MONDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2010


KLMNO PERFORMING ARTS


Warpaint The band that headlined at the


Rock & Roll Hotel on Saturday night calls itself Warpaint and plays music rooted in late-’70s post-punk. Like most other con- temporary post-punk revivalists, however, this all-female Los An- geles quartet has divested the style’s fury. The group’s 70-min- ute set was occasionally raucous and frequently sultry, but far from warlike. What Warpaint derives from


such precursors as the Slits, Tele- vision and Talking Heads is its aural spaciousness and iced- down approach to reggae, soul and Afropop.The prominent bass and scratchy guitar of songs such as “Undertow’’ offered funk’s tim- bres without its swagger; the en- core, a semi-original titled “Billie Holiday,’’ took some lyrics from “My Guy,’’ Mary Wells’s 1964 hit, but none of its drive. Rather than theimmediacy of classicMotown, Warpaint specializes in the dis- tant and the dreamy—but with a potent rhythmsection to keep the wispy riffs from floating away. Democratically, the group


spread across the stage, with all four musicians clearly visible. Singer-guitarists Theresa Way- man and Emily Kokal flanked drummer Stella Mozgawa (who sounded more assured than on the band’s debut album, “The Fool’’) and bassist Jenny Lee Lindberg. Although sometimes two or more members sang to- gether, often only one musical element was highlighted. Pieces of the sound would drop out, and Wayman and Kokal rarely played guitar at the same time. Assisted by generous servings


of reverb, this skeletal style didn’t sound thin. And the sprawling, unpredictable structures en- dowed even the lesser material with an intriguing tension. But Warpaint’s skill at dismantling songs wasn’tmatched by its abili- ty to put them back together. The climactic “Set Your Arms Down’’ worked best, building in a rollick- ing crescendo before gradually receding to vapor. A few more such payoffs would have en- hanced a show where the empha- sis on supple rhythms and shift- ing forms just might have been mistaken for a lack of memorable tunes.


—Mark Jenkins


21st Century Consort Maybe it’s not too surprising


that we’re fascinated by water — we’re mostly made up of the stuff, after all — and composers in particular have always been drawn to it. Perhaps that’s be- cause water is so much like mu- sic: constantly in motion, with profound depths and astounding power under a surface of infinite variety. Whatever the reason, wa- ter is still inspiring some of the most interesting music of our time, as the 21st Century Consort demonstrated in a remarkable concert titled “Unruly Land- scapes,” at the American ArtMu- seum on Saturday.


EVY MAGES FOR THE WASHINGTON POST


WARPAINT: The all-female band performed its often dreamy, post-punk music at the Rock&RollHotel on Saturday. Loosely linked to “The Pond,”


an ongoing exhibit of photo- graphs by John Gossage, the pro- gram opened with “The Stream Flows” for solo violin, by the Chinese American composer Bright Sheng. It was likable enough, if traditional Chinese melodies tarted up in a modern idiom float your boat.Much more satisfying was David Froom’s Pia- noTrioNo. 2, “Grenzen”—a piece so full of life that it almost bursts out of its skin—which received a spectacularly energetic and fo- cused performance from Elisa- beth Adkins on violin, Rachel Young on cello and Lisa Emen- heiser at the piano. Emenheiser is so little that you


half expect her to be blown away by the first strong breeze, but she brought volcanic power to Alan Mandel’s “Steps to Mount Olym- pus,” whose title sums up its outsize gestures and almost ro- mantic thundering. Far more in- volving was Emenheiser’s read- ing of “Thoreau,” the last move- ment of Charles Ives’s “Concord” sonata. Not every pianist can make genuine sense of this con- founding work, but Emenheiser infused it with delicate, ephemer- al poetry; even Ives would have been impressed. The real high points of the


evening, though, were two gor- geous works by West Coast com- poser Donald Crockett. There’s a great naturalness and effortless- ness in Crockett’s writing, and “to be sung on the water”—a hymn- like duet performed by violinist Adkins, with Abigail Evans on viola — had a kind of distant, otherworldly glow, like nymphs singing from some underwater realm.HisHorn Quintet, “La Bar-


sonUniversity Center for the Arts on Saturday, for instance, gave its newest member, violist Jeremy Kittel, a terrific showcase for some of his stuff—a soul-searing blues cry in the opening arrange- ment of JimiHendrix’s “Have You Ever Been”; a delicate interweav- ing with two guest players, pia- nist Cyrus Chestnut and guitarist MikeMarshall, in a jazz version of “AngelsWeHaveHeard onHigh”; and an enthrallingly intricate im- provisation in the group’s version ofMiles Davis’s “Milestones.” What the Turtle Island Quartet


