, a decade before Kill Henry Sugar formed and explored the delicate spaces between notes, Sharenow knew the value of silence. When he was producing hip-hop records, he had a trick he would use to win over artists in the studio. Right before a rousing chorus, he would drop out all the instrumental tracks, mute them all, and leave behind only the main vocals, naked and in your face, before kicking in the full mix right as the chorus punched in its climax. It worked every time.

“It’s so effective and beautiful to take everything out for a second,” said Sharenow, who sports a full, bushy beard and a scruffy haircut but manages to look clean-cut in photographs. “We keep the plane flying with as little fuel as possible.”

The singer-songwriter Erik Della Penna was born in the Bronx and raised on Long Island, returning to Manhattan at age 17 in 1983 and living in Washington Heights and in Brooklyn while attending the Mannes College of Music to study classical guitar and music theory. He would later live in Fort Green and Park Slope, Brooklyn, and the East and West villages.

Della Penna toyed with guitars on and off until he was thirteen, when he became very serious and dedicated to the instrument, he said. He has lived and worked as a full-time musician, supporting him and others, for 25 years.

Sharenow met Della Penna sometime around the early- to mid-‘90s, when both men were making the rounds in New York City’s thriving Irish ethnic music scene.

Fueled by a wave of Irish immigration to the city and its environs in the late ’80s and early ’90s, Sharenow and Della Penna would play pubs and venues like The Black Rose in the Bronx with musicians like fiddler Eileen Ivers and bassist Trevor Hutchinson. There was a high demand for authentic Irish music – this is “before all the River Dance bullshit,” Della Penna noted – and each musician typically could get paid as much as $100 a gig. And, there, among the proletariat, the newly arrived immigrants, they were awarded for good performances with tears, and learned and refined their craft.

“While I wasn’t Irish, I learned a lot about not being uptight and being a good musician … and having the music be a functional part of civic life,” said Della Penna, 44, a sometimes-scruffy man who wears his longish, salt-and-pepper hair either tied back or tucked behind his ears.

Around 1994 or 1995, the pair reconnected when they auditioned for spots as the live back-up band to pop-rock artist Joan Osborne. The tour was a success and the two, who shared rooms, felt a connection. One or both later would back Tiny Tim, Natalie Merchant and folk icon Joan Baez, among others. “Our interests were not just parallel,” Sharenow said. “It’s like finding your artistic partner.”

In 1999, Sharenow recorded a collection of Della Penna’s songs and they released it as the first Kill Henry Sugar LP. Though the group initially focused on a meatier, full, alt-rock sound, Sharenow and Della Penna said musicians who played with them tired of their eccentricities.

By late 2001, they officially solidified as a duo. Over the span of the next nine years, Kill Henry Sugar would release four riveting and sometimes-brilliant records, each featuring stripped-down and stirring songs that mixed the folk tradition of storytelling with early blues and rock n’ roll and a kind of Old World charm whose roots are difficult to map. The songs are distinctly New York songs, but New York is only sometimes mentioned. The duo likes to promote itself on its Web site by saying it lays bare the naked roots of Gotham. “Exquisite compositions, stunningly performed without a net,” Baez told the band.

“You really can hear an evolution but an evolution toward simplicity,” Sharenow said. “As time has gone on, we have found that we don’t need to wrap it up any more …. It doesn’t need the artifice of production. It doesn’t need multi-tracking. It doesn’t need overdubs.”

Sometimes, Kill Henry Sugar can sound like the inheritor of the Mississippi Delta Blues, a folk-blues band scattering its notes and hooks and frighteningly memorable melodies like unpolished gems at the floor near your feet. At other times, they sound like a post-rock act covering Johnny Cash; all the emotion and swagger is still there but the notes are stripped bare, each fragile and set in perfect place.

“[They perform] expressive rhythms and melodies that manage to sound both archival and brand new,” The New Yorker observed. “Kill Henry Sugar continues to show its strengths in inconspicuous ways, wedding intriguing lyrics to little textured grooves that have a habit of getting under your skin,” Mike Joyce wrote in The Washington Post.

Kill Henry Sugar splits its duties, with Della Penna writing the songs and Sharenow leading the record production. The inimitable Tom Waits once explained to Rip Rense of Performing Songwriter magazine how he and his wife, Kathleen Brennan, collaborate on making records; Sharenow sees similarities. “I’m the prospector, she’s the cook,” Waits told Rense. “She says, ‘You bring it home, I’ll cook it up.’ I think we sharpen each other like knives.”

“He’s the farmer,” Sharenow joked. “I’m the factory.”

The passing of a generation of New Yorkers – around the time Kill Henry Sugar formed – has left clear imprints on Della Penna’s songwriting. “When my grandparents died, I guess, I started seeing the New York I heard about going away.” he said. “There were young people coming in and I was like, ‘That’s not New York. That’s not New York.’”

“[When I arrived here] I hung out, played music, met people – the city was funky. I could name-drop for hours,” Della Penna added. “The city was alluring and seductive, a murky river to be swam in, to drink from. Now, New York City is a fitness center for out-of-town frat boys and sorority girls with trust funds.”

Della Penna, who had played his songs for grandparents who had emigrated to the U.S. from southern Italy, immortalized the sense of closeness to them and their passing in song.

“I’ll show you who you are, she said/ but just show me all your friends/ my grandmother, well, she told me this/ now she’s no longer here,” Della Penna laments over an acoustic guitar and a brushed share on “Company We Keep,” a hushed number from 2004’s “Love Beach.” “Some friendships made, they’re built to last/ while some are obsolete/ the building blocks that interlock/ well, I’m glad that you’re with me.”

Della Penna had read “Low Life,” Luc Sante’s brilliant book about the shadier side of life in New York City as the 19th century gave way to the 20th, a kind of document in the Joseph Mitchell or even Jacob Riis veins of the seediness, slums and inviting shadows lost in the official, modern-day histories of America’s largest city.

“That just lit the fire about the whole history of New York for me,” Della Penna said. “There’s definitely heavy source material to what I think about – not just songwriting but linking myself to the past, realizing that times were always tough.”

History looms large in the Kill Henry Sugar discography. The group has written songs about Italian fascist Benito Mussolini, Tammany Hall’s legendary Boss Tweed and, more recently, the eco-friendly wanderings of Johnny Appleseed. But the records are also packed with a sense for what the loss of history, no matter how obscure, means to society and its chroniclers. Della Penna dismisses himself as a chromosome away from a Renaissance storyteller, merely spinning yarns for an eager audience. But he also compares himself, maybe more fittingly, to Cervantes’s Don Quixote, someone somehow noble yet also delusional about the trappings of a lost age, a bygone era.

“Art usually works that way,” Della Penna said. “They always write the history that is out of grasp, the fetishizing of history just out of reach.”

In February, the pair amicably separated from Surprise Truck Records, a Hollywood-based indie label, and self-released “Hot Messiah,” their sixth record and one of their finest to date. The collection was recorded – mostly – on a houseboat docked on the Hudson River in Garrison, N.Y. and opens with “Yankee Talk,” a rousing number whose rhythms and repetitions gradually unfurl. The song, a good example of self-reflexive, post-modern storytelling, places Sharenow and Della Penn among the “volk” whose traditional forms of storytelling they seem so fond of co-opting.

