Laetitia Sadier Source Ensemble
The Spin is as tired as you are of all the grousing about New Nashville traffic and parking, but yowza, sometimes the struggle is real. After making a few loops between Sixth Avenue and Cannery Row Thursday night, hunting for a strip of pavement that looked plausibly legal for parking a car, we ditched the whip in a questionable-looking alley and made our way to Third Man Records.
Walking down the hallway to The Blue Room feels like stepping into a rock club designed by Lewis Carroll, through a looking glass into a world where the rules don’t always apply in the ways you’ve come to expect — something that didn’t feel all that jarring, thanks to the recent ominous threats of transcontinental nuclear war. Laetitia Sadier’s headlining set and those that accompanied it proved to be just the antidote we needed. Sadier began by strutting up to the mic and asking in a warm, enthusiastic voice if we were all ready for some international love. A little love was decidedly a welcome change.
Lylas
The disappointing downside of our little vehicular adventure is that we missed the beginning of Lylas’ opening set. The Nashville indie veterans have been through quite a few changes in recent years, mixing in the influences of other groups they’ve been sharing members with, from Stone Jack Jones to Margo Price to Coupler as they prepped this spring’s hiatus-breaking LP Warm Harm. Thursday’s lineup, with frontman Kyle Hamlett backed up by siblings Rodrigo and Nicky Avendano on bass and keys, respectively, and drum MVP Rollum Haas on the throne, had a jangly sound that reminded us of the early-’80s New Wave faves like The Bats or The Chills, with a whiff of the more melodic, poppy end of Television. If you, like quite a few of our cohorts, haven't seen Lylas in a long time, we’ll argue that this is their best period yet.
Art Feynman
Earlier in the week, we discovered Blast Off Through the Wicker, the magnificent debut LP from Here We Go Magic’s Luke Temple under the moniker Art Feynman, and we were stoked to see how he would bring it to life. The album is a barrage of art-school rock from the ’70s and ’80s: There are Suicide’s synthesizers, ESG’s drum machines and guitars that would fit right in with Brian Eno’s Here Come the Warm Jets. As Feynman, Temple took the stage in a fluorescent yellow hoodie, pulled up tightly so that all you could see was his nose, mouth and Alan Vega mirrored shades. Looking like a character from some long-forgotten post-punk music video, he stood alone onstage with a guitar, beat box and a cheap synthesizer on a simple stand — imagine Kraftwerk, if the group was just one guy who got everything he owned at a garage sale. With little fanfare, he launched into the ticking electronic rhythm of his first song, alternating between his flange-drenched guitar and the ethereal wooziness of his keyboard.
Playing up what we pegged as an intentionally cold and stark stage persona, Feynman paused to pull out his phone. He stared at it in silence, seeming to care little about the people watching him, though you could hear a pin drop among the rapt audience as he gazed on. What the hell was he staring at? His set list? His Tinder matches? Job postings on on LinkedIn? The awkward heaviness was broken when his electronics slowly faded back in, unleashing a hypnotic dub beat. Feynman is a weirdo, for sure, but his music is phenomenally enchanting.
Laetitia Sadier Source Ensemble
After a short changeover, Sadier & Co. took the stage. Though she’s best known for her avant-garde indie band Stereolab, the music of her new Source Ensemble has a similar loopy, crushed-velvet groove. At one point, Sadier mentioned the odd juxtaposition of pairing songs about free love next to “Committed,” a swaying, droney romantic number from her newest album Find Me Finding You. Time has been kind to her feel-good rock-adjacent sound, which straddles the worlds of French art pop, German krautrock and lounge music. Fans crowding the room got a taste of a broad swath of late-’60s Europe in the space of an hour, spanning art-school pop, class war and the romanticism of revolution. Her 2014 plea for the collapse of capitalism, “Echo Port,” became a backdrop for railing about the changing cityscape of Nashville and the corporate attitudes that play a role in it. That brought us back down into the present a bit — back outside in the real world, there’s a lot of work to do. But at the very least, the Spinmobile was right where we left it, without a ticket on the windshield.
See our slideshow for more photos.
In The Spin — the Scene's live review column — staffers and freelance contributors review concerts under a collective byline.