JOSH SISK FOR THE WASHINGTON POST


THEWALKMEN:This Brooklyn-based group played a sold-out show at the 9:30 Club on Friday.


ca” (with Laurel Ohlson on horn), was far closer to the surface, but no less beautiful — a work of relentless inventiveness from a composer we should hear more of.


—Stephen Brookes


Turtle Island Quartet At 25, theTurtle Island Quartet


exists in a constant state of re- newal. Its founding members, vi- olinist David Balakrishnan and cellist Mark Summer, welcome young second violinists and vio- lists who are attracted by the sort of technical and improvisational opportunities the standard classi- cal repertoire doesn’t offer. They bring new ideas, new music and amazing skills to the group, stay several years and then move on. The quartet’s Silver Anniversa- ry Celebration at the George Ma-


artists have with their repertoire of nonstandard sound-producing techniques is the ability to re-cre- ate the best jazz, rock, bluegrass and the rest in sonorities that are rich, transparent, balanced and blessedly lightly amplified. This program was a retrospective of the music that this group has made its own over the years. There was an arrangement of John Coltrane’s “Moment’s No- tice,” with Chestnut spinning droplets of notes over the percus- sive chugs of the violins and the basslike thumping of the cello, along with a joyous rendition of “Crossroads” and Marshall’s down-home-sounding bass man- dolin version of “Gator Strut.” Chestnut’s pensive leads in ar-


rangements of “SwingLow, Sweet Chariot” and Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” wandered from sweet to astringent, and were both gentle and crystalline. Balakrishnan’s “Monkey Busi- ness,” a commentary on Darwin- ian controversy, came the closest, stylistically, to classical idioms and rounded out a program that featured astonishing versatility. —Joan Reinthaler


TheWalkmen If Friday night’s sold-out 9:30


Club show by theWalkmen didn’t have much of a palpable sense of occasion about it, perhaps it’s because these guys are just too head-down professional to allow any giddiness to creep in. Never mind that this was to be their final gig of a successful year; never mind that it was a sort of homecoming, to boot: Four-fifths of the Brooklyn group grew up together here in Washington. Though absent sentimentality, it wasa captivating evening of jaun- diced, grandly put millennial in- die sulk (with a some 1950s Sun RecordsDNA), of which the band retained complete control from themomentit kicked the party off with a booty-quaker called — er, “While I Shovel the Snow.” It comes next to last on this year’s confident “Lisbon” album. And it’s a waltz.Twoof the guys played trianglesonit.“Half ofmy life I’ve been waking up,” goes one line. With that whisper of a tune,


the group compelled the atten- tion of the room and never gave it back. TheWalkmen’s best trick is thewayMatt Barrick’s fast-flurry- ingdrums,PaulMaroon’s surfing- the-Arctic-Sea guitar and Hamil- tonLeithauser’s wraithlike vocals seem initially to be performing different songs, then fuse togeth- er with an immediacy that snaps your head back. The set would find room for two-thirds of “Lis- bon,” gathering in tempo and volume with the ferocious “An- gela Surf City” and “Blue as Your Blood,” a number that bridges the band’s poles with coal-fired John- ny Cash verses and stratospheric U2 choruses. Performing in a tweed jacket,


trousers and a button-down, frontman Leithauser looks more like an adjunct professor than a rock star, but he’s got a voice that shrinks big spaces, and the elu- sive quality of presence. By the time he brought on a four-piece horn section to lend a bent, regal sway to “Stranded,” we’d have happily let him bum us out all night. Later, heavy-footed en- cores of “The Rat” and “Little House of Savages” reminded ev- eryone that the Walkmen is still an aggressive rock band, but it didn’t need 75 minutes of runway to show us that. This outfit is capable of vertical takeoff. It boils at room temperature. —Chris Klimek


Barnes & Hampton Celtic Consort


The ancient Celtic tribes


roamed far and wide, leaving their traces in languages and mu- sic from the British Isles and the Iberian peninsula to Central Eu- rope and Asia Minor. On Satur- day, the Barnes&Hampton Celtic Consort focused on the British andIrish segments of Celtic musi- cal culture, an inheritance gradu- ally blended with elements of other ancient societies. The en- semble’s engaging, reflective af- ternoon marked the 25th anni- versary of Dumbarton Concerts’ annual Celtic Christmas event at Dumbarton Church in George- town.


