Originally written for CT Indie and Manic Productions

     Considering that Wednesday’s show was part of Owen Ashworth’s last lap under the name Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, anticipation for an exceptional performance was fair, though bittersweet. Here he was, performing solo in a humble and intimate setting which was also the last time many will see him perform. This tour was constructed in preparation for his notable Chicago show at the Jay Pritzker Pavilion, which he made a point to mention made this show “practice”—not that it made any difference to those in attendance. No, for Ashworth, the crowd would do a special favor at the end of the show and move to the front from behind their glass partition at the bar.

For Lion Cub and Arms and Legs, the square that marked the dance floor seemed to repel the crowd as if there was an unannounced game of the floor is lava.

    The expression on Chelsea Hahn’s face was still one of continual pleasance, something close to an ‘I’m just happy to be here’ look. Though they currently live in Massachusetts, Hahn and Chad Jewett have deep roots in New Haven, which also housed the creative process for their upcoming debut full-length, Seneca. Between Hahn’s hand-carved stamps for their merchandise and the distinctly folksy content of their songs, they present all the style and aesthetic of lo-fi electronica while rooted in something much more wholesome.

The room’s new color lights whirred around the floor in time with the beat, moving so fast at times that the motion blur mimicked gnats dancing in front of a light. Hahn’s spine was straight, ankles crossed, firing out drum beats on the Nord in front of her while Jewett wailed into the microphone on her left. His guitar was about two sizes too loud for the room, adding abrasiveness to the otherwise pleasance of the two during songs like ‘American Buffalo’ and ‘The Bird on Your Sill.’

    Nights like these, Lilly’s Pad seems more like an exclusive loft rather than what it is—an after hours dance floor turned venue. In between acts, most of the crowd would plop into a chair at one of the tables for two along the wall or brazenly socialize behind the bar’s glass partition. The few under 21 mostly loitered awkwardly, but were the ones who braved the invisible frontlines for Arms and Legs’ set.

    Arms and Legs have an air of wizened musicianship about them, which could be owed to their time in Beijing playing to thousands via festivals put on by their label Modern Sky Records. Scott Daly moved with positively manic energy which appeared to be gunning through his vocal chords. His voice contradicted his fever and emerged unharmed in Thom Yorke-like croons. He seemed to permeate octaves, leaving a lonely tone to float hauntingly within the darkened room. Each instrument in the mix left the same lingering effect in their wake. At times, the double drums shook your ribs more than the bass throbbed with your pulse. Everyone in the band pulsed trance-like with their parts, making it feel like more of an awakening when a song closed and Daly laughed nervously, saying “Alright, then” or “Whaddaya say, gang?” At one point he excused his banter by saying he’s been listening to too much Jim Morrison lately.

    Powerful and authentic, Arms and Legs were certainly the best set of the night. The cycles of applause swelled with more excitement at the close of each song. Yet on top of the powerhouse of instrumentation already in place, every now and then one drummer would turn to an open laptop at his right and play a track to sync into a song. It was the only artificial source of sound in the set, and in that bound all three acts of the night by this common denominator. These were mostly filled out by keys and looped vocals, which could have been manually orchestrated by Daly as he had equipment to do both on either side of him. Then again, he was so possessed by song at times it was like an exorcism taking place above York Street for all passerbies to see. Like Daly has tattooed on his forearm: “Never afraid, never ashamed.”

    The reception for Ashworth was like a dinner par- actually, more like the last scene of Titanic. Warm, familiar, with an undertone of excitement for his future endeavors. Also, Leo was at the top of the staircase.

    In any case, Ashworth was not among strangers, a crowd he’s earned after 13 years of musicianship. Requests were called out, sneakers fidgeted in clear excitement as the notes to a familiar song began to play (most of which were off 2006’s Etiquette). And at the relentless request of ‘Love Connection,’ Ashworth waved up two eager devotees (notorious and wanted CT Indie contributors John Packer and Megan Manowitz) to awkwardly hammer out the lines to the song over the glow of Packer’s phone which displayed the lyrics to the song just in case. They wanted to hear the song so much, they were even willing to sing the line ‘a delicate blend of sweat and menstrual blood.’ Menstrual blood! Oh god, the fandom!

    It’s clear that none of this has reached Ashworth’s head in any negative way. He stood above his motherboard of equipment and microphone, never behaving with any visible gusto though with a subtle precision. Still, he’s probably humbler than the next indie legend. “I feel weird about playing this song because the Sun Kil Moon version was better,” he joked with a dryness stirring up laughter as he went into ‘Natural Light.’ He spoke about his trip to Las Vegas in an especially endearing way, how he visited the Liberace Museum and made sure to capture himself in the shots with mirrors behind immortalized outfits from the musical icon; how he ate lobster not one, but two times. With overtly mortal stories like these, it’s funny to remember that Ashworth is just as goofy as any of us, no matter the lack of underground sensationalism in our lives.

    However human, someone still graciously provided him with a bar napkin for his sweat.