“Well, we descended from some European trash/ though we would not assimilate into the children of the corn/ The custom agent’s only taking cash /‘cause he knows we’ll all be dying in the class that we were born,” Della Penna sings, his voice captivating and expressive. “Had we been wronged, had we been broke/ by helping hands, had we been choked/ It’s that way for Dean and me, Yankee talk with many shades of meaning.”

(The song goes on to detail a confrontation between soldiers and mobs, Della Penna and Sharenow caught in the midst of it, and notes, very matter-of-factly, “you can hire half the working class to kill the other half.”)

The record features more than a handful of gems and, throughout the proceedings, the band sounds more comfortable experimenting with the blues, especially of the Mississippi Delta variety, than they have on previous recordings. “Hot Messiah” is also darker, musically and lyrically, than its predecessor, 2007’s “Swing Back And Down,” and, at times, more direct in confronting the listener with what the loss of history means.

“I’ve developed, in Kill Henry Sugar, despite the other stuff I’ve done,” Sharenow told me. “Erik and I found our sound and we always strive in our band to play as little as possible. If it’s possible to not play, we don’t play. With two guys, if one guy is not playing, you are making a huge statement.”

“The idea of playing less and less and less has really been a huge factor. I think all good art comes down to that,” he continued. “The stuff that really moves me is where you see what they could have done but didn’t …. I think what isn’t said is so much more important than what is, especially in music.”

Piñataland

About five years ago, the core members of Piñataland – David Wechsler, Doug Stone and Bill Gerstel – were invited to play a live set for a group of young prisoners, most of them aged 18 to 21, on Riker’s Island. An appearance on NPR brought the group to the attention of a prison teacher.

The group was used to playing their songs in unusual spaces. Over the years, they’ve performed in the Atlantic Avenue subway tunnel (complete with miner’s flashlights), an abandoned church in Braddock, Pa., the Edison Museum, a Brooklyn mausoleum, and the Coney Island boardwalk. They even performed a marching song to celebrate the New York Times’ transition to color printing on that newspaper’s loading docks.

But the audience on Riker’s island was different.

The trio, after checking their gear through metal detectors, played “Ota Benga’s Name,” a song about a Congolese Pygmy displayed at the turn of the century with the monkeys at the Bronx Zoo, and “The General Slocum Disaster,” a piece about a boat that caught fire in the East River, not far from Riker’s Island.

After the set, a worried prison administrator confronted the band, demanding answers about their intentions and asking what he was supposed to say in his official report about their visit. “What is it you guys do?” the administrator pressed, frustrated.

“It was very odd – I said, ‘I don’t know,’” said Doug Stone, 39, a screenwriter who lives in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. “Someone was demanding that we justify our existence. And I didn’t have an answer for them.”

“I don’t think we were too helpful. We didn’t really fit in,” said Wechsler, who turns 39 April 7. “It’s really hard to describe our music and describe what it is we do.”

Like Kill Henry Sugar and the rest of this circle of musicians, Piñataland has always confounded those who seek to categorize them. Formed in late 1994 by songwriters Wechsler and Stone, who met as students at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachussetts, the group’s first incarnation was more of a comedy routine, a manic country-polka act with some Tex-Mex overtones whose work was heavily influenced by the Old World jazz-pop of Little Jack Melody and His Young Turks. The melodies were frantic and the first EP, a self-titled affair, skittered and scattered all over the place. They made an early appearance on Comedy Central.

By 2003, however – and after another, more developed EP, Songs From Konjin Kok – the group really had found its wings, when it self-released what continues to be a hallmark of the historical-vignette genre, the brilliant Songs From The Forgotten Future Vol. 1. It begins, appropriately, with a bold thesis statement: “The future’s eternally bankrupt but history provides.”

“Goodbye to the Gramercy Ball/ It’s gone now and no one survived/ All of the best things that money can pay/ Have passed on their problems to those who have stayed/ All the mistakes that we paid for on credit/ And prayed for have finally been made,” Wechsler sings over a barely audible acoustic guitar before a pedal steel steps in.

“So buy your time from someone you trust/ And I’ll buy mine from a cold blooded schemer/ Who lies as he cheats me and claims that it’s just,” he adds, before the song expands into an orchestra, led by a soaring guitar. “All of the pockets where money collides/ Are emptying out right in front of your eyes/ The future’s eternally bankrupt but history provides.”

In just 10 songs and 50 minutes, Piñataland takes the listener through a musical fun-house of obscure history, singing beautifully arranged songs about the 1939 World’s Fair; the exploited Pygmy Ota Benga; the destruction of much of East Tremont to construct the Cross-Bronx Expressway; and Mathias Rust, a German teenager who flew a single-engine plane through the Iron Curtain and straight into Red Square in 1987. The band closes the proceedings with the epic “Latvian Bride,” where weeping strings form a wall of sound that can be emotionally overwhelming. The record, a combination of alt-country-flavored Americana, orchestral pop and Island-era Tom Waits, even a touch of They Might Be Giants, was one of the finest releases of the year and drew raves from countless underground magazines. This music was ambitious, even cinematic in scope.

“The album’s tone is reflective, as if the band unearthed a 20th century time capsule hundreds of years from now and decided the best way to understand this forgotten culture was to write ballads about it – timeless ballads full of explosive dynamics, strange instrumentation and ethereal harmonies,” Steve Labate wrote in Paste in late 2003.

“When the Decemberists came out, I was like, ‘This should have been us,’” said Gerstel, 55, a full-time musician and lanky, sometimes-manic drummer with dyed-red hair who came to New York City in 1980 and now lives in the East Village. “All of that could have been us.”

Shortly after Vol. 1 was released, Wechsler left Brooklyn to pursue real estate, musical theatre and a master’s degree out in Chicago, living in Irving Park. The band continued writing and performing, aided by the Internet and interstate commutes. It was around this time that Robin Aigner, a folk singer-songwriter in her own right, joined the band. She had met Piñataland after the band played a set at Freddy’s in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and eventually asked if she could provide backing vocals.

“I think my first show with them was at Joe’s Pub,” Aigner said. “They are such an interesting juxtaposition of the contemporary and the nostalgic.”

“Since Robin joined the band and our performances became more focused on our male-female harmonies, my songwriting has changed for the better,” said Stone, who has clear blue eyes that project curiosity and wears his brown hair short. “Now, when I write, I think about how her personality is going to inform the song …. It’s a bit like how Black Francis and Kim Deal worked in The Pixies. Kim didn’t sing lead on a lot of tunes, but her vocal presence was vital to make the music more expansive, to give it more of a human personality. Imagine ‘Doolittle’ without her and you get ‘Trompe le Monde’ – good tunes, but a serious lack of heart. And that’s what she brings to Piñataland, and it’s a big deal for us.”

In 2004, The Village Voice named Piñataland the city’s “best dark old-weird-history orchestrette.” They applauded them for Vol. 1 and the recording and online release of a John Quincy Adams political anthem, complete with the name John Kerry woven throughout.

