The Spin

Who’s who at MercyThursday’s lineup at Mercy Lounge was one of the strongest local bills we’ve seen in quite some time. Solid draws respectively, Ghostfinger, Glossary, Lone Official and Altered Statesman combined forces to pack the house on a weeknight. We walked in midway through the Statesman’s set, with the band delicately plucking some of its quietest moments. Sharing the same aptitude toward soft subtlety, Lone Official’s set featured many tracks from Tuckassee Take—their stellar full-length whose Stateside release has remained in limbo for nearly two years. While the first half of the night was tempered by hushed vocals and the occasional jazz chord, the second half introduced the straight rockin’ portion of the evening. This show was the Nashville stop on the brief Ghostfinger/Glossary tour. Still riding high on the recent release of the well-received The Better Angels of Our Nature, Glossary delivered the bill’s highest-octane performance. Even though we’ve seen them practically a thousand times, Glossary never gets old. Ghostfinger had a tough act to follow—luckily, half the band was comprised of double-duty Glossary players. The Ghostfinger who released 2005’s These Colors Run is getting harder and harder to recognize. The idiosyncrasies with which we fell in love on the band’s debut continue to take a backseat as Richie Kirkpatrick and company continue to exercise their obsession with rootsy jams. Not that they aren’t still good at what they do, but the chameleons who played on These Colors Run made a name for themselves by combining a broader cross-section of influences. Regardless, Kirkpatrick remains the city’s most entertaining and most mustachioed frontman. Seeing him lead his band through new terrain reminds us of another reason we like Ghostfinger—they do whatever the hell they feel like doing.

Buzz, click

Saturday evening marked the fifth consecutive year of WRVU DJ B’s Buzz & Click Festival, which showcased 10 choice local experimentalists in just five hours. Unfortunately, the Dewey Cox performance at Mercy kept us from the first half of the evening, but we made it in time to catch the latter half of Logickal’s set and the remaining three bands. The lone laptopper, clad in a shirt and tie, toyed with various other gadgets generating soundscapes of blips, glitches, pops and crackles with a clutter of crunching and jumbled beats that occasionally locked into a discernible groove, only to crumble back into sonic rubble. A seizure-inducing display of psychedelic visuals was projected behind the bands, but the onstage theatrics stopped there, with little other than some head bobbing and finger twiddling when it came to showmanship. Still, the half-filled room of fans already knew and accepted this and sat at full attention, occasionally busting a move when the beats were able to accommodate them. Manchester’s (Tennessee, that is) Anemone broke us off some one-man groovebox jams that ran the gamut between funky hip-hop beats, jazzy keyboard licks, vocoder pop and ambient synthscapes. Local duo Jensen Sportag followed with a short set of fresh tunes, allegedly written in just the few days preceding. The new stuff still featured their choppy, club-friendly cut-and-pasted jams laid under sweet, synthetic vocal harmonies. Closing the show was Nashville’s Let’s Say Baltimore, a nine-man collective of drums, guitars, bass, electronics and brass. Crescendoing from a surly hum into a loosely controlled chaotic freakout, the band improved through what was certainly the most sonically enriched performance of the evening.

No more walking and chewing

We stepped into The 5 Spot last Saturday just before Magnet School took to the stage, fronted by the Scene’s own Steve Haruch. The trio’s bare-bones approach served as an apt vehicle for Haruch’s minimal yet literate songs and allowed his near-croon to sit comfortably in the mix—kinda like when Hum played quiet songs. Like most brainchildren of music writers, Magnet School speak to the pretentious rock critic in all of us. The darlings of many local rock critics in their own right, The Carter Administration played second. Drummer Todd Kemp added occasional keys—a new approach that added a little extra color to songs both old and new. The three-piece remain some of the best powerpop songwriters in town, and their near-flawless execution on this night proved they’re some of the best players around also. But the story of the night was the departure of longtime local indie-poppers The Bubblegum Complex. The final leg of the band’s career found them venturing into noisier territory, effectively separating themselves from Nashville’s sometimes more complacent roster of indie rockers. As the band took a backseat to many of the obligations associated with age, the prospects grew dimmer, so the Complex called it quits. Their last show was everything for which the should be remembered—fun, catchy, crowded and just the right amount of sloppy. As inconsistent and sporadic a trip as it was, we’ll miss you Bubblegum Complex.

Nashville goes nuts for Cox“I’ve never heard so many men say, ‘I love Cox,’ ” leered Dewey Cox, a.k.a. actor John C. Reilly, onstage Saturday night at the Mercy Lounge. (Obviously he hasn’t played Tribe.) Cox, the man, the legend, swung through town on a six-city tour to promote his new Judd Apatow-scripted biopic Walk Hard, which screened earlier in the evening to two packed halls at Green Hills. Even though it ends with his death, the abominable showman wasn’t about to let that ruin his night in the Athens of the South. “I’ve been to Athens,” Cox said. “That place is a shithole.”

Kicking off with his outlaw anthem “Guilty as Charged,” Cox whipped a four-piece band led by The Candy Butchers’ Mike Viola through a torrid hour-long set studded with instant nuggets from the movie soundtrack. After thoughtfully providing a female fan with a sweat-soaked hanky (“You’ve suffered long enough”), he brought out Holly Williams—some expected Jewel, who appears in the movie—to coo the single entendres of “Let’s Duet.” “In my dreams, you’re blowing me,” Cox sang, gazing at his partner and pausing to add, “…kisses.”

Intro/“Guilty as Charged”

From there, it was all the hits you’d expect. OK, maybe you didn’t expect the coked-up “Cocaine,” followed by a dynamite viva-Las-Vegas cover of Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab” worthy of the King and the TCB Band. (The movie’s karate-chopping Elvis, Jack White, was in the house but didn’t take the stage.) But Cox didn’t slight the protest phase of his career—“not that I believed in that shit”—stating his creed in Viola & Dan Bern’s “Dear Mr. President”: “I stand for the dyke / I stand for the retard.”

“(I Hate You) Big Daddy”

As for Reilly, his snake-hipped moves, lithe toreador frame, credible blues harp (on “Got My Mojo Workin’ ”) and Roy Orbison vocal range came as a surprise even to fans of his big “Mr. Cellophane” number in Chicago. (Calls for the former Chest Rockwell to sing Boogie Nights’ “The Touch” were rebuffed, alas.) And Cox? After dispensing one last sweat-soaked kerchief—it went to The Rage’s Kristin Whittlesey, who’s never washing again—he bid Nashville adieu with a holiday greeting: “For Christmas, the people want Cox.” Dewey ever! See more footage from the show on Pith in the Wind and even more on Nashville Cream, and watch for our interview next week with Reilly and director/co-writer Jake Kasdan.

“A Life Without You (Is No Life At All)”

 

The Spin holiday wish list 2007 (cont.):4. More T-shirts boasting punchy witticisms about Nashville.5. More pyro.To be continued...