SHOW OF THE MONTH
Bombadil
Eddie’s Attic
Atlanta, GA
April 27, 2008
Over the last year, Bombadil has built up a reputation for a fairly eccentric tour, incorporating pre-show busking at local college campuses with a constantly updated setlist and packed sing-a-long crowds. While the band’s recent show at Eddie’s Attic was a bit sedate compared to its last Atlanta performance at The EARL, it was more than enough to leave Eddie’s audience swaying and tapping their feet in their seats, and served as a perfect introduction to the full length record the group released that weekend.
 Bombadil played an early 7:30 show on Sunday, which goes a long way toward explaining the small audience that evening. The crowd might have wandered into Eddie’s for a late dinner, rather than to hear one of Durham’s fastest-rising acts. With the third song of the set, Bombadil easily stole the audience’s attention, singing, in harmony perfectly fitted to Atlanta’s spring weather, “Jellybean wine, perfect for a summer morning hangover / Jellybean wine, perfect for a summer morning ... High as a kite that’s kicking the ground / Yesterday’s gone but she’s still around and she knows.”
Switching instruments and adjusting straps for the next song, pianist Daniel Michalak awkwardly explained, “This next song’s about Malaysia. It’s our favorite city right now. We’ve never been there, but, yeah, we just think it’s really great; just fantastic.”
Bombadil kept up Michalak’s traveling spirit, playing in rapid succession “Polar Bear” (a reworked Polish children’s story), “Get To Getting’ On” (a hymn to ending tough relationships) and “La Paz,” a song written in memory of bassist Bryan Rahija and Daniel Michalak’s time studying in Bolivia’s capitol city, Nuestra Señora de La Paz (“Our Lady of Peace”). The night’s diverse instrument choice reflected the group’s far-ranging international influence, incorporating the zampona (Bolivian pan flute), charango (a ukulele sized guitar, originally crafted from the shell of an armadillo) and, in one of Bombadil’s last songs, a set of dollar store maracas. As the band’s set proceeded, it was impossible to predict what song or instrument Bombadil would pull from their musical bag of tricks.
-Review & photo by Ben Grad
David Dondero and The Entire State of Florida / Barnraisers / North Elementary / Doly Toro
Soapbox Laundrolounge
Wilmington, NC
April 5, 2008
Red backlights set the atmosphere for Doly Toro’s hollow folk-rock, which was punctuated by Jamin Belmont’s keen use of vocal emanations. Vocalist Jamin Belmont, sporting the first of the night’s many plaid shirts, sang with a careless precision. His vocal warblings during choruses often seem ad-libbed, but are designed to set a contemplative mood over drummer Justin Tinkler’s steady and vaguely tribal percussion. Keyboardist Lynn Casper handled some of the vocals, and the back and forth between Belmont and Casper culminated in their final and perhaps best song, “Truly A Mistake,” where Belmont’s long voice was punctuated by Casper’s sharp inflections of “Die! Die!”
Chapel Hill band North Elementary, with whom most of the crowd seemed unfamiliar, was up next. Main prognosticator John Harrison, also in plaid, joked that the band had toured with Better Than Ezra and that they were fired. No one laughed or even batted an eye. The band seemed all right with the lack of crowd response, and took the opportunity to jam longer on some of its usually tight rock songs.
Barnraisers were up next, and the trio took their unplugged instruments and closed in tight around their vintage styled mic. When compared to the rest of the bill, Barnraisers were most likely not to fit, with their classic country western and sarcastic bluegrass set and singer/banjo player standing out from Doly Toro and North Elementary. Yet they were the most anticipated, having recently been voted one of the most popular acts in Wilmington. The tight trio of banjo, guitar and upright bass provided a more intimate setting, drawing the crowd in close.
Sometime-Wilmington resident David Dondero and his band, The Entire State of Florida, took the stage next. The stop was part of his national tour to promote his new album, Simple Love on Team Love Records. The pedal and steel guitar provided the right atmospherics for an homage to past folk music roots. Dondero’s songs detailing his adventures across the United States proved captivating, as did his unique ability to blend Americana and rock along with compelling narrative songs. “Mighty Mississip!” from the new record served as an emotional hightpoint for the set, with the song including an electro-pop buildup with a new twist on Southern rock that sent the band and crowd into jittery headshakes.
-Review & photos by Josh Spilker
Hammer No More The Fingers
Reggie’s 42nd Street Tavern
Wilmington, NC
April 12, 2008
Durham trio Hammer No More The Fingers put on a pretension-free good time and made people on the floor dance and jump along with the band.
