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Bitch
Thursday · Crush (above Union Station Video Café)
If you think someone leaving a moderately successful band called Bitch and Animal might search for a more family-friendly moniker ... well, you don't know Bitch. Bitch and Animal was actually a dreadlocked, lesbian duo comprised of Bitch (yeah, that's her name — you gotta problem with that?) and Daniela Sea (aka Animal). The twosome are on a good run, recording with Ani DiFranco and releasing two albums on DiFranco's Righteous Babe Records. The group's fiery, folksy, political AgitPop has garnered attention from outside of the music biz as well — John Cameron Mitchell cast the musicians in the controversial flick Shortbus (they didn't participate in any of the movie's explicit sex scenes) and Sea landed a continuing role as the transgendered Max on the Showtime series, The L Word.
That has left Bitch to pursue solo interests and she does so with a bang on her solo debut, Make This/Break This, released on long-standing Indie Rock label Kill Rock Stars. The intensity is still evident in her lyrics and passionate vocals, but this Angry Young Woman now uses an even more engaging musical backdrop that reflects the depth and complexity of her confrontational poetics. Bitch has developed a singular sound, a kind of "orchestral minimalism" that is enriched by acoustic instruments, toy pianos, various percussion and violins.
Still, it is Bitch's percussive, soul-stirring vocal style that is most magnetic. She has the ability to craft melodies that are almost Rap- or Punk-like in their attack, but Folk-like in their organic, well-anchored feistiness (it is most akin to DiFranco's like-minded directness).
She sings songs of personal and societal politics. Empowerment is a key thread, like the defense of "Aileen Wuornos," the beleaguered prostitute/serial killer who was the subject of the film Monster, or "Witches," a spoken-word-ish track that refers to the witch trials in Europe, which made Salem look like a summer vacation hotspot.
The hostile, seething "Rise" is the album's highlight, a no-bullshit deconstruction of the Bush administration's fatal flaws. The anxious, atmospheric track (think U2's "Bullet the Blue Sky" with Bono replaced by a lesbian poetess in green dreadlocks) is like a modern "Talking Blues," as Bitch calls for a new revolution, singing lines like, "Baghdad lit up a green gold/Beat up by bullies/With bombs generations old/George Bush is as evil as Saddam/It takes one to know one."
Next time you hear someone bemoan the death of protest music in the modern age, hand them a copy of Bitch's Make This/Break This. With apologies to Neil Young, this is how it should be done. (Mike Breen)
Ratatat
Monday · Southgate House
If there is one thing that this generation of musicians might be known best for, it could well be the proliferation of the side project. Back in the '60s and '70s, the outside band project was more often than not a so-called "supergroup," when stars from established bands would hook up to create a one-off alliance for recording and/or touring purposes. But today's creatively driven band members are finding a single group to be insufficient in satisfying their songwriting and performing back-monkeys (just look at the spawn of Broken Social Scene) and are seeking new and multiple modes of musical expression and claiming membership in a number of bands simultaneously.
Mike Stroud and Evan Mast of Ratatat are among the latest examples of multi-tasking Indie Rock players looking for varied creative outlets. Stroud, who plays with both Ben Kweller and Dashboard Confessional, and Mast, who also operates under the E*vax banner, got together away from their primary gigs nearly four years ago under the name Cherry in order to work out a number of internal creative demons, a combination of Baroque Pop, Electronica and visceral Indie Rock, in an instrumental atmosphere. After picking up a tour opportunity with Interpol, who had become fans of the band, Stroud and Mast changed the group's name to Ratatat, launched their own Audiodregs label and released their first single, a catchy bit of Baroque Pop classicism called "Seventeen Years," which earned the twosome a fair amount of critical acclaim and even more attention from their peers.
The duo put in a good year of roadwork in the U.S. and Europe, opening for everyone from The Killers to Franz Ferdinand. With their sophomore release, Classics, Stroud and Mast continue down the instrumental path but broaden their sonic palette with better production and an expansion of their Rock-via-Electronica concept to include more elaborate instrumentation.
The tour that brings Ratatat through town this week is the band's first headlining circuit, so they're sure to make the most of their added stage time and increased attention. With wordless charm and boundless energy, Ratatat is where it's at. (Brian Baker)
Of Montreal with Loney, Dear
Tuesday · Southgate House
There was a time when you could see the words "Elephant 6 collective" in an album review and have a fairly good idea what it was going to sound like. Although Kevin Barnes and his second-tier E6 band Of Montreal certainly started out in that vein, his sonic path over the past decade has made each OM album a distinctly unique animal to consider.
Early on, OM reflected Barnes' deep affection for the psychedelic '60s Pop of The Beatles, The Kinks and The Pretty Things and while the band's membership changed, Barnes' sonic direction remained resolutely intact on their early albums. On 1999's The Gay Parade and 2001's Coquelicot Asleep in the Poppies: A Variety of Whimsical Verse, Barnes turned OM down a more conceptual path with actual song structures morphing into suites of music and lyrical/musical themes recurring across the albums' entirety.
2002's Aldhils Arboretum signaled a shift to a slightly dancier mode and a return to actual songs, but it also came at a particularly fractious moment in the band's history, as Barnes married his longtime girlfriend Nina (who became a band member), lost the services of longtime collaborators Andy Gonzales and Derek Almstead (who left for family/educational/other band concerns) and found himself label-less with the collapse of Kindercore Records. With the next two OM albums, 2004's Satanic Panic in the Attic and 2005's The Sunlandic Twins, Barnes began to pursue an even more Electronic sound for the band, incorporating shades of Afro Pop and World Beat into a funkier, rhythm-driven mode that drew less on his '60s Pop roots and more on his growing affection for Prince's '80s Soul/Pop, David Bowie's '70s/'80s Glam/Rock and Brian Eno's sinewy Electronic Ambient/Pop.
Although a couple of early OM albums were considered de facto solo albums with a few hired hands to fill in the gaps, the last few albums have become increasingly less band-oriented and more the product of Barnes' solo vision and execution, to the extent that Of Montreal's recent release, Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?, reflects almost no outside input, drives the Electronic/Dance themes even deeper into OM's fabric and features some of the most incredibly personal and painful lyrics that Barnes has ever applied to OM songs. As disconcerted as some of the band's early fans have been at this sonic style shift, it might not be a coincidence that each successive Of Montreal album has been more commercially successful than the last, and Hissing Fauna seems on the verge of topping them all.
It's clear that however Kevin Barnes decides to shape OM's output, he truly believes in the artistic and sonic direction that he's following. You can't expect more than that from your favorite band, now can you? (BB)