With the new group and a host of songs in place, studio work began in late 2007 at Wombat Studios in Park Slope, Brooklyn on Songs For The Forgotten Future Vol. 2, with producer JD Foster – who has recorded alt-country troubadour Richard Buckner, southwestern desert-rockers Calexico and the breathtaking guitarist Mark Ribot – at the helm. Foster engineered some songs, aided with arrangements and played bass on about 60 percent of the record. Sometimes, he said he was merely a band cheerleader.

“Their take on history is more defining than their musical style,” said Foster, 56, of downtown Manhattan, who met the group through Gerstel. “It’s really interesting that the band is kind of interested in shining the flashlight in the little cobwebby corners and writing songs about it. It’s a reason to exist.”

Foster enjoyed seeing the different ways in which Wechsler and Stone worked as songwriters and composers. “I’d say Doug comes from a purer pop songwriting place than I do,” said Wechsler, the soft-spoken member of the group, whose brown hair sometimes falls over his eyes and his round face. “I’m a fan of written arrangements, complicated interactions, close harmonies and the like, while Doug usually just wants to clear that all out of the way and just let the song come through.”

“He cleans up my songs and makes them less cluttered and more listenable,” he continued. “I take his songs and add compositional depth and unexpected musical hooks that wouldn’t be there otherwise. It was great having JD [Foster] in the studio with us ’cause he’d sort through the different approaches and pick the best way for any particular moment before it got to Doug and I just butting heads against each other.”

Vol. 2 ended up being far more commercially and aesthetically accessible than its predecessor – a slice of orchestral Americana, some songs poppy and yet still heavy on the pedal steel. “Centralia” – a song about a Columbia County, Pennsylvania town that was abandoned, sometimes forcibly, after a mine fire started (and didn’t stop) burning underground in 1962 – even shook off the Old World cobwebs, sounding stunningly modern.

Wechsler thinks the group’s interest in history is a New York City phenomenon. “New York is one of those places that’s always sort of eating its tail and reinventing itself,” said Wechsler, citing Ouroboros. “So it’s a great place to put a new spin on history – or an old spin, depending on how you look at it.”

Stone draws his views on history from childhood experience. Stone’s father, Leland, worked as a colonel and hospital administrator for the U.S. Army and, like children in military families, Stone called many places home over the years. He lived in Germany early in elementary school and, stateside, he settled in South Carolina, Maryland and Texas. When living in Forest Glen, Maryland, he found National Park Seminary, a politician’s retreat that was reinvented as a girl’s school before Walter Reed Army Hospital bought it in 1942 as a home for convalescing soldiers. In addition to various Victorian styles, the buildings on site included a Dutch windmill, a Swiss chalet, a Japanese pagoda, an Italian villa, and an English castle.

“Everything was falling apart (and) it was a place that was designed in the 1800s to look historic,” Stone recalled for me. “Living in this environment, you have a real sense of history being present and all jumbled up.”

“I came away with a feeling how, when you can spot a certain kind of historical record … it can kind of fill your imagination,” he continued. “It makes your life better.”

Piñataland is now at work on its third full-length record, a 10-song collection tentatively dubbed Boy Scouts of Democracy, a title borrowed from a dismissive comment Stone said Adolf Hitler made about American GIs. The record, which boasts its share of history songs but is not “Songs For The Forgotten Future Vol. 3,” should hit streets before the close of 2010.

“It’s a little more of a stripped-down record but that could change, depending on what we do on it,” said Stone, who said the songs maximize the interplay between his and Aigner’s vocal harmonies. “[It’s] more straight-forward. Hopefully, you’ll get a little more sense of the performers …. It’s still an unformed thing.”

Wechsler also has a new record in the works. His second release as Tyranny of Dave, a 12-track outing, is due to be released online April 7. It is titled The Decline of America, Part 1: The Bush Years.

“It’s not actually a political album [but] most the songs are personal, reflective for that period,” Wechsler said. “There [are] songs about the economy. There’s a song about New Orleans. There’s a song about the World Trade Center coming down. I’m just trying to branch out, do other stuff.”

Robin Aigner

She has opened for Emmylou Harris in Nashville, played festivals in Europe and Canada with the Crooked Jades, loves the work of Gillian Welch and has flirted with both New York’s Old Time and anti-folk scenes. But, Robin Aigner is a musician who, like her peers, is difficult to peg down to simple musical categories. She is a square peg in a musical genre-game filled with round holes. She is a beautiful anomaly.

Her new record, Bandito, which was released in late January, only adds ammunition to the spirited argument that “folk singer” is too reductive or simplistic a term to describe what Aigner musically concocts in the studio and on stage.

The record begins with an acoustic guitar, almost jazzy and seductive, slowly shuffling just below the surface of things, low in the mix, as Caroline Shaw’s violin weeps and Joshua Camp runs his fingers over the keys of a piano, dosing out spare but perfectly timed notes.

Then, Aigner sings and her voice instantly becomes a magnet for the listener’s ears. You are drawn into her orbit. She is at the center of the world.

“I’ve been to the Campbell Apartment/ at the invitation of F.D.R./ I’m the only one who knows where he goes when he parks his car,” she coos, her voice soaked in sensuality and dropping more than a hint of double entendre. “You can’t believe the papers, periodicals you read/ I’m a lady first and foremost, doer of good deeds.”

Then, Shaw’s violin returns, weeping over Camp’s lonely piano. The effect is devastating.

The song is “Pearl Polly Adler,” an engaging homage to a New York City Madame and Russian immigrant whose houses of ill repute were supported by the likes of mobster Dutch Schultz and served the gangsters and politicians of her day. And it’s the kind of brilliant moment that can be found throughout “Bandito,” Aigner’s second solo record and her first in almost eight years. It is a record that, like those of Tin Hat Trio, sits at the eclectic intersection of jazz, American folk and Eastern European gypsy music. It is an expressive and expansive disc.

But, how did she arrive here? After a series of live sets at New York City clubs like The Living Room, Sidewalk Cafe, and Pete’s Candy Store, Aigner, a sparkly eyed, curly-haired chanteuse who stands much taller than her small, five-foot-three frame suggests, formally introduced herself to musical audiences in 2002 with Volksinger, a 15-track CD of acoustic ballads and odes that Aigner hoped would project a “lonesome prairie” sound but sometimes, maybe even more appropriately, calls to mind the heart-wrenching cowgirl blues of Edith Frost’s Calling Over Time. Then came Royal Pine, her duo with multi-instrumentalist Brook Martinez, and two excellent records steeped in alt-country and Americana – 2004’s Chantytown and 2007’s Huasteca, which had an ultra-limited run and was mostly shared among friends and confidantes.

Aigner toured widely and even traveled to Romania in 2003 with the New York City act Luminescent Orchestrii, a forerunner in that city’s Balkan music scene, to study Eastern European music in a small Transylvanian village (When the locals found out Americans were in town, a night of Old Time American music was planned and staged at the village’s town hall. Aigner played ukulele and sang. Someone translated the performance into Hungarian for members of the crowd.) Her musical palette was diversifying. But something very basic about Aigner’s songwriting is central to what makes her work so appealing, said one musician versed in Old Time music.

