The object of this article is to make Robert Christgau a liar. All due props to the Dean of Rock Critics, who gave Philadelphia's world-beating live act Low Cut Connie some of its best early reviews (and in so doing helped put them on the map). But when they finally met after a gig, Connie's piano-pounding co-founder Adam Weiner remembers, Christgau told them three things: 1) "You guys are fucking great." 2) "You'll never make it." 3) "You're way over everybody's head."
Whaa? If Low Cut Connie were four sullen trendinistas fussing over their iPads, producing music that sounds like the amplified death rattle of an underpowered freezer, well, yeah, maybe. (And even some of that can be cool too. In limited doses.) But it's not. It's music that curls lips and greases hips. Its founders are a drummer-guitarist with locomotive-piston arms and a piano player who pounds the white off the keys. The band's Stone Fox show a few years ago climaxed with Weiner stomping atop his piano, perilously close to bashing his head through the ceiling tiles. If this is inaccessible egghead fare, then "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" is Finnegan's Wake.
As the group answers the Scene's call, these delicate aesthetes are hunched in a Chevy van outside a Whole Foods in Detroit, nursing hangovers Weiner describes as "biblical." That's what Jim Beam and a 30-pack of Hamm's consumed until dawn will get you.
"Yeah, we stayed up at a Red Roof Inn until 5 a.m. staring at a graveyard across the parking lot," says guitarist James Everhart. He sounds like he oughta be in it. A two-year member, he's wedged in with Weiner, co-founder/songwriter/guitarist/drummer Dan Finnemore, bassist/drummer Will Donnelly, gear crammed on all sides, and that battered hulk of a piano (named Shondra, after an Atlanta stripper who evidently matched it in size as well as durability).
That kind of living matches the vibe on Hi Honey — the band's third album, and its first with a producer. Not just any producer: The group hooked up with Thomas Brenneck, former guitarist for Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings and Antibalas, who brought forth the same smoky ambience he summoned on Alabama Shakes' latest record. Weiner had long admired his work, especially with sexagenarian R&B dynamo Charles Bradley, and Brenneck came out to see the group play at a Staten Island fishermen's bar.
"Tommy had a really big hand in arranging the record," says Finnemore, who enlisted Memphis garage-rock legend Greg Cartwright (Reigning Sound, The Parting Gifts) as part of a roster of guest stars that includes members of the Dap-Kings and The Budos Band, Dean Ween, and tUnE-YaRdS' Merrill Garbus. Hearing the band through an outsider's ears, he says, made him think a lot differently "with regard to texture, dynamics and so much more."
The sound, with Weiner's artfully sleazy strip-club piano anchoring the lewd grooves, recalls nothing so much as the recording of "Money" from Jerry Lee Lewis' 1964 LP Live at the Star Club — a record where the space around the go-to-hell music suggests a nightworld reeking of lust and bad intentions. It's a much different record from 2011's Get Out the Lotion and 2013's Call Me Sylvia. Those records — gems of grimy, spit-lubed garage rock like "Shit, Shave and Shower" and "Boozophilia," anchored by impeccable songcraft and demimonde savoir faire — were the sound of Weiner and Finnemore finding their legs as a band after years in separate acts: Jersey kid Weiner in the doo-wop-influenced Ladyfingers, Birmingham, U.K., factotum Finnemore in Swamp Meat. The two acts played Nashville for the first time around 2001 on a double bill at Springwater, where Weiner made the acquaintance of a house piano.
"What a piece of shit," he recalls. "Keys were flyin' off it."
They were also honing a sound that stands alongside its stable of influences instead of just echoing them: the Leadbelly album Weiner bought at age 11, swaggering sides by Dion and the Belmonts that served as antidotes to his parents' Sinatra and Streisand records, the blues 78s and Sun Records singles he heard while living in Memphis under the tutelage of ethnomusicologist David Evans and the late Beale Street Caravan co-founder Sid Selvidge. Put another way: With its slinky primordial grooves and lyrics that pitch their solidarity with uninhibited cross-dressers, scuffling musicians and convention-defying lovers, Low Cut Connie suggests how early rock and R&B might've sounded if they'd followed the punk era, rather than vice versa.
"When we made the first record, we'd never played a gig," Weiner says, sounding as ashen as the Motor City sky. "When we made the second, we were still very young. By the time we made this one, we'd discovered we were a pretty killer live act."
That confidence emerges on Hi Honey as ballsy theatricality. With Brenneck's production allowing room to stretch, Weiner slips in and out of a rogue's gallery of protagonists: the secret moneymaker-shaker of sinuous album opener "Shake It Little Tina," with its soupy atmospherics and gospel backing vocals, even a walk in Finnemore's shoes in "Danny's Outta Money," with a literally phoned-in cameo by none other than The Sopranos' Vincent "Big Pussy" Pastore as a goon demanding his money. Asked how biographical the song is, Finnemore says sheepishly, "Well, sometimes it's tough being in a band."
Above all, though, it's a dance party, and that goes quintuple for a Low Cut Connie show. And the dances involve a lot of bumping and grinding. That has Weiner a little concerned about the edict he got to make the band's free outdoor show at Centennial Park's Musicians Corner on Saturday — with Those Darlins, Cory Branan, and Guthrie Brown and the Family Tree — "family friendly." You might as well ask Weegee to work at Olan Mills.
"When people tell us things like that, we sometimes end up doing the opposite," Weiner says. You've been warned — no. You've been tantalized.
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