The Bowery Presents

Music Hall of Williamsburg upcoming shows

BrooklynVegan Showcase

Fanfarlo / The Antlers / Laura Marling / Nathaniel Rateliff & The Wheel / Walter Schreifels Band / Think About Life

Hosted By Dave Hill

Venue:
Music Hall of Williamsburg
Date:
Tue 10/20
Notes:
18+
Doors: 6:00 PM / Show: 7:00 PM
$15 advance / $15 day of show
Tickets
Fanfarlo
official website
myspace
"The first 16 years of my life I spent a lot of time around lakes. You see... I get quite passionate about things for a time, like reservoirs."

The passion, the obsession, the dissolution of intellectual rigour; heart and longing colliding with mind and matter; these are the recurrent themes of Fanfarlo. As aging instruments are brought back to life with a creaking aching beauty, a bizarre collection of characters join our midst, each an accidental Fanfarlo metaphor - the irrational pursuit of an otherwise intellectual mind. Case in point: Howard Hughes' decent into madness in "I'm A Pilot;" the delusion of Pellegrino Ernetti in "The Walls Are Coming Down" and the absurd writing career of "Harold T. Wilkins," all sweep from sweet murmuring melodia to orchestral pop.

Again and again the UK five-piece find ways to mirror the impotent fury of the words. Members Cathy Lucas (violin, keyboard, vox), Justin Finch (bass) and Amos Memon (drums) and Leon Beckenham (trumpet, keyboard) all conspire to ensure that Fanfarlo eschew a defining format. Reaching for less than obvious conclusions to musical conundrums: saws, clarinets, cellos, mandolins, ukuleles, melodicas, hands clapping and feet stomping.

There is no doubt that all of Fanfarlo are clever, bookish coves, but when they come together to make music, they function on a gut level. For a band that comes from all over - frontman Simon Balthazar (vocals) is himself from Gothenburg - there is that restless, furtive artistry. A keenness to avoid the constraints of home, battling with the longing of the heart, the distant locations of a burning house "Fire Escape;" a drowning village "Ghosts;" and the uneasy sensations of urban sprawl, "Luna."

Trapped and spiraling guitars, an insistently hammered piano chord, or an ominous stomp, the fervour with which they play is stirring and infectious... Fanfarlo Baudelaire's fictional dancer, impossibly desirable, an inescapable object of obsession.

"I always try to write accessible lyrics that people will get and understand, but it always ends up impenetrable," explains Fanfarlo frontman Simon Balthazar, "then I attempt to write deep, serious and difficult music, and somehow it keeps coming out as pop."

It is a nice problem to have and Fanfarlo benefit greatly. The wonderfully bewildering array of characters and scenes on Reservoir, comes laden with memorable hooks. Recorded over a month and a half with Peter Katis (The National, Interpol) at his home studio in Bridgeport, Connecticut, it is has been a formative process for the band.

Fanfarlo's early singles, combined with winning live performances had proved a sensation in the blogosphere, both in Europe and in the US. But as good as those singles first seemed; Talking Backwards (Fortuna Pop), You Are One Of The Few Outsiders Who Really Understands Us (Fandango), Fire Escape (White Heat) and Harold T.Wilkins (Felt Tip), it was as nought to the leaps and bounds made in those few shorts weeks in New England.

Working with Peter was the first opportunity to properly explore what this full band could achieve. Cathy Lucas - the bearer of Fanfarlo's distinctive accompanying vocals - is convinced of the new ground the band has occupied, "Peter would find the right sound straight away and I started thinking that it could become much more than just a series of songs..."

"I always thought big with this band" enthuses Simon. "Wanting to make music that everyone would love, which always seemed like a realistic expectation, given the response we got to our live performances... it's an amazing relief to be able to say, yes, this is what it should sound like."
The Antlers
official website
myspace
Sometimes you have to put yourself first, no matter how difficult that notion seems; no matter how much time and effort you’ve already put into this one person—the person who’s reduced your very being to its absolute core. Just ask Peter Silberman, the string-pulling founder of The Antlers, a solo project that suddenly went widescreen on the self-released Hospice LP (now receiving a proper widespread pressing through Frenchkiss). The first Antlers effort to feature two key permanent players—powerhouse drummer Michael Lerner and the layer-lathering multi-instrumentalist Darby Cicci—it’s an album with a sound that’s actually as ambitious as its concept.

“Hospice came from the idea of caring for a terminal patient who’s mentally abusive to you,” says Silberman. “You don’t have the right to argue with them, either, because they’re the one who’s dying here; they’re the one that’s been dealt a wrong hand. So you take it, but you can only take so much. Eventually, you realize that this person is just destroying you.”