Duncan Webster (bass/vocals), Jeff Stickley (drums) and Joe Hall (guitar/vocals) returned to Reggie’s 42nd Street Tavern, a place that has become a home away from home for the boys when in Wilmington.
The Durham trio took to the floor-level stage politely, got comfortable and lined up close at the microphones to shotgun beers, looking like vampires tearing apart aluminum with tiny smiles. Stickley’s drum set was placed left of stage instead of the rear, allowing for more interaction. He put on sunglasses for no apparent reason a few songs in.
“Doesn’t he look like Andrew McCarthy?” Webster asked. Girls in the crowd whistled.
The set was comprised of new, unfamiliar material like “Poison Apple,” “Shutterbug,” “Burning My Eyes Out” and “Automobiles.” The new tunes missed the bounce of familiar songs but that was pleasantly replaced by drawn out grooves, hinting at the band’s newer direction. To some extent the sound was more serious in tone, but the songs show the band stretching out its sound, feeling it out and developing it into something more.
The set was tight but newer material found HNMTF more cautious, playing songs that were still only newborns. Webster began “Shutterbug” by saying, “This is a new one, we’ve only played it a few times.” It was played delicately-strange, given the song’s power — but it was interesting to see and hear a song learning to walk and being refined. It was notable that Hall and Webster looked more at their instruments than outward and stood still more while they performed newer material.
That all changed as HNMTF played older songs. Explosions erupted in the band members’ feet and the crowd reacted heartily. The college girls danced in place. They went nuts when the band played “O.R.G.Y.” and “Mushrooms.” The set ended with musical anarchy as Reggie’s owner Matt Hearn held a cymbal stand for Stickley to play.
-Review & photo by Brian Tucker
Chatham County Line / Georgia Fireflies / Drakkar Sauna
The Earl
Atlanta, GA
April 18, 2008
Perhaps hoping to broaden its steadily increasing fan base, North Carolina’s acoustic Americana favorite Chatham County Line performed at gritty indie-rock venue The EARL at the Atlanta stop of its current tour. Rather than opting for a more logical, austere listening room such as Eddie’s Attic, the bluegrass and folk-influenced quartet seemed undaunted by the rock ‘n’ roll environment and the group’s unwavering professionalism and consummate musicianship served them mightily through an evening featuring a typical EARL crowd that was often louder than the bands onstage. Lawrence, Kan. duo Drakkar Sauna opened the three-band show, playing to about 20 people when its set began. The slightly odd Jeff Stolz (guitar/lead vocal) and Wallace Cochran (guitar/organ/bass drum/harmony vocal) performed a song about how all your friends would eventually contract diseases and die, and lamented in another song that there were “not enough tits on a wolf,” painting them as some sort of folksy Tenacious D. The group’s jokiness, however, was tempered by the inclusion of two reverent renditions of Louvin Brothers songs (from Drakkar Sauna’s full-length tribute CD to the Louvins), so it was difficult to gauge the duo’s sincerity.
On the other hand, The Georgia Fireflies, the middle band, had sincerity going for them if not quite the musical chops (especially vocally) to match. Jeff Holt (guitar/banjo/vocals) and Leanna Fugate (banjo/mandolin/vocals) hung a wooden sign with their name burned into it on one of the microphones as if to signify some sort of rustic authenticity to the trickling-in crowd, which had now grown to about 75. The band’s set included a rather lifeless cover of Bob Dylan’s “You Ain’t Going Nowhere” and a nicely done, eerie minor-key death song (“Darkest Sleep” sung by Fugate), but overall the duo was not loud (or interesting) enough to hush the din of the slowly swelling audience.
By the time Chatham County Line hit the stage at midnight, the now 125-person throng was temporarily quieted by the straightforward musical acumen of the band. Looking positively dapper in suits and ties, guitarist/vocalist Dave Wilson, mandolin/fiddle player/harmony vocalist John Teer, banjo player Chandler Holt and upright bassist Greg Readling confidently drove through a diverse 19-song set that ran from near-pop (“The Carolina” and new single “Chip of a Star”) to mournful ballads (“Saro Jane”) and storytelling songs (“Route 23”), with a few stops at blistering bluegrass instrumentals (“Clear Blue Sky” and “Gunfight in Durango”), noticeably being the crowd favorites. The members of CCL clearly love what they’re playing, as evidenced by the natural, unforced interaction between the band members throughout the set, but chances are, because of the noisy clientele at The EARL, they won’t be sharing their pure, unadulterated American acoustic music with East Atlanta any time again soon.