“She really caught my ear with her voice – she has a natural, fluid, beautiful delivery,” said Parrish Ellis, 35, of Asheville, North Carolina, a guitarist for The Wiyos who met Aigner in New York City while he was playing in an Old Time string band about seven or eight years ago. “She’s a tremendous songwriter but her voice is under-rated.”

Ellis traces Aigner’s songwriting back to the sensibilities of Tin Pan Alley, even though the inheritors of that tradition might be today’s pop and Top 40 superstars. “She’s got that craft to it,” Ellis said. “All the elements are there and they fit together – the pacing, the phrasing of the melody, the lyrics being clever and still intellectually stimulating, just interesting chord progressions that you want to do over and over again.”

But, on the incredible Bandito, Aigner is more of a driving or central force than a solitary one. Aside from one song – the closing “Great Molasses Disaster,” which is so fragile, ethereal and quiet it feels like eavesdropping on a whispered conversation between lovers – Aigner surrounds, even engulfs, herself with sound, whether it’s a violin, Sharenow’s beautifully understated percussion, an upright bass or the throbbing pulse of the Rhodes organ.

“I think Song For The Forgotten Future Vol. 1 was a huge influence on Bandito,” said Aigner, 41, a freelance copy-editor and writer who has called Brooklyn home for 14 years and now lives in a co-op in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. “I loved the layering of different instrumentation from that album, and especially the violin. I used a lot of violin on Bandito and did more layering on that album than I ever had on other recordings.”

“Plus, I work a lot with Dave Wechsler on his solo projects, doing harmonies, et cetera,” she added. “So I think that experience, being around such an incredible songwriter and composer, has been invaluable.”

Aigner’s connection to history – and her ability to recreate historical moments in song – is something wholly her own, said Matt Singer, a Brooklyn musician with whom she has collaborated.

“When she’s talked about actual historical events, my experience is that she does a great job of creating a personal story that helps a person feel like what the event might feel like,” said Singer, 32, of Park Slope, Brooklyn, a social worker and musician who first saw Aigner perform around 2001 at the familiar Sidewalk Café. He is releasing a live record in two parts this year.

“I see her as someone from a different generation and a different time and place than most songwriters I know,” Singer said. “Most of the songwriters that I know pretty much fall into a modern pop-folk acoustic genre and Robin just seems to be very comfortable in a mood and a style of presentation that you could have seen at any time.”

“She has songs that could be comfortable being listened to anywhere in America in the [past] two centuries,” he said. (Singer and Aigner collaborated on a cover of The Strokes’ “Heart In A Cage,” with Singer on acoustic guitar and vocals and Aigner on melodica, about five years ago. It still can be viewed on YouTube.)

Aigner has been no stranger to the indie press. In 2006, the Web site Treble voted Aigner one of the most overlooked female performers in the country. Folk Radio UK described her new record as a meeting between The Decemberists, Tom Waits, Beirut and Leonard Cohen— high praise from any critic, indeed.

Music – and songwriting – came to Aigner late. “I tried to play the flute in about third grade, gave it up when I couldn’t hold a note for the required amount of time,” Aigner told me. “Also played the recorder but gave that all up by about fifth grade. Tried to learn guitar in high school, gave that up for obscure English imports, then picked it up again as an adult.”

Aigner is not extensively trained. After proudly walking away from a developing career in the New York City publishing world in the 1990s, she studied acting for three years at a West Village studio, waiting tables at a Mexican restaurant to pay her rent, then just $795 a month. After giving up on acting, she briefly studied guitar and took voice lessons. But she was quick to write her own material.

One night, while waiting tables at an expensive Italian restaurant in Brooklyn, she was inspired to write a song. So, between delivering food and taking orders, she’d scribble down lyrics on spare pieces of paper. The result was “Stone Cold Mamacita,” something of a minor hit in some Brooklyn circles.”

It is the only song in Aigner’s catalog to be recorded twice – once on “Volksinger” and once on Royal Pine’s “Huasteca,” complete with backing vocals and an accenting guitar line played with a bottleneck slide.

Even today, her songwriting can be spontaneous, not labored. “I usually get an idea in my head – like I’ve been trying to write a song from the perspective of Joseph Smith’s wife, when he came to her with a revised version of the ‘Book of Mormon,’ with a new revelation that encourages polygamy,” Aigner said. “So I will get an idea and try to write a song around it. But, sometimes, I just pick up an instrument and start playing something and a line will come to me. Then I decide after that line what the song will be about.”

“That happened recently with a song now called ‘Shoegazer,’” she continued. “I picked up the guitar, started playing something and this came out: ‘Is it a crime, to be 59, and be told you look cute? When you know it’s just the color of your shoe. Or the clicking of your high, high-heeled boots.’ It seemed so absurd to me that that’s what would come out of my mouth. So, I decided that the song was about a shoe fetishist and went from there.”

Aigner admits elements of her own life slip into songs. One of the most effecting songs on “Bandito” details the ambiguity of a romantic relationship. She said it is drawn from personal experiences.

“You only see me in the night-time/ when the sun goes down/ Are you around?/ See you around,” she sings, almost bitingly, over a carefully strummed acoustic guitar and the buzz of the Rhodes organ. “Did you know my eyes aren’t blue?/ They change in the afternoon/ Did you know I have a crooked bottom tooth/ some have called cute?”

“I could make a meal for a king/ sing a tune about any damned thing,” she later wails, pleading with the nameless lover. “You would know all of these things/ if you were around.”

New York City and her native Brooklyn also play prominent roles in Aigner’s creative life. “I’m inspired by my surroundings and, since I live in Brooklyn, and, despite the fact that I write about historical events that take place elsewhere, little pieces of Brooklyn inevitably end up in the songs, little details,” said Aigner, who, before moving to Sunset Park, lived in Park Slope, Brooklyn. “But, also, there is such a wealth of musical diversity in this city that you can’t help but stylistically be influenced by it.”

Curtis Eller

Gee Jon became the first man executed in an American gas chamber when he was killed on February 8, 1924 in Nevada. Several states soon thereafter abandoned the electric chair and followed the new practice, including North Carolina. According to a North Carolina Department of Corrections Web site, the state first used the gas chamber on January 24, 1936 to execute Allen Foster, a man sentenced to death for murder in Hoke County.

Curtis Eller heard a slightly more colorful version of the same story.

“The way I heard that story is that in the late 30’s in North Carolina, they were instituting a new capital punishment device that we all know now as the gas chamber,” said Eller, 40, a full-time musician from Astoria, Queens. “In an attempt to learn if the procedure was painful or inhumane, they placed a microphone in the chamber with the condemned man, waiting to hear what he would say. Not surprisingly, the guy in the chamber was black and his last words turned out to be, ‘Save me, Joe Louis, save me!’”

More stories were written at one time about Louis, an African-American prizefighter from Eller’s hometown of Detroit, than were written about Jesus Christ, Eller said. So, he added one more to the canon.

“Here’s hoping things get better/ after I’m gone away/ If I was there with you I would drink myself blind/ But these hard times could be here all day,” Eller sings over his signature banjo on “Save Me, Joe Louis,” which closes 2008’s Wirewalkers and Assassins with a chorus that borders on a gospel rite. “And Mr. Roosevelt in the White House/ can deliver no comfort down here/ And I know that it’s only a paper moon/ but it’s the last hope to fight back this fear.”

