The weekender
Can’t stand dodging strollers and lollygaggers at streetfests? Head indoors this fine June weekend with Jeremy Messersmith and Gardens & Villa. It’s gonna rain anyway.
We wrote earlier that people will forgive Foster The People’s artifice if they own up to it; artifice won’t take a singer/songwriter very far. That’s why it’s important that Messersmith’s The Reluctant Graveyard makes plain hints of The Kinks and Paul Simon — acknowledging roots and attempting to expand on them. It’s also helpful that he keeps baroque indulgences within “John The Determinist,” a stroke of very-British melancholy that betrays the breezy joy within “Dillinger Eyes” and the Badfinger-derived “Violet!” (Saturday@Schubas with The Daredevil Christopher Wright and Dinosaur Bones.)
The difficulty in discovering a band after they’ve released their second album is getting used to the idea that they’re ready to move on. Some of the elements on Hospice derived from their debut, which is why fans might find it disconcerting that The Antlers would move on so significantly with Burst Apart (Frenchkiss). The white-noise undercurrent that connected Hospice‘s disparate bits together has been replaced with a static — in a different way — analog wash. A polarizing piece that will have some gushing about beauty and others lamenting their boredom, how they handle it live should be a great indicator of how The Antlers meant it. (Saturday@Metro with Little Scream.)
As indie-rockers flock to analog synths and swirling loops, the repeated invocation of “Animal Collective” drives wedges where there needn’t be. Gardens & Villa, Secretly Canadian’s latest find, don’t do much with guitars on their self-titled debut, yet the Santa Barbara-based band still sound an awful lot like The Shins. Despite very definite individual tracks (and potential singles), the album morphs within an amoebic framework, almost like it’s doing the worm. (Sunday@Lincoln Hall with Foster The People.)
— Steve Forstneger
Category: Stage Buzz, Weekly
