Music

The funny thing about The Blacks that I first noticed, upon witnessing their mind-blowing performance at the Bottom of the Hill on Saturday (Aug. 9th), is that if there were ever a lead singer who reminded me of Karen O from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, this was it. But take Louisa Black and place her next to Karen herself and who would look like the imitation? Certainly not Miss Black. After enduring the gloomy basement-art-rock stylings of opener The New Centuries, aptly named after a local strip club (or that’s the rumour anyway) – The Blacks entered the stage and began shouting at me unapologetically. But I didn’t mind. It was like somebody kicking art up my ass – art that I deserved. I felt that I had been waiting for this moment for a very long time. Singer Louisa Black looked just like all of the sexy, assertive, and intelligent bitches I’ve ever met in my life, except she played guitar way better.

Lead singer Jillian Iva has all the mystique of a 12-year-old preteen girl.
Yet it is just this sort of shameless playful experimentation that gives Von Iva an edge performance-wise over many other bands today. I would say “bands of its type”, but in trying to reference bands similar to Von Iva, I couldn’t think of any. Think Cher preaching over old skool video-game music. That is the closest analogy I could find. Backed by Kelly Harris on drums and Becky Kupersmith pounding heavy, bizarre synth backgrounds, Von Iva is neither dainty, nor elegant, but more like down-to-earth dance pop delivered Vegas-style. Indeed, it is Jillian Iva’s dancing and wild stage antics – from twirling the mic like a cowgirl, flinging the contents of her water bottle all over the audience, and leaping onto the drumset and bending over backwards – that make Von Iva a smashing, captivating success. Over the course of the evening, I watched as singer Iva writhed onstage like Madonna, climbed all over the speakers, and walked into the audience, all the while preaching her doctrines – such simple messages as “Do It” and “You Need No Man.”

Well, almost.
Back online, back home in California, and back to our humble roots. Not that we’ve ever been anything but humble. What I’m saying is that it’s once again all about the music. So stay tuned, dear readers, for show reviews galore, interviews with bands you’ve never heard of (but should have), dissections of recent albums, and of course, impassioned, venomous screeds about the state of popular music and culture.
On September 1st, we rise again.

Gogoray.net has been suspiciously quiet recently, I’ll admit it. But that’s not to say that we haven’t been out there, trying to get some of those tasty, tasty morsels of Boston culture for you. And so, we present: Two to Watch.

This installment comes sraight from last night’s gig at TT the Bear’s Place, headlined by the appropriately forgettable Forget the Girl. The real interest was to be had from the night’s opener, who may well be Boston’s countrified answer to Fiona Apple: Katy Pearson. Although her live act needs some significant tightening (and perhaps some fresh blood in the backing band), the Berklee graduate showed off some impressive songwriting chops, especially on hook-heavy number “Call the Doctor”. Sometimes she strays a little too far into the extraordinary machine’s territory (“She was just a phase,” insists Pearson. “The Decemberists are really my main influence”), but for the most part delivers a set strong on intelligence and short on the pretension that sometimes affects Apple.

100% pretension-free is spastic punk outfit Electric Laser People. Although their odd stabs at funk never connect, there’s a lot of boneheaded joy to be had in their set, thanks to a good sell from their frantic front boy. Highlights include an interesting take on “Heartbeats” that turns the amp on and all the way up; and their heart-rending “love song” (sample lyric: “Girl, you know I wrote this song for you to take your clothes off in front of me”), complete with soul-baring power ballad guitar solo.

So the night delivered from two ends of the spectrum: give Pearson a couple of years to mature out in L.A. (she’s moving there to “try to make it happen”) and either some time for her band to improve or for new members to come into the fold, add a solid producer and you’ve got the next female singer-songwriter phenom - it’s not even a question of “if”, but of “when”. Electric Laser People, if they write a killer tune, will become a must-see: for now, they’re harmless fun and cliched punk-rock-star posturing - in other words, harmless fun.

Joel Simchez - tonight working at TT the Bear’s Place - is Boston’s travelling sound guy.

“I’m freelance - I don’t work for any of the clubs, but I sub for other people.”

How long have you been on the Boston music scene?
I’ve been around since the mid-eighties. Things were a little more interesting back then.

What do you think of the musical landscape right now?
It’s just starting to get interesting again after the last six or seven years where there was not much happening; you could go to a club and see four bands, and they’d all be cut from the same indie-rock cloth.

Which bands do you think are stepping up and making things interesting again?
I’m working with a band - Camaro - that are just exploding right now. There’s another band, Three Day Threshold; they’re a mixture of bluegrass, punk and country. They’re in your face, but they’re wearing cowboy hats while they do it.

The vital question: TT the Bear’s, or The Middle East?
TT’s manages to put on a more consistent bill of local acts.

“Singing in public,” Nick Zamutto tells me, “is the last thing I’d ever want to do.” The guitar-playing half of The Books is speaking to me over the phone at one o’clock in the afternoon – he’s heading towards a gig that’s scheduled to start at eight, and he’s still far, far North of Boston. “And now it happens to be my livelihood.”

The man that would prefer to “cook” for an audience rather than play is clearly a nervous performer. As he walks on to the stage at the Somerville Theatre, he apologizes to the audience for his current state. “I have a cold right now, so I’ve lost the singing ability that I never had.” He avoids taking centre stage with jokes and horseplay – except as a reaction to one crowd member that shouts for song “Tokyo” (response: “What was that? That sounded obscene”) – preferring to get ahead and start the set. “We really just don’t want to be these egos on stage,” he explains. “We want to give people real choices about what they pay attention to.”

“We could never get into any of the other festivals,” Peter Donnelly explains to a packed crowd at Club Passim. “So we decided to make our own, damn it!” There are laughs and applause as Donnelly goes on to introduce the night’s opening act. Mark Swinger then promptly takes the stage and, after a few jokes to get the crowd eating a little closer to his hand, he rips into set opener “Give Us Our Own”, a call-to-arms that hangs on the line: “We’re gay, and we’re proud!”

This is the beginning of the Big Taboo Music Night, which encompasses a whole night of gay male singer/songwriters. The five artists playing tonight are some of the core members of a larger group that will be playing the Taboo Festival this September in Provincetown. Beyond the banner-waving gay pride shout-outs (such as those above), there’s a real cause here that deserves recognition: the Gay Men’s Domestic Abuse Center.

Jesus Christ! It’s 1997, when ska ruled the world!! Oh wait, no, its Monkey. That’s right kids, did you know that ska is still around? I know, I know. I thought it died when No Doubt became popular too, but apparently some are trying to resurrect it. Monkey is an eight piece bay area ska band that prides themselves on the fact that they are “real musicians playing real instruments.” Wow. Even when ska was cool I would not have listened to this.