Eller – whose wild, curly hair and conspicuous, brushy moustache jump out in photographs, where he’s often shot in full suits or in shirts with suspenders – was born and raised around suburban Detroit and took part in musical theatre in Michigan and North Carolina before moving with his then-girlfriend, the poster artist Jamie B. Woolcott, to New York City in 1995. (The pair met at a vintage musical instrument shop, where they both worked, in Lansing, Michigan, and have been together since 1991.)

Eller had visited New York City previously but the move was transformational. Within a year or two of his arrival, Eller dedicated himself entirely to the banjo and started playing live shows at venues such as The Sidewalk Café, a staple of New York City’s anti-folk scene. He shared his first bill with Piñataland, with whom he would later collaborate on Songs For The Forgotten Future Vol. 2.

“Growing up in Detroit, your idea of the city was that it was a big, terrifying, empty place that you should avoid,” Eller said. “Visiting New York in the 80’s kind of opened my eyes.”

In 1999, Eller self-released an EP of his banjo-driven songs. Soon after, a full-length record, titled 1890, and another EP, Banjo Music for Funerals, followed. Two more recent full-length records – 2004’s Taking Up Serpents Again and Wirewalkers and Assassins – drew critical acclaim for their engaging combination of boxcar folk, bluegrass-tinged balladry and rousing, full-band toe-tappers like “Sugar In My Coffin.”

“They’re putting water in the whiskey just to keep the boys in line/ You ain’t a-busting up my place like you did last time/ The drinks are getting weaker with every round they serve/ The way they keep us sober, man, it’s getting on my nerves,” he sings in “Sugar In My Coffin” over lively banjo, thumping bass, spare drums and what sounds like an accordion. “So, when I’m dead and gone/ I want some sugar in my coffin/ Well, I said, ‘If I’ve got to go/ I want sugar in my coffin.’”

Eller’s music is the oldest-sounding, in the Old Time sense, of this circle of New York City musicians, perhaps due to the instrumentation he chooses to populate his songs. Banjo is prominent, taking center stage along with Eller’s voice, as is the upright bass. Some reviewers cited the records as experiments in Old Time music.

“I think if I played guitar, people would just call me a folksinger,” Eller said. But Eller’s live shows – which seemed to draw as much from the well of punk rock tradition as that of folk – are truly something to be experienced, those who have experienced them say.

“Most performers will get up on the stage and they’ll stand and sing and play their songs at the microphone and they’ll stay there the whole set,” said Joseph “Joebass” DeJarnette, 34, an Eller collaborator, producer and former upright bassist for The Wiyos, a band with Old Time credentials, who moved in December from Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, to rural southwestern Virginia. “I’ve never seen Curtis stay on the microphone, on the stage for more than three songs.”

Eller walks on tables, tells the audience stories and teaches them to yodel, sprints around the stage and acts in a manner one would expect from someone who proudly identifies himself as “New York’s angriest, yodeling, acrobatic banjo player.”

“Curtis Eller gives a master class in how to command the attention of a room,” Kid Pensioner wrote in the U.K.-based Venue magazine. “Go and see Curtis Eller. One day, you’ll be able to say you saw him in a tiny venue before he was huge.”

“Basically, what it does is that it reduces the barrier between audience and performer,” said DeJarnette, who has performed with Eller both as part of a live band and in the studio and might be producing his new record. “So, the audience is really involved in what he’s doing.”

Andy Whitehouse has been active in promoting Eller’s shows from his home overseas.

“I had a venue called The Circle. I had a punky blues band from Sheffield [England] booked and the agent rang me and said, ‘Andy, would it be okay if we brought New York’s angriest yodeling banjo player as support?’ It took about 3 milliseconds to say, ‘Yes,’” said Whitehouse, 46, who works with young adults with autism and Asperger’s syndrome and lives in Sheffield, England. “So I looked Curtis up online and found this footage of an awkward guy who reminded me of Tom Waits and Randy Newman and had this bizarre, nervy stage presence. I was hooked!”

“I think a lot of English artists shy away from the notion of being ‘entertainers,’” Whitehouse added. “Curtis is the most breathlessly entertaining performer I can ever remember seeing. He is assessing every audience all the time and responding to what is happening. It’s fascinating to watch him.”

Eller got an early education in performance and the value of giving paying patrons their money’s worth. His father, Robert, a gym teacher by trade, ran a small-time circus called Hiller Old Time Circus and the younger Eller gained entertainment experience as both a juggler and acrobat. Robert “Bob” Eller also played bluegrass banjo and rockabilly guitar for a Baptist church in their native Michigan and he taught his son the ways and means of the bluegrass banjo when Curtis was just 13, formative years for the teenager.

“Banjo players were like the punk-rockers of their time,” Eller said. “It’s a highly physical, harmonically simple music that is designed to get people sweaty.”

When it came to writing his own material, Eller started around age 18 and was inspired by 1920s-era banjo players like Dock Boggs, Old Time string bands, and the 1960s Old Time revivalists The Holy Modal Rounders, one of the first acts Eller said used the term “psychedelic” in song. “[The Holy Modal Rounders] are giants for me,” Eller said. “They sort of established the playbook on how to be modern and stand in one spot and work backwards – great music.”

Eller stresses, despite the banjo and the anachronistic airs, he is no member of the Old Time crowd. “I sing about old things but the songs are not constructed like actual old songs. A lot of people aren’t familiar with Old Time music,” Eller said. “[My music] is somewhere between folk and rock n’ roll music.”

It’s more about music that actually moves and rolls itself around, making you move with the sound.

“It’s splitting the difference between 1928 and 1961,” Eller explained. “The writing is much more closely related to people like Randy Newman or The Kinks – modern songs about old things.”

In another song off “Taking Up Serpents Again,” Eller laments the current, deteriorating state of the film and entertainment industries by calling for the return, the resurrection, even, of silent film marvel Buster Keaton.

“Well, since they started in with the talkies/ you can’t get a moment’s peace,” Eller sings over a lonely banjo. “But they’re talking just to hear/ their own voices, well at least/ that’s what it seems like/ ‘cause there’s nothing that I’ve heard that bears repeatin’/ Won’t you come back to the movies, Buster Keaton?”

“It sums up the sense of loss of a world that perhaps never was but is yearned for,” Whitehouse said.
The era of the silent film and of vaudeville, and the artistry both embodied, loom large in Eller’s work. History and the capturing of history are ever-present. But, Eller strongly disputes accounts in the underground press that say he writes about obscure historical figures.

“I concern myself with the most prominent historical and political characters out there,” Eller said. “Abraham Lincoln, Elvis Presley and Richard Nixon seem to show up frequently. I think if you understand Elvis, Lincoln and Nixon you know everything you need to know about America.”

“I’ve also written about John Wilkes Booth, Amelia Earhart, Buster Keaton, Jack Ruby and Boss Tweed,” he added. “None of these can really be considered obscure. If anybody around here is obscure, it’s me.”

As a full-time musician, Eller spends a lot of time on the road, touring both nationally and internationally. When he’s in the studio, which he will be later this year, he likes to work quickly, capturing the energy and vitality of his performances and those of his backing band. Sessions take hours and days, not weeks and months.

