Bands performing here this week.
BROKEN SOCIAL SCENE “Forgiveness Rock Record”
Back with a big bang
Kindred spirits: Metric, Stars, Arcade Fire Show: Monday at the Warner Theatre. Show
starts at 8 p.m. 202-783-4000.
www.warnertheatre.com. $29.50.
“Forgiveness Rock Record” is Broken Social Scene’s first album since the group’s eponymous, and cranky, 2005 release. With the tight and polished “Forgiveness,” the Canadian indie rockers seem much happier. Typical of BSS, this is not music for lo-fi fans of minimal arrangements. For the most part, grandeur abounds; it’s epic in scope, with big ambitions and even bigger sounds. There are guitar solos, synths, haunting strings, piano, pounding drums, horns and soaring choruses. There are instrumentals (“Meet Me in the Basement”), uptempo
THE DRUMS “The Drums” Kindred spirits: Early Depeche Mode, the Pains of Being Pure at Heart, New Order Show:With Surfer Blood on Sunday at the 9:30 Club. Doors open at 7 p.m. 202-265-0930.
www.930.com. $15.
With their full-length, self-titled debut album, the Drums continue to build their reputation, first established on 2009’s EP “Summertime!,” as top-notch mimickers of new-wave era synthpop. On the opening track, “Best Friend,” the group comes right out of the gate with a deliberately paced snare beat and staccato bass line working in tandem to evoke the sound of a drum machine. By the time the guitar riff, lifted straight out of the New Order playbook, and the soaring chorus of ohs and ahs over sustained
synthesizer notes kick in, the time-traveling DeLorean is up to nearly 1.21 jigawatts. The album spans all sorts of ’80s touchstones: the prom slow-dance swoon on EP retread “Down by the Water,” mope rock lyrics invoking sadness and death (“I Need Fun in My Life” and “We Tried”) and moreNew Order guitar strumming piled on top of synthesizers (everywhere). If this brings back Reagan-era flashbacks and makes you want to throw on your Black Flag albums, you can pretty much stop reading. But if hearing this makes you want to throw on your acid-washed jeans and head to the club, you’ll be happy to know that the album, despite a somewhat slow second half, packs plenty of tightly wound pop gems packed with big hooks.
— Brandon Weigel NORMAN WONG Broken Social Scene makes a grand (re)entrance with “Forgiveness Rock Record.”
numbers filled with synths and violins (“Chase Scene”) and arena rockers (“Forced to Love”). With its horn section, “Art House Director” could pass for an updated ’70s TV theme song, while “Highway Slipper Jam,” with its slide guitar and harmonica, has its alt-country moments. “Forgiveness” contains more radio-
DEVIL’S BRIGADE “Devil’s Brigade”
Kindred spirits: The Cramps, Billy Bragg, X Show:With Street Dogs, Flatfoot 56 and
Continental on Thursday at the Rock & Roll Hotel. Show starts at 6:30 p.m. 202-388-7625.
www.rockandrollhoteldc.com. $16.
More than just another Rancid side
project, Devil’s Brigade is a band with a story. Six of the songs on the California rockabilly trio’s self-titled debut album were written for a never-finished musical about the Halfway to Hell Club, 19 construction workers on the Golden Gate Bridge who were saved by a safety net. Evoking the plight of Depression-era laborers, these tunes feel more than a little pertinent to today’s recession. Singer-bassist Matt
Freeman, the band’s frontman, didn’t go far to find Brigade’s members. The guitarist is Rancid’s Tim Armstrong, and drummer DJ Bonebrake comes from X. A third Rancid member, Lars Frederiksen, appears on the rousing “Bridge of Gold.” Unsurprisingly, some tracks sound like outtakes from Rancid, and a few, notably “Vampire Girl,” are disappointingly predictable. But the gruff-voiced Freeman works some interesting variations on the Rancid formula, in part by simply slapping a stand-up bass. The music veers closer to old-timey country, using such unexpected instruments as mandolin, piano and xylophone. “Gentleman of the Road” even slinks toward trip-hop but offers a timeless message: “No one’s recession-proof,” growls Freeman, and it’s not entirely clear what decade he has in mind.