-Review by Scott Roberts; photo by Sue Volkert
Unknown Hinson / Syrens of the South
The Earl
Atlanta, GA
April 12, 2008
Unknown Hinson was an unlikely headliner to sell out The EARL. With the gold embroidery on his black dress jacket, grease-paint eyebrows and adhesive sideburns resting just a little too high on his cheeks, he comes off like an incredibly horny vampire doing a Johnny Cash tribute in Las Vegas. His dirty, tangy tenor, however, bears no resemblance to the earnest Man in Black.
Openers Syrens of the South were a fine complement to the comic Hinson. The Syrens presented true classic burlesque employing everything from banana costumes to life-sized puppets.
 Like the Syrens, Hinson’s talent and charisma tended to overshadow his shtick. He writes anthemic country rock songs such as “Peace, Love and Hard Liquor” that would be at home in Nashville if the raunch levels in his lyrics weren’t permanently in the red.
Hinson was at his best belting out passionate ballads aimed at the panties of married women. One such song, the apparently very popular “Your Man,” prompted the night’s most hardcore sing-along. Chorus: “Your man is gay.”
His shtick, incidentally, is that he is, in fact, a vampire. He did a quick origin-story review with the unhinged thumper “Undead Blues” but, judging by the warm reception, there wasn’t any need for it that night. The rockabillies, degenerates and nerdy types (who might have first encountered Hinson as the voice of Early Cuyler on the Adult Swim cartoon show The Squidbillies) clearly knew the back-story.
Hinson returned the affection, but mostly to the ladies, saying, “I love you Atlanta womerns [sic],” before dedicating a song about stalking them. Surely a few feminine hearts beat faster at this, though possibly with more terror than desire.
Tip: you can get away with adhesive sideburns when you can play guitar at least as well as Hinson can — well enough that one might believe it did indeed come from some infernal source. Hinson has a way with the sweet blues solo and his ridiculous eyebrows and mannerisms of a debauched southern gentleman make for some striking solo faces. But there’s something besides talent going on that makes Unknown Hinson something more than a novelty act.
Danny Baker, Hinson’s alter-ego, creates a living and memorable character down to the last detail. Under the ghastly green stage lights that shadowed his eyes, he was able to transcend his own campiness in a way that was downright chilling. During Hinson’s own black-eyed version of The Who’s “Behind Blue Eyes,” his performance achieved a strange poignancy that — as any Elvis impersonator will tell you — actually requires fake sideburns.
-Review by Beverly Bryan; photo by Jason Reed
Patterson Hood / Don Chambers
The Five Spot
Atlanta, GA
April 17, 2008
During a rare touring respite from The Drive-By Truckers, lead singer Patterson Hood stayed on the road with a short string of dates through the Southeast. On the second night of the tour, he brought the solo “Rock Show” to The Five Spot in Atlanta. Hood’s longtime friend and touring partner Don Chambers opened the evening with his self-proclaimed “pirate sing-a-longs” and fusion of rockabilly and blues. Along with his collaborator Jim Wilson on drums (and ladder, hubcaps, etc.), Chambers tore through a stripped-down, passionate set of tunes with lyrics such as “devil may care but I don’t” and “filling up the devil bucket.” Between the appearance of the improvised additions to Wilson’s drumset and the off-beat and dark subject matter, Chambers could easily be a post-apocalyptic vision of the type of southern rock ‘n’ roll that is yet to come.
Patterson Hood and his band then took the stage to a now capacity crowd. Hoods band included fellow DBT members Brad “EZB” Morgan and John Neff as well as long-time producer (and rarely touring band member) David Barbe. Hood played a variety of both old and new solo tunes as well as past DBT favorites. It was intriguing to see the raw and simply-structured tunes from Hood’s debut solo album Killers & Stars fleshed out with the addition of a full band. Hood smiled and thrashed through the more upbeat tracks such as “I Understand Now” from his upcoming solo effort, Murdering Oscar.
In honor of the sold-out show that same night at the Variety Playhouse two doors down, Hood also offered a passionate take on Todd Rundgrens “Range War.” Understandably, some of the most well received tracks of the evening came from Hoods usual band, as he offered a more somber and blues-filled version of “Feb 14” as well as the crowd favorite “Heathens.” John Neff’s soulful pedal steel carried “The Opening Act,” from DBTs most recent release, while Chambers joined the band on banjo for the solo tracks “Rising Son” and “I Killed Oscar.” Although the solo effort is more or less a temporary substitute for Hoods’ regular gig, it is a welcome opportunity for the bands fans to whet their appetites as well as a chance for Hood to produce art outside the customary restraints of a full-time band.