Appropriately enough, Hospice’s 10 distinct chapters resonate on debilitating sonic and lyrical levels, from the hypnotic harp and tension-ratcheting build of “Two” to the sing-or-sink choruses of “Bear” and the speaker-rattling peaks of “Sylvia,” easily one of the year’s most immediate epics. It’s here, amidst contrasting shards of ambient noise, sweeping strings and smoky horns, where The Antlers truly transcend Silberman’s singer-songwriter beginnings—a striking escalation of expectations first hinted at on 2008’s New York Hospitals EP. The progression doesn’t end there, either. In a move that could be taken as the riff-raking extension of his thorough guitar training (from the age of 6 ‘til right before college), “Atrophy” and “Wake” delve into sheets of distortion, subtle shades of soul, cicada-like effects and enough movements to fill an entire EP.

“We were going for something that’d be dense but not too complicated,” explains Silberman. “I hate the word ‘lush,’ but I guess that’s the best way of describing it. The structures are like pop songs—verse/chorus, verse/chorus—but the sound is a little more shoegaze-y or post-rocky.”
It’s about to get even more complicated, too, as The Antlers’ Technicolor-tinged trio take all of Hospice’s songs—and three previous releases—in a completely different direction, jettisoning a note-for-note rendition of the record for “a massive sound” doused in delay, reverb and unrehearsed chaos. And to think Cicci was a stage actor with a desire to drop it all for music just a few years ago.

“Hospice was the clear indication that this isn’t a singer-songwriter thing at all,” says Silberman. “Whatever we record next is going to define the three of us as a ‘band.’

He continues, “I always figured I’d be the ‘shredder’ in a group…But things somehow ended up this way.”

We wouldn’t have it any other way, either.
Laura Marling
official website
myspace
At the tail-end of the Summer, just before work began on her second album, Laura Marling sat down with producer Ethan Johns to discuss her ambitions for the record. She gave Johns just two instructions: "This is very much my stepping stone," she told him. "And this is England."

I Speak Because I Can is indeed a coming of age, its 10 songs imbued with a richness and a ripeness and a sophistication. It is also an album marked by its quintessential Englishness. For all its American instrumentation, its shades of Crosby Stills and Nash, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, these songs are no pale Americana interpretation; rather they are tales of snow-covered England, of blackberries and cold noses, songs that are deeply rooted in place. It is as if in the months since we saw her last, Marling has sought out her own identity, and found herself to be thoroughly English, unapologetically female, and a fully-fledged musician in her own right.

Marling was, after all, just 17 when her debut Alas, I Cannot Swim was released in the Winter of 2008. Alive with stories of past lovers, night terrors and hearts that tick away like hourglasses, Alas was an exceptional record, revealing Marling to be in possession of not only a voice that was pure and bright and uncommonly beautiful, but also a remarkable songwriting talent that belied her years. Its successor, recorded during Summer 2009 at Peter Gabriel's Real World studios near Bath and Eastcote Studios in London, revels in a new maturity, at points, Marling's voice sounds a little harder, a little world-wearied, alongside a lyrical bluntness, a thematic darkness, a realisation that, as Marling puts it: "I'm not good all the time, but I try to be."

Marling, credits many of Johns' earlier records (among them Ray LaMontagne, Kings of Leon, Emmylou Harris, Sarabeth Tucek) with kindling her interest in music, had long admired his way of working, his use of reels, his quiet, traditional methods of production. Recorded live, I Speak Because I Can includes contributions from many of Marling's peers — among them Pete Roe, Marcus Mumford, Ted Dwane, Tom Fiddle and Winston Marshall, who provide a robust musical counterpoint to Marling's lyrical introspection. "As much as I love those boys, I'm not in control of them; they want to play fast and hard," she says. "But I think that's what's nice about the record: I have my bit of incredible self-indulgence and then they kick it back into real time."

Perhaps it is a sign of Marling's growing maturity that there is a strand of womanliness that runs throughout this album: "I think it was feeling the weight of womanhood, or the greatness of it, coming to terms with it is something that I thought was quite interesting," she explains. She was inspired, she says, by "the changing role an idea of Women throughout history."

Accordingly the album's penultimate track, the exquisite title track I Speak Because I Can, is in part rooted in the story of Penelope, the wife of Odysseus. She says "the idea of her waiting for him to come home, and the very old-fashioned sense of man and woman, and monogamy, that's quite amazing and truly fascinating. That is probably the most pretentious thing I can say about the album." In What He Wrote, we find a song inspired in part by a series of wartime love-letters and diary entries Marling saw published in a newspaper: "The writing that they did, I love that, the way their passion is expressed. And you could feel in their letters, a longing to be with each other." There was one diary passage in particular that stood out to Marling: "It was about letting him go, physically letting go, how you can't let go, and about turning to stone. And I suppose it's like what a break-up is — you just can't let go of it, no matter how much you want to. And I thought it was such a beautiful thing, as a metaphor for forgiveness, and letting go of things that you need to, or confronting things that you need to."