Eller has been doing this full-time for nearly a decade. He gave up his last day job, a gig answering phones for an architect down in Greenwich Village, shortly after day-to-day life in New York City was turned upside-down by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

“If there’s a chance that everybody in the world is going to die, I don’t want to die with a phone in my hand,” Eller remembered thinking. “I’d rather die with a banjo in my hand than a phone.”

Eller, who plays a regular gig at Banjo Jim’s in the East Village, said he’ll be releasing a new record, maybe two, before the end of the year but he’s also quick to talk about his daughter, Daisy, who turns three March 30.

“Daisy has been strumming away on the [ukulele], banjo and mandolin for a while now,” said the proud father, whose voice changes, if only slightly, when he talks about his daughter. “She often ‘writes’ tunes about what’s going on in her life. It’s really very cute.”

“I suspect I’ll be opening for her one of these days!”

Profile: Robin Aigner (2010)

justinvellucci — Tue, 18 May 2010 02:01:31 +0000

Originally published in Brooklyn Rail April 2010

Robin Aigner, a vintage dress and boots extending her pint-sized frame, remains in control of the Living Room’s standing-room crowd as the music swirls around her. Ian McLaughlin’s upright bass lurches along, drummer Bill Gerstel doles out spare yet fluid accompaniment, and Brady Jenkins conjures up twinkling piano notes as Aigner, plucking an acoustic guitar at center stage, works her way through the verses of “See You Around,” the relationship number from her new record, Bandito.

“I’ve tidied up for the occasion, looking forward to the liaison,” she sings, her voice both vulnerable and seductive. “I throw away all of my reason when you come to town.”

Then comes the confrontation.

“I could make a meal for a king, sing a tune about any damned thing,” Aigner wails, throwing her head and neck backward and pushing out the words as violinist Rima Fand joins her on harmony vocals. “You would know all of these things if you were around.”

Robin Aigner is a songwriter in transition, and Bandito, which she self-released earlier this year, is a document of a musician operating at the peak of her craft. Aigner, who lives in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, introduced herself to local audiences more than seven years ago with Volksinger, a 15-track collection of acoustic odes that foreshadowed the singer-songwriter’s later affiliations with New York City’s Old Time and Anti-folk scenes. Then there was her collaboration with multi-instrumentalist Brook Martinez in Royal Pine, a duo that toured the countryside and released a pair of records steeped in Americana and alt-country. Aigner’s “Stone Cold Mamacita,” an early song released on both Volksinger and Royal Pine’s ultra-limited Huasteca, became a minor hit in some Brooklyn circles.

Bandito, however, presents Aigner as more of a central force than a solitary one. On songs like the beautifully engaging album-opener “Pearl Polly Adler,” she surrounds, even engulfs, herself with sound, most notably the rich and emotive violin playing of Caroline Shaw. “I’ve been to the Campbell apartment / At the invitation of F.D.R. / I’m the only one who knows where he goes when he parks his car,” she sings, letting the listener in on the secret and slipping in a hint of double entendre. “You can’t believe the papers, periodicals you read / I’m a lady first and foremost, doer of good deeds.”

Then, Shaw’s violin returns, weeping over Joshua Camp’s lonely piano.

On “Irving and Annie”—which concocts a relationship between composer Irving Berlin and Annie Moore, the first immigrant to pass through the gates of Ellis Island—Aigner accents her banjo-strumming with Dean Sharenow’s jangly percussion, a couple of piano solos, and the whisper and moan of Shaw’s violin. Even “See You Around,” a fairly low-key affair by Bandito’s standards, is fleshed out with multi-tracked vocals, pulsing bass lines, drums, and Rhodes organ.

Only on the disc’s closing track, “Great Molasses Disaster”—a historical vignette about a January 1919 incident when a tank of molasses exploded in Boston—does Aigner perform solo, in the true sense of the word. Then, the effect is so spare, fragile, and intimate that listening to it almost feels like eavesdropping, and the result feels devastatingly personal. “Sorry, my darlin’, I can’t meet today, doin’ my job, doin’ my job / How could something so sweet sweep us all off our feet / Our shoes are where our heads should be,” she coos over a naked acoustic guitar measure. “Too warm for January ten and nine / The air felt like September when you laid down your life / And the horses stuck like flies.”

Aigner’s voice is the engine that drives much of Bandito, a tender vehicle whose smooth texture and sensuality calls to mind Sam Phillips’s recordings for Nonesuch Records. However, Aigner is no folk-pop torch singer in the Phillips mold. Some of the songs on Bandito sit closer to the intersection of jazz, folk, and Eastern European gypsy music so wonderfully mined over the years by Tin Hat Trio. But Mark Orton, Tin Hat Trio’s guitarist, doesn’t hesitate to flaunt his virtuosity and jazz chops on six strings, whereas Aigner’s guitar lines are simple and more straightforward, recalling 1960s-era folk acts or even the more recent cowgirl blues of Edith Frost’s Calling Over Time. The components of her songs form a complicated equation, but above all they work, fitting together like so many puzzle pieces.

The fingerprints of Piñataland, the Brooklyn-based Old World orchestrette with whom Aigner collaborates, can also be found all over Bandito. Like Piñataland’s brilliant full-length debut, 2003’s Songs for the Forgotten Future Vol. 1, Bandito concerns itself with retelling and recapturing lost tidbits of American and personal history, but highlighting the emotional resonance of the events, rather than the cold simplicity of the facts. This approach also binds her to local acts like Kill Henry Sugar and Curtis Eller, the Astoria, Queens-based banjo player who opened for Aigner during the Bandito CD release event at the Living Room.

Bandito was recorded on a tiny budget over the course of three weeks at the Seaside Lounge Recording Studios in Brooklyn. Aigner later laid down some vocal tracks at Wombat Studios, a Park Slope institution that’s a short hop from Freddy’s Bar and Backroom, where Aigner first established herself with solo performances in the early 2000s. A lot has happened since she first took the stage in Freddy’s with her great-uncle’s acoustic guitar during an open mic night sometime in 2001. Aigner herself is quick to note the incredible transformation that would greet a listener following Volksinger directly with Bandito.

“We did a lot of [Volksinger] live, but it took forever, and I didn’t have the means or the confidence to add other musicians to it,” Aigner recalled. “By the time I got to Bandito, I had more creativity and more exposure to other kinds of music, more experience playing with other musicians, and more confidence in my ideas and my ideas in the studio. I was in charge in the production end, but I also had musicians who got the music and were excited and brought to the studio their own interpretation of it,” she said. “I definitely can’t take full credit for the way the album turned out.”

By the time Aigner started writing and recording Bandito she had also traveled quite a bit. She had toured widely with Royal Pine, recording sessions for Knoxville, Tennessee, radio station WDVX, played festivals with the Crooked Jades in Europe and Canada, and opened for Emmylou Harris in Nashville. She had also trekked to Romania with the string band Luminescent Orchestrii, pioneers of New York’s Balkan music scene, studying Eastern European music at a local festival and later staging on Old Time set at a Transylvanian village’s town hall. In 2006, the website Treble named Aigner one of the top overlooked female artists in the country.

