February 25, 2010 8pm
Cafe Bourbon Street
2216 Summit St.
(614) 268-9377
$5 adv / $7 door
Ages 18+, under 21 pays $2 surcharge at door
So Cow
http://iamsocow.com/
So Cow came into being in late 2006 in Seoul, South Korea. Up to that point, So Cow was plain Brian Kelly, a much-too-young tourism college lecturer and occasional Open Mic participant from Tuam, Ireland. This one-man musical project has now becoming something much bigger than he could/should have hoped for or expected. 2010 sees him release his second LP Meaningless Friendly on Chicago’s Tic Tac Totally Records, as well as extensive touring throughout North America and the European Union, with trips further afield in the offing. Often described as a marriage between any number of groups – expect to see Television Personalities, The Clean, The Nerves, Abba and Swell Maps end up in these pairings – So Cow has also forged a sound that exhibits ambitions and a vision well beyond the dank sheds and freezing bedrooms he tends to record in.
The first 18 months of So Cow saw Kelly operate in any number of often-chaotic live outfits or experiences, entertaining and befuddling audiences in his home of Ireland and his adopted home of South Korea. Rousing choral moments, guitar insanity and occasionally upsetting self-injury were very much par for the course. A series of albums were self-released on Kelly’s own Covert Bear Records, leading to a small army of excitable fans and a great deal of blog-love. The line-up solidified into a power trio, taking in shows with Ted Leo & The Pharmacists, Dan Deacon, Deerhoof, Maximo Park and Frightened Rabbit amongst others. 7” singles Moon Guen Young (Almost Ready Records, Hawaii) and Commuting (Going Underground Records, Bakersfield) soon found themselves out of print.
2009 saw the release of the So Cow LP, the first release with Tic Tac Totally. A compilation of the best recorded moments from Kelly’s self-released CDs, it found favour with Pitchfork, the Washington Post and Maximumrocknroll, as well as positive write-ups in Italy’s premier music monthly Rumore. The year continued in such fashion, with appearances at the Fence Homegame festival in Fife, Scotland, an exhaustive tour of the US – sharing bills with Love Is All, Girls and Tyvek - and extremely well-received performances at the Primavera Club festival in Madrid and Barcelona. The LP also found a home at South Korea’s Pastel Records, leading to a still-bizarre appearance in Vogue Girl Korea magazine, a first and presumably last for a member of the underground pop community.
The months ahead see not only the Meaningless Friendly LP and accompanying tour, but an appearance on Under the Covers Vol. 2: A Tribute to Paul Collins, Peter Case, and Jack Lee on I Hate Rock N Roll/Volar Records. There’s a lot more to all this, but that’ll do for now.
Day Creeper
http://www.myspace.com/daycreeper
Day Creeper is the latest on the turf, but my how each and every step they make is not to burn the flesh. This duo has a chemistry that belies their rookie status. There’s Spartan punctuation at each simple turn of these big riffs and melodies. That synergy is especially prevalent on “My Blue Screen,” the big organ and twinkle choogler that ultimately wins out. The untitled disc that came earlier in the week shows much more range (find “The Problem at Hand”) by cramming some discernable lyrics into the angular twists the guitarist’s Richman-esque charisma exudes. - The Agit Reader
The Lindsay
http://myspace.com/thelindsay
My first live encounter with the Lindsay one month ago was a life-affirming revelation. And if this relatively green quartet had come from anywhere else, this wouldn’t be a problem. But they don’t. They hang in my turf: Columbus, Ohio, a city with a musical output that has always been on the cusp (of what I’m not sure); so I’m torn as to how to approach their first recording, Dragged Out, through an outsider’s lens. It’s the absolute antithesis of the lo-fi, art-punk, gutter-n-grad school rock that’s churned out on a weekly basis here, but that may not mean much to anyone living outside the confines of the I-270 outer belt.
The beginning of the record doesn’t help matters. “Life Is Fair” and “Ready to Run” exhibit the band’s primary influences to the point of imitation, namely Pod-era Breeders and Sonic Youth circa Daydream Nation. Blame can be laid upon their physical make-up: bassist Gretchen Tepper and guitarist John Olexovitch play a veritable Kim (Deal/Gordon) and Thurston, with his/her harmonies and steely-cum-sweet melancholy to match. This synchronicity of genders is bound to make most listeners pile on the obvious comparisons, especially when jutted against skewed histrionics, but any fan of modern rock can’t hold that against them.
While the aforementioned slanted skronk remains threaded throughout the album (albeit with more surprising and nuanced returns), it’s “Like the Back of the Hand” where the songs start becoming earnestly rapturous and playfully obscured by the group’s ragged-yet-buoyant pop. Like an accidental time-machine moving in reverse, the song gets logged in a vacuum connecting the Kinks to Crazy Horse, the Byrds to Black Sabbath, barely brushing against either. It’s a mission statement of sorts: the sound of the Lindsay wringing out a sponge soaked in decades of psychedelic cool with a nonchalance that suggests they have no binding relationship to the classics.
Soon after, it becomes apparent that Dragged Out is made from two heads; closer to the Bunnicula lupine-vampire variety than Jekyll and Hyde’s split personality. That is, every cute and cuddly moment on the record is countered with a sinister display that could easily suck the red from tomatoes. “Your Contemporaries,” for instance, is five minutes of eight miles high guitar prisms before it dissolves into a cesspool of string torture and reverb worthy of the most visceral noise sculptures, while “Abigail Folger” is a stuttered, mid-tempo jam that ends with an organic robot spitting foreign tongues and locomotive steam.
“Iranian Eyes,” the album’s stand-out, best exemplifies this duality. Though it’s the Lindsay’s obvious a-side, a traditional garage product of the highest Nugget’s standards, it is undercut by an all-join-in refrain (“All the same”) and a haze of layered shoegaze fuzz that brings the listener out of a retro state of mind and into a pleasurable post-millennial bliss. Really, modern life never felt so good. - Kevin J. Elliott, Stylus