The Spin

Planet SpaceFriday night, Elliston was crawling with stony-eyed rock ’n’ roll types and listless youngsters who seemed to have nothing better to do. While The End staged an Xcessive Records party featuring several nerdishly Goth-sounding DJs (e.g. DJ Angel Shadows, DJ Ghoulsy), across the street Exit/In hosted one of our most anticipated local shows of the week. Caitlin Rose, one of our favorite Nashville singer-songwriters, opened the show with a strong set that featured new tunes, even as she apologetically reminded us several times that she was battling a cold. She gazed at the ceiling and belted out her folk gems with usual strength, and at one point, Rose’s father, local songwriter Johnny Rose, joined her onstage for an endearing rendition of Warren Zevon’s “Carmelita,” a charming song about heroin addiction made popular by Linda Ronstadt. Chicago transplant David Vandervelde was up next. We weren’t too familiar with Vandervelde—he admittedly hadn’t played a show in nearly a year—but his band was composed entirely of Ghostfinger members, who played a set of soaring country rock tunes accompanied by his slick, flinty tenor. But this is Nashville, so the crowd remained frustratingly stoic until Ghostfinger took the stage and invited us to “Planet Space,” melting the audience’s characteristically icy demeanor. Richie Kirkpatrick’s fire-engine-red outfit made him resemble some sort of Thriller-meets-Hendrix mustachioed mutant, and he and his classically trained troupe played several tunes from 2005’s These Colors Run. Some may call Ghostfinger a band of fast-fingered jokers, but as far as we’re concerned, the joke’s still funny.

Feature-lengthIt’s probably safe to say that not since the late ’90s has The Features’ Matt Pelham played for a local crowd as small as the one we found at The 5 Spot Saturday night. Only a handful of friends and hardcore fans were present to witness the frontman step up all by his lonesome to present a rare solo acoustic set. By the looks of Pelham, you’d think he was actually in a room all by himself. Bearded, longhaired and looking a bit like he just emerged from a single-room wooden shack in the wilderness, Pelham spoke not a word before he started up, nor did he say anything between songs. Rather, he just stood there howling onstage from inside his own little bubble—an alternate reality of his own creation roped off from the rest of the room. The tunes themselves were stripped down renditions of new material from The Features’ upcoming full-length Some Kind of Salvation. Despite their sparse delivery, the songs featured the same bouncy, galloping hooks and contagious, freewheeling melodies that have made the band a local favorite. Several times Pelham exchanged his guitar for a banjo to deliver more of the same, but with plinkier accompaniment. Pelham exited the stage just as quietly as he’d stepped onto it, and next we got our first exposure to the local singer-songwriter simply known as Tristen. Heaving an acoustic guitar slightly bigger than her torso and backed by a two-piece rhythm section, the petite songstress packed some mighty powerful pipes and spouted simple, catchy, straightforward folk-rock that won over the room within minutes. Finishing off the evening were Chattanooga indie-poppers Coral Castles. In addition to sounding a bit like The Features, these guys actually kind of look a little like them too. Their instrumentation is identical to The Features’ lineup, with a lanky, baby-faced fellow on drums, a stocky, hunched-over keyboardist and a high-voiced singer with a hollow-body guitar pulled high up to his chest. Coral Castles also draw heavily on British Invasion sunshine pop, combining the bubbly instrumentation of the Elephant 6 collective with the sharper, tighter hooks of bands like The Shins. The room was more than receptive, with a couple of baby boomers cutting a rug between turns at the pool table, and more than a few other folks abandoning their posts at the bar to strut some moves of their own.

A warm Nashville welcomeFor whatever reason, the three-tiered lineup at The End for headliners Ladyhawk was delayed an hour-and-a-half, but a mostly full venue of cigarette-buzzed 20-somethings seemed blissfully unaware. The gig’s opening act, Nashville’s own Eastern Block—an unsigned four-piece with little more than a MySpace page to their name—was even welcomed with a wealth of cat calls. So when Neva Dinova, Ladyhawk’s official tour mates, took the stage, the crowd may have only slightly thinned, but the enthusiasm had been mostly drained. At one self-conscious break between songs, lead songwriter Jake Bellows fumbled with his tone knobs when someone in the crowd asked for a downtime joke. “Umm, a bunch of guys from Omaha walk into a bar…yeah,” Bellows smirked. Though most seemed unfamiliar with Neva Dinova’s catalog, which recently saw the addition of their third LP, You May Already Be Dreaming, the band’s self-assured presence made for a soothing listen. Ladyhawk finally took the stage, rushing into their first song before the crowd had even reconvened. As it turned out, though, only the staunch fans had stuck around through the set change, making for a slender but sturdy crowd. A shot in the arm of proto-indie throwbacks—think a more precise Husker Dü with better mics—Ladyhawk tore into the tireless “S.T.H.D.” and “I Don’t Always Know What You’re Saying” from their latest album, Shots. Able to cue every hook without feeling contrived and splinter a chord progression like the pros they are, Ladyhawk deserve a much warmer Nashville welcome next time around.