Bandito is a record with many lustrous moments, from the heartache of “Pearl Polly Adler” to the hints of Spanish flamenco on “Dolores from Florence,” to the humorous “Mediocre Busker” and the flirtatious duet “Get Me Home”. It’s a product of its environment and the collaborators increasingly linked to Aigner, but it’s also a brilliant collection of songs, one that, all things being equal, should prove fodder for some best-of lists at the end of 2010.

Review: Kill Henry Sugar – Hot Messiah

justinvellucci — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 13:45:12 +0000

Originally published in American Songwriter March 2, 2010

Kill Henry Sugar has never been fond of genres. The New York City duo just isn’t easily classified.

To call Erik Della Penna and Dean Sharenow a folk act is reductive and off-the-mark, as their songs do not worship at the altar of early Bob Dylan or, even moreso, at those of Woody Guthrie or Pete Seeger. (Full disclosure: the pair has legitimate folk credentials, having worked with, among others, Joan Baez.) But the trappings of folk – the acoustic guitar, the historical ballad, the boxcar lamentations about the good ol’ days – are never too far removed from the band’s repertoire.

On Hot Messiah, the group’s sixth record, Kill Henry Sugar continues to evade those who might seek to categorize them. The 12-track album is darker, both musically and lyrically, than its predecessor, 2007’s Swing Back And Down, and also flirts more with the blues. But it is not a blues record, just as past efforts were not entirely folk records. There are songs with electric guitar, songs with acoustic guitar and songs with no guitar at all. Though the music sometimes concerns itself with history and the ramifications of using history as a source of inspiration, the music is thoroughly modern, sometimes even self-referential and post-modern. This is a collection of spare, stirring and emotive numbers that are raw and beautiful, like unpolished gems freshly pulled from the soil beneath your feet.

The record begins with “Yankee Talk,” one of the finest album-openers you’ll hear this year, a song whose lyrics place Della Penna and Sharenow among the “volk” whose American molds of music and story-telling they seem so fond of borrowing from but not completely embracing.

“Well, we descended from some European trash/ though we would not assimilate into the children of the corn/ The custom agent’s only taking cash /‘cause he knows we’ll all be dying in the class that we were born,” Della Penna sings, his voice walking the line between balladry and theatricality. “Had we been wronged, had we been broke/by helping hands, had we been choked/ It’s that way for Dean and me, Yankee talk with many shades of meaning.”

The song — in which Della Penna, conscious of class distinctions and the castes they create, bluntly notes “you can hire half the working class to kill the other half” — gradually unfurls, with both Della Penna’s jazzy acoustic guitar and Sharenow’s fluid percussion picking up their pace and becoming more aggressive as the song progresses. By the time the song’s four-minute-and-change running time runs out, you wish they just kept rumbling for a few more verses.

Elsewhere, the smallest detail can leave behind the deepest impression. In the transfixing “Bewildered,” it’s not Della Penna’s laundry list of modern-day inconveniences – crazy drivers, people who spit on the sidewalk, scientific advances – that claws its way into your memory, but the backing of two guitars, one reverbed, one almost as trebly as a zither, which subtly dose out single notes to accent Della Penna’s quietly shuffling acoustic guitar. In the folksy “Against The Stars,” the tale of one man’s fateful quest to become a cop, the thing that sticks with you is Della Penna and Sharenow’s fragile harmonies and the occasional interjection of a lonely banjo.

That’s not to say the record lacks big moments. The bluesy “Long Ago” is a barnburner, complete with dirgy guitars and harmonica, “Time Is Just A Piece of Paper” is a jazz nugget for piano and brushed snare and hi-hat, and “Runs In The Family” and “Age of Man” border on pop of the inviting variety, with contributions from electric guitar, bouncy bass, backing vocals and the careful picking of a banjo or acoustic guitar.

Those who love Kill Henry Sugar when their eyes are fixed on the days before them will appreciate “Johnny Appleseed,” a historical-vignette that follows in the footsteps of Boss Tweed and “Tammany Hall” from Swing Back And Down. “London Town,” which Della Penna and Sharenow sing beautifully a capella, is a fatalistic historical view of the life-cycles of a single city. And that says nothing of the lyrics for “Long Ago,” which seem to concern themselves with the absurdity of applying historical models – science driven by religious dogma, laws against blasphemy — to modern life. And just how much of modern life is composed of such histories?

Blues from somewhere near the Mississippi Delta float to the surface on the sparsely arranged and incredibly catchy “First Born Son” and, just three minutes later, Della Penna and Sharenow are pounding the floorboards, offering up “Spinning World,” whose floor-toms thump and thud and whose rollicking electric-blues guitar, fleshed out during bridges by the high wail of a what could be a Farfisa organ, falls somewhere between rhythm-and-blues and early rock.

The record ends not with a bang but a whimper, an elegiac weeper titled “Within My Lifetime.”

“I feel a strange wind blowin’/ I’m under threatening skies/ I hope the spell gets broken/ Within my lifetime,” Della Penna sings, broken-hearted over a melancholy verse on piano. “I started out so humble/ And I saw the garden grow/ I saw an empire crumble/ Within my lifetime.”

“I’m at the new location/ The old one slipped away,” he continues, with Sharenow now offering almost whispered harmony. “Can I rise above my station/ Within my lifetime?”

It’s a fitting close to an eclectic, even brilliant, album, another unexpected gem from a pair of musicians who, musically speaking, have carefully nurtured the art of walking between the raindrops.

Review: Robin Aigner – Bandito

justinvellucci — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 15:09:54 +0000

Originally published in American Songwriter Jan. 19, 2010.

Rating:

Robin Aigner’s got you hooked from the first verse.

The acoustic guitar, jazzy and hushed, slowly shuffles, the violin weeps and fingers run over the keys of a piano before a single word is spoken.

And, then, it comes.

“I’ve been to the Campbell Apartment/ at the invitation of F.D.R./ I’m the only one who knows where he goes when he parks his car,” Aigner coos, her voice a magnet, both flirtatious and sensual. “A house is not a home/ and Winters cannot hold a candle to my throne.”

The song, which opens Bandito is “Pearl Polly Adler,” a stirring historical homage to a New York City Madame whose houses of ill repute served the gangsters of her day, and it’s far from the only lustrous moment on this nine-track outing.

Aigner has made her rounds on the Old Time circuit, but her second solo record – the first was 2002’s Volksinger, followed by two releases with her duo Royal Pine — is not solely a product of that scene, instead presenting itself as a textured collection of history-infused song-vignettes that blend folk, mid-century country-and-western tunes, Eastern European gypsy music and strains of the contemporary singer-songwriter. This is beautiful music, beautifully made.

Here, there’s “Found,” an upbeat recitation on found objects and those who pursue them, or the banjo-flecked “Annie and Irving,” which concocts a relationship between songwriter Irving Berlin and Annie Moore, the first immigrant to pass through Ellis Island. Over there, you can catch hints of Spanish flamenco on “Delores From Florence,” laugh at the humorous descriptions of the street-weary performer in the appropriately titled “Mediocre Busker” or enjoy the playful romantic give-and-take between Aigner and singer Nate Reed on the folksy “Get Me Home.”