Alongside these broader themes, I Speak Because I Can also addresses more intimate subjects; the intriguingly-named Alpha Shallows, for instance, Marling explains as "Kind of a codename, because this was kind of personal. And not that I don't write personally, it's just that I do it mostly at arm's length. I think when I wrote it I was worried that perhaps it was almost a bit too pathetic. And so in my diary I was referring to people as Alpha Shallows and stupid codenames and... God forbid anyone ever read my diary." She says she has "forgiven" her younger self for writing the more obviously personal songs that appeared on her first EPs and even her first album: "the first songs you write are always going to be about yourself. It's about finding the right balance of experience and turning that into something that's very much meaningful to you but not too blood guts and hearts."

One of the album's undoubted highlights, however, is also one of its most intimate songs, Goodbye England, a rumination on love and independence and also a wistful tribute to the English countryside that seems to hinge upon the line: "And I never love England more than when covered in snow." "All of this album is a lot about my childhood," Marling says, "and I grew up in the countryside and you can hear a lot of the countryside in this album. I feel very English. And I obviously look bloody English. And I'm away on tour a lot and sometimes, especially in the Winter, I want to be at home, and I want to live in the house that I want to live in when I grow up, with a fireplace on a farm." She has, she says, a very vivid memory of walking near her childhood home up to the local church, "When I remember my Dad saying 'Please bring me back here before I die.' I was probably about 9 when he said this to me and I remember thinking 'What an horrific thing to say!'. But I hope I go back there before I die. I've got quite long roots in England, and because I grew up here, the beauty of England resonates with me more than any other kind of beauty. And I think that ends up defining you as a person, where you're from, and you can acclimatise to anything, but the wind of England shakes my bones."

A couple of years ago, Marling recalls, she was gripped by a quite crippling fear of death, a subject that surfaces subtly throughout this record. "I don't think you ever get over that fear of death, but it was causing me panic attacks which became uncontrollable, so I had to face it," she explains. "With a fear of death comes a fear of insignificance, and I thought well, whatever happens I'm going to be ok because I've done some things. It's not about being something as in being famous; it's being something as in being something to someone. And for me, the idea of being something is actively doing something with your life that positively impacts other people. If you can make people's day a bit better. You don't have to fix their problems, but you just have to make them feel a little more secure."
Nathaniel Rateliff & The Wheel
official website
myspace
Combining the endearing swagger of Jacques Brel, the moody mysticism of Leonard Cohen and the pastoral plucking of Nick Drake, Rateliff’s potent songs and rich voice grabbed the audience by the heart and the throat.
Walter Schreifels Band
myspace
Walter Schreifels (born March 10, 1969) is a rock musician and producer from New York City currently living in Berlin.

In the late 80s, he played in many New York hardcore bands, most notably Youth of Today and Gorilla Biscuits (where he also acted as the songwriter). After Gorilla Biscuits broke up, he formed the short lived Moondog. Moondog would transition into the more metal oriented post-hardcore band Quicksand. He also collaborated with his former Gorilla Biscuits bandmates in the pop-punk band CIV. Later, he helped create the melodic indie rock-styled band Rival Schools. Walking Concert, his most recent project, is heavily influenced by classic British such as Elvis Costello, The Kinks, and The Smiths. A new solo acoustic LP is in the pipeline.

As a producer, he has worked with such hardcore-related bands as Hot Water Music, and The First Step. Recently, he produced the EP Dear Strutter, the first from UK band Cars as Weapons. He is also part owner of the record label Some Records.
Think About Life
official website
myspace
Think About Life have been causing panic on Montreal dance floors since just a little before they were personally invited by Wolf Parade (Sub Pop) to be their support act during last year’s North American autumn tour. Montreal’s best-kept secret is now coming out… on record.

“Think About Life builds a bridge from swiriling chaos to kindly pop, but the bridge is a shaky beast that tends to collapse into the sea and capsize any onlooking vessel. Shows can meltdown to oblivion or soar to ecstacy or implode after one song with police intervention. The sounds range from manic to troubled to tender to silly, exploding every emotion at once into a thousand pieces at the bottom of a canyon. TAL reassembles this raw material into a worldview rooted in thunder-storms, roller-coasters, clowns, sea-beasts, romance, fireworks, massive sphinxes, basketball championships, chivalric knighthoods, snowmen, children, videos, hamlets, sunglasses, and YOU.”

Think About Life is the lovechild of Graham Van Pelt, a multi-instrumentalist, recording studio proprietor and co-director of Montreal’s adored all-ages alternative space, the Friendship Cove. The band’s primary vocal organ is Martin Cesar, the genius of the Donkey Heart quartet that squinty, pimply West Montreal kids swear by as “the little band that could…” Matt Shane is the name of the band’s drum machine.
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