Alternating on a bevy of instru-


ments — some quite ancient in lineage — the consort performed a broad sampling of Christmas songs and dances, all of them marked by continually pulsing rhythms and touches of wit. (And it was easy to recognize rhythmic and melodic styles eventually passed down to Appalachian mu- sicians.) There was the tradition- al, wassail-filled “Abbots Bromley Horn Dance,” picturing a drunk- en Christmas brawl. Other ar- rangements dealt with sacred Christmas subjects, as in the hushed “Blessed Be That Maid Marie.” The wide assortment of music


was matched by continually changing combinations of instru- ments, some little known today. Linn Barnes explained how he strapped himself into the uil- leann pipes (Ireland’s version of the bagpipes). He also played a “lutolin”: a hybrid mandolin-lute that he invented. Allison Hamp- ton soloed on the Celtic harp, and Joseph Cunliffe played every- thing from a tiny sopranino re- corder and high-pitched whistles to a resonant bass saxophone. Steve Bloom joined in with a bodhran (an Irish frame drum), tambour (a cylindrical two-head- ed drum) and cymbals. WETA’s Robert Aubry Davis spiced up the Yuletide mood with jauntily read narratives and poems depicting wintry landscapes of long ago. The consort performs again at Dumbarton Church on Dec. 11 and 12.


—Cecelia Porter


EZ RE


C5


Wife was unfaithful, and he still hurts


keep the marriage going and keep punishing her in perpetuity. If you’re on that fence right


CAROLYN HAX


Adapted from a recent online discussion:


Dear Carolyn: How long does the hurt from


marital infidelity take to heal? Wife cheated some years back, finally admitted to the affair two years ago. I kind of knew during the affair, but put blinders on. After the admission I felt like I got squashed by a falling piano. We’ve talked about it, and her


attitude is, it is in the past, let’s move on. I don’t normally like to pick scabs, but sometimes I feel the need. What’s the best way to deal


with this, and how long before it is truly in the past? Washington-Baltimore metro


I don’t think it can be “truly in


the past” until you are satisfied that your wife has been honest with you. I don’t mean (ack) gory


details, I mean honest about: where her mind and heart were when she started this affair; why it ended; what she feels about you now; whether she regrets anything, what she regrets and why; and what you and she can do now to avoid this mess or other messes in the future. These are the materials you need from her for both of you to start


building trust all over again, since the old foundation was wrecked. If she doesn’t give you these


things, then all you have is the fact that it happened and it’s not happening anymore—and that’s the building equivalent of a rubble-strewn hole in the ground. “Let’s move on” is not a


NICK GALIFIANAKIS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST


now, then you need to make up your mind once and for all:Has your wife expressed credible regrets, can you use that as grounds for forgiveness, and can you start trusting her again? Or, do you have reason to believe that the rest of your marriage will involve wondering when she’s going to cheat and/or lie to you again? It may seem like a tough call


to say which of these is going on, but it’s not. If she raced through the truth-telling and straight to “It’s in the past, get over it,” then you have grounds to tell her you need more. She has every reason to want this to go away, but you have a right to know about the conditions that led to her betrayal, because you can’t make peace with what you don’t understand. If instead she has answered


fair answer to that. Now, if she has given you


these things, and you believe in them—you “kind of knew” about the affair, so your gut knows whether she has come clean with you since—then the onus is on you to fix the problem. Even though she is the one who betrayed you, it’s not fair to both


your painful and awkward questions and now just wants to be free to be more than just “the wife who cheated,” then she has a right to that, too, whether she does so as your wife or ex-wife. As misplaced as this sounds, if you can sympathize—if not with her actions, then with the frailty of hers that precipitated them— then your wounds are more likely to heal.


3Read the whole transcript or join the discussion live at


noon Fridays at www.washingtonpost. com/discussions.


Write to Tell Me About It, Style, 1150 15th St.NW,Washington, D.C. 20071, or tellme@washpost.com.


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