Aigner, time and again, taps the same vein Piñataland did with its brilliant Songs for the Forgotten Future Vol. 1, using wordplay and gentle melodies to paint history-pictures for the type of listener who trolls the Internet and their local library for signs of a disappeared world somehow more perfect than our own. The similarities are no coincidence; the Brooklyn musician has collaborated with that old-world orchestrette.

But even those familiar with Aigner’s work will be surprised by the new disc, which alternates between lush arrangements for guitar, Caroline Shaw’s violin, bass and Rhodes, and devastatingly spare tracks like the album-closing “Great Molasses Disaster.” The work is so complete, so thorough, that it makes Royal Pine, her duo with Brook Martinez, feel antiquated and Volksinger, an accomplished collection of acoustic odes, sound like rough drafts and works-in progress.

In the midst of all this reminiscing, Aigner makes room for just one relationship song – “See You Around.” On the song, where haunted bass and Rhodes pulse behind a finger-picked acoustic guitar, the love is of the broken variety and Aigner’s performance is engaging for its vulnerability.

“I can make a meal for a king/ sing a tune about any damn thing/ You would know all of these things/ if you were around,” she sings, stretching the syllables of some words and sounding somewhere between bitter and broken-hearted or both. “Sometimes, I can’t even recall your look/ Sometimes, I erase you from the phone book.”

Aigner performs solo, in the truest sense of the word, only on the closing song of Bandito and, then, she only does it for three, too-short minutes.

“The air smelled like September when you laid down your life,” she sings, her voice soft but double-tracked over the plucked strings of her acoustic guitar. “Sorry, my darling, I can’t meet today/ doing my job, doing my job.”

The record ends with Aigner’s voice, now breathy, extending the line of the chorus and a simple strum, again, of the acoustic guitar. The record is filled with moments like this and worth tracking down for even one of them.

Bandito is the sound of a history buff using inviting music to reconnect the listener with the dusty past. It also happens to be a brilliant, coming-of-age document that shows a young songwriter at the top of her game. If this were December, we’d be name-dropping this on our best-of-the-year lists and making up stories about how we caught Aigner before she broke big. And, if there’s any justice left in the American underground, this music won’t be self-released for very long.

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Review: Dish – Ma Raison De Vivre Ton Amour

justinvellucci — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 15:07:17 +0000

Originally published in Delusions of Adequacy June 17, 2009

There’s plenty to love about Ma Raison De Vivre Ton Amour, the second outing from Dish, but the verdict is still out over the disc’s most engaging attribute. Is it the vocals of Roberto Aguilar, the eerie way his wail channels Jeff Buckley at his always-familiar, rock-inflected peaks? Or is it the junk percussion of brother Nathaniel Aguilar, the jagged and inventive backbone of the duo? No matter your answer, this disc, out now on ROA Records, will transfix you – and for all the right reasons.

The disc begins with what, for lack of a better term, could be called a spiritual number or even a work song, the voices multi-tracked over the banging of a metal rail and a hubcap. But, after that 90-second introduction, Ma Raison De Vivre Ton Amour kicks into gear with “Cold Is,” a bright pop-rock nugget with plenty of hooks and a fist-pumping chorus. From there, the disc simply carries you from one great moment to the next. There’s “This Ain’t Livin’,” where Roberto Aguilar largely sets the pace with a shuffling acoustic guitar, and “Tired of Writing Songs,” which unfurls a lullaby guitar line over clattering percussion. On “Closer Dead,” Nathaniel Aguilar dresses up a pensive verse with the occasional pop of found percussion. On the sensual “Pictora” or the driving “Flutter,” the junk, the way those notes spike and jump out of the speakers, nearly steals the show.

The disc is also nothing if not diverse. At one turn, these guys are refining the art of the low-key (the trippy “The Song I Couldn’t Say,” the ballad “I Will Run For Our Love”). Then, without stumbling, they shift to the grandiose, from the country-and-western-tinged “Letter To You” to the excellent “Flutter,” which fleshes out its refrains with trumpet, trombone, French horn and tuba.

There are too many great moments on the 16-song disc to list, from the jazzy swing-and-sway of “I Saw A Bird” to the poppy humor of “Zombie Love Song” to “Death and Romance,” which begins with vibraphone but ends a dirgy barnburner. The disc ends with “Because The End Is Near,” where the brothers Aguilar again accompany the proceedings with horns. But, here the mood is reflective, a moment of pause at the end of 53 incredible minutes. It’s a calming curtain-close, almost an antidote to the heightened pop-rock pulse of it all. Not if only we could determine to which element of the band we should pledge our allegiance.

Review: Point Juncture Wa. – Heart To Elk

justinvellucci — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 15:02:24 +0000

Originally published in Delusions of Adequacy June 8, 2009

The album begins with the click and clack of electronic percussion but, within moments, carefully gives way to humming horns and punctuation from a vibraphone. The percussion, on a full kit and now more pronounced, slinks along, a jazzy shuffle. The mood is somewhere between sleepy and dreamy, that ill-defined middle ground where the world starts feeling fuzzy and then slips away. “How blissful it would be to think only of me,” sings Amanda Spring, her breathy voice floating right in the middle of the mix. This is our introduction.

Point Juncture, Wa. isn’t really a place in the sense that conventional maps or cartographers would have you believe. But if the attributes of the Portland-based quartet that has chosen the moniker as its name were applied to a town, a real speck on the map, it surely would be inviting. Every home on every block would be warmly lighted from within, the winding roads would be clutter-free and every intersection would be carefully plotted. City planners would appear to leave nothing to chance.

Heart to Elk, Point Juncture, Wa.’s third release, is evidence of this modus operandi but, make no mistakes, it’s far from cold or over-calculated. It’s a beautiful and well-produced record, one whose craft is clearly matched by the attention and care it received in the studio. Its 13 songs sometimes lack the requisite hooks to call it pop, but there’s something almost inherently catchy about the material, something that quietly slides it under the surface of your skin to make it feel at home. This is music to remember.

For lack of more precise terms, Heart to Elk sits at the same intersection of pop, rock and jazz once occupied by Eleventh Dream Day. There are moments on the 49-minute disc that pump the blood (the distortion-drenched “Biathalon,” the closing minutes of “Melon Bird”) and there are others that are quiet and contemplative (“Rocks and Sand,” “The Easy Winners”). At one turn, the band is offsetting grungy bass with gentle background cooing (“New Machine”); at the next, it’s placing a gently strummed acoustic guitar front and center alongside interjecting horns (“Kings Part II”). “Viking Mission to Mars” is a pop-rock gem, complete with frenetic refrains. “Stray Bear” veers between the honey-dipped and the adrenaline-pumped. “Sick On Sugar,” with its light-footed guitars and blaring horns, feels like it’s about to soar out of your stereo.

The record ends with another song aided by electronic percussion — “The Easy Winners.” But, here, unlike on the album-opener, the electronic percussion lingers, pockmarking the background as the band builds and rebuilds a song with the solitary notes of an electric guitar, understated bass and Victor Nash’s plaintive vocals. (“It’s better if you don’t, it’s better if you don’t,” he sings, pleading.) The song then buckles under the weight of clattering guitars, roiling drums and carefully timed backing vocals, everything in its right place, more details in yet another song worth remembering.