-Review & photos by Micah J. McLain
Attractive EightiesWomen / Tenth to the Moon / Standing Behind You With Knives / Seven Envy / Slow Motion Crash / Chinese Frankenstein vs. Stan Woodard / Subliminator / Sorry No Ferrari / The Christpuncher
Lenny’s Bar
Atlanta, GA
April 5, 2008
Lenny’s Bar, long considered Atlanta’s premier “dive bar,” was looking even dive-er than usual on Saturday April 5. Though the bar was hosting a benefit for victims of Atlanta’s recent tornado, the event hadn’t been well publicized, and most of Lenny’s patrons were at the bar or pool tables, far away from the music portion of the building. Throughout the four hours of music, none of the bands drew more than about 30 listeners, with mediocre opening bands even convinced a few paying customers to leave before the more heavy-hitting headlining bands had a chance to perform.
The venue’s “feel” took a turn for the better when Tenth to the Moon started playing. The guitar/keyboard/drum trio created a darkly psychedelic sound complimented by singer Mitchell Foy’s industrialized shrieks. As the group’s set ended, Foy shifted from repeating the words, “You’ve built your house on stilts,” to rolling Daffy Duck-style on the floor, whispering and moaning at the gathered audience. Tenth to the Moon’s wrenching performance would have worked just as well in the midst of the storm as it did now, two weeks since the F-2 tornado hit.
 After a quick soundcheck, Standing Behind You With Knives followed, playing what could be interpreted as an evolution of Tenth to the Moon’s set. Though Standing Behind You With Knives plays fairly straightforward metal, the band followed Tenth to the Moon’s tendency to swing between extremes of intensity and quiet with almost Explosions In The Sky-style instrumental interludes. Taken as two parts of a whole, the righteous indignation present in each band’s set complimented each other, and it was an unexpectedly good midpoint for what could have been a disastrous night.
Following good (but not great) performances by Seven Envy and Slow Motion Crash, Attractive Eighties Women took the stage two hours after their scheduled midnight show. Half the band members had stripped to their underwear. Lead singer Phoebe Cates (AKA Mack Williams) explained, “We thought we were gonna go on at 12, but those other guys ran late, and it’s fuckin’ two, so ... we got drunk. I’m probably gon’ mess up some lyrics.” As other reviewers have mentioned, Attractive Eighties Women are not great musicians; their music isn’t too complex to perform drunk, and their sound is no more nuanced than the sort of rock you’ll hear in bars throughout the Southeast. They are, however, five of Atlanta’s best performers, and their sheer charisma propels the sort of stage antics that would make other bands seem fake or pretentious. What other band could begin each of their performances by announcing, “Those other bands fucking sucked, but we kick ass!”? Saturday night’s performance was yet another example of a near-perfect party band stretching their musical and performance capabilities to the limit, proving that it really is possible to make songs with choruses like “She Made My Heart Walk the Plank” and “Fuck You, That’s My Name” into audience-electrifying masterpieces.
-Review & photo by Ben Grad
Standing Behind You With Knives
The Heap
Farm 255
Athens, GA
April 25, 2008
Friday night was the first night of Athens’ annual Twilight Criterium. The yearly bike races in Athens brought in out-of-towners and townies alike. The Heap began warming up for its set at Farm 255, and the outdoor venue started filling to capacity. The band had a little trouble getting everything tuned up and ready to go, and one member was temporarily missing during the first song. But the energy onstage was undeniable and as the eight-piece launched into it’s first song the crowd became enthused as people got up to dance. Though most college students were missing from the scene, the Farm was packed with a much older crowd that seemed to appreciate the no-frills sound of The Heap. The Heap played a mixture of jazz and funk that incorporated a little of the blues and sounded more like a jazz-fusion jam band. The horn-dominated sound of the band was a little reminiscent of James Brown’s backing band. The baritone-voiced singer/guitarist Bryan Howard bellowed songs about loving, living, drinking and basically having a good time. The band played a very tight set, though the keys were a little underrepresented, perhaps because of the dominating horn section. The heavy instrumentation included Jeff Rieter on upright bass, Paul Kim on keys, Ian Werden (Slackdaddy) on drums, Diego Catalan on percussion, Jeff Crouch on trumpet and Marcus Gilley and Chris Costigan on saxophone. The songs varied between funky, upbeat rhythmic jingles and bluesy, laid-back pieces that often sounded like gospel music. One of the songs that stood out that evening was “Hot Box,” a soulful funky number that featured a guitar line that sounded a little like Stevie Wonder’s “That Girl.” One of the most rollicking tunes of the evening was “Mad Man Blues,” a raucous song in which the bass and guitar got most of the grooviest riffs. The band played what seemed like a really short set and finished just under an hour. The Heap played a delicious set of groovy, horn-laden soul that entertained as much as it energized, and as the last song rang out, it was certain a funky good time was had by all.
-Review by Charley Lee
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