— Mark Jenkins
friendly tunes, but true to its indie roots, the band makes it difficult for radio to play them. The album opener, “World Sick,” is filled with beautiful guitar lines, crashing drums and delicate harmonies that build to a crescendo, only to tumble to silence, but the song is seven minutes long. And “Texico Bitches” has an infectious melody, but no
JASON MORAN “Ten”
Kindred spirits: Vijay Iyer, Don Pullen, Herbie Hancock, Lafayette Gilchrist Show: Saturday at the Rosslyn Jazz Festival at Gateway Park. Show starts at 2:30 p.m. 703-228-1850.
www.arlingtonarts.org. Free.
Jason Moran calls his new album “Ten” because it has been 10 years since he formed his Bandwagon trio with drummer Nasheet Waits and bassist Tarus Mateen. During that time the three have become arguably the most important band in jazz, translating their rare stability into a muscular, flexible cohesion that has swallowed up jazz’s past as easily as it has digested hip-hop, rock and art music. The evidence is on this remarkable new recording. Included
are compositions by three of Moran’s biggest piano influences — Thelonious Monk, Andrew Hill and Jaki Byard— and each time, Moran extracts one element from the original and pursues its possibilities into territory never dreamed of by the composer. “Feedback Pt. 2” finds the trio responding to a montage of Jimi Hendrix feedback moments with unexpected tenderness and melancholy. Two versions of Conlon Nancarrow’s “Study No. 6,” one jittery and the other meditative, uncover the lyricism of this modern classical piece. It all begins, of course, with Moran, who is a superb technical pianist and an even better conceptualist. But Bandwagon wouldn’t be the band it is if Waits and Mateen weren’t able to invent such surprising divisions of time — and such tuneful tones for those divisions. They are as important to Moran as Tony Williams and Ron Carter were to Miles Davis. — Geoffrey Himes
one will play a song that repeats that title 12 times. The strength of “Forgiveness” lies in the
band’s ability to pull off a diverse mix of genres so well. They play big but catchy, which is not easy to do. (See rock, prog.) It’s grandeur without the bombast. —Benjamin Opipari
DR. LONNIE SMITH “Spiral”
Kindred spirits: Jack McDuff, Jimmy McGriff, Joey DeFrancesco, Charles Earland Show:Wednesday at Blues Alley. Shows start at 8 and 10 p.m. 202-337-4141. www.bluesalley. com. $30.
Because the B-3 Hammond organ offers so much rich sustain, it’s tempting to let the instrument’s sound flood through a song. But Dr.Lonnie Smith, heir to the jazz-organ sound of Jimmy Smith, knows how to punctuate his phrases with pauses and dynamic shifts that shape his lines into clearly defined melodies. That phrasing is his trademark, as much as his tightly wrapped turban and wispy white beard. On his latest organ-trio album, “Spiral,” Smith crisply defines every tune, even as he takes full advantage of that glowing B-3 tone.
Smith, not to be confused with fellow
jazz keyboardist Lonnie Liston Smith, is joined by guitarist Jonathan Kreisberg and drummer Jamire Williams. Williams is especially exciting, playing not just the groove on such tunes as Jimmy Smith’s “Mellow Mood” and Richard Rodgers’s “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was” but also a thunderstorm of secondary beats. The tension between his Tony Williams- inspired drumming and Smith’s understated phrasing lends a welcome drama to these familiar standards. Even when they turn to slower tempos, as on Slide Hampton’s “Frame for the Blues” and the 1963 novelty hit “Sukiyaki,” one still gets the sense of a horse tugging at the reins.
— Geoffrey Himes
NewMusic
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THE WASHINGTON POST • FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 2010
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