    Some people prefer what they can expect. A good bar, a modestly-stacked bill (three acts—not too many, not too little) and a decent crowd. This is part-in-parcel for both Manic Productions and Casiotone for the Painfully alone, actually—both known for their consistency in production and backing tracks (well, only one of them is known for the latter. Give you one guess.)

    But for all the things you try to anticipate, there are just as many outliers. These tend to define the bands, performances and shows beyond the impression you get from a packaged record. It’s part of why you make the effort to go to these shows, whether they are a debut or final performance.






(Photos: Luke Dringoli)

Figured I'd post about the first printed issue in the new format. I printed the first run this past Wednesday for the Balance and Composure show, where they were handed out in single-page, 11x17 formats. The front has one of the best illustrations from Andy McKinnon yet, and the back features an abbreviated show listing for the month of July.

I'm going to be posting them around local businesses (I live in Trumbull) this week, but if any of you guys live in northern parts of Connecticut and know of places a show listing would be good to post, send me an e-mail so I can mail some copies to them.

Here's this issue's cover, by Andrew McKinnon. In spirit of this being the seventh issue, the Seven Plagues of Cramps Romano.

Though “Sex, drugs and pop” might not carry the same ring to it, Danny Goodwin of Tweefort Records thinks the genre needs a little more attention in New Haven. He went about this by kick-starting a record label, releasing local talent, hosting frequent shows and eventually presenting Elm City Pop Fest, a barebones three-day festival (the last day is to be held this Wednesday, May 26th) showcasing pop music from home and abroad in New Haven’s venues.

The festival is an incarnation of everything Tweefort revolves around: bringing nationally touring pop bands to New Haven where they can play with like-minded locals. This year is the second run of the event—the first installment launched the weekend of the 14th—during which bands performed at Café Nine and Tweefort’s makeshift home-base venue ArtSpace Underground. Locals in the lineup like EULA and The Fictional West originate in New Haven, but this year Goodwin broadened the Connecticut portion of the lineup with acts like Steven Deal (Milford) and the Field Recordings (Danbury). On Saturday evening, ArtSpace was a gallery turned venue full of wine glass toting music fiends. They have hosted Tweefort concerts since last spring.

“I was a little surprised when we first started — although I shouldn't have been — that a lot of the fans of our shows are people that were really involved in New Haven's punk/pop heyday in the '70s and '80s,” said Goodwin. Late Saturday evening, around 60 bodies hovered around the performance space with drinks in hand, alternating between conversation and focusing on the talent. A gallery assistant flitted from wall to wall ensuring that no shoulder blade or stray elbow of an audience member touched one of the suspended paintings. One particularly inspired audience member with a ball of tight curls danced alone in the front lines to New Haven’s Butterflies of Love. A sound technician from East Rock Recording Studio, another longtime supporter of Tweefort’s mission, sat among the clumps of audience to check the bands.

All proceeds from Saturday’s show went directly to ArtSpace as a thanks for what the organization has done for New Haven arts. “[My wife] Aileen and I would travel to Boston, Northampton and New York City to see pop shows and then we kind of realized that could and should be trying to get these bands to play in New Haven,” Goodwin remembered. “New Haven has a diverse and open-minded music and arts scene plus students from all the nearby colleges and universities.” This Wednesday’s last installment of Pop Fest at Café Nine on State street coincides with New York City Pop Fest, allowing Elm City to piggy back on acts like Horowitz and Allo Darlin’, two bands from the UK.

“I think we knew there was a lot of potential fans in New Haven,” Goodwin said. “There is a whole worldwide community of indiepop fans and I knew we could tap into that with a lot of the music we promote.”

By Elise Granata
There is a groggy morning light that Make It Easy on Yourself awakes in. The only other presence in the room is a solitary guitar being plucked, conjuring up a companion for itself with its echoing reverberation. Omeed Goodarzi (vox/guitar) barely cracks a word’s shape with his lips while cooing the record’s opening lyric, questioning his expression in itself: “What am I now, when I go to speak?”

Midi and the Modern Dance ached in a similar key before in “Stay Awake,” the opening track on 2009’s Twilight, How Sweet You Are (“I feel numb and painless, my dear/and there are no comforts here”). But where “Stay Awake” leaves traces of a lullaby to reassure (“but the night will come eventually/and there will be better days, you’ll see”), “I’m Sorry” simultaneously opens and closes the record with a despair so thick, Goodarzi can’t see the forest but for the trees. Maybe this is why a track like “Everything I Touch” was chosen to follow—it kicks off its predecessor’s drear with Mikey McGovern’s (keys) ecstatic Rhodes ditty and breaks of upbeat pop frenzy. This was a bit of Midi’s monogram in the days of Twilight, but “Everything I Touch” is a dishonest attempt, the defiantly sunny day which falls on the saddest afternoon of your life.

Dave Groener’s (Suns) poolhouse acoustics cloud the quality of the rest of the record into a lo-fi fog which also disenchants “Almost A Threat” and “I’m Sure,” two songs with kindred insincere half-smiles. These don’t give the record any levity, but sidestep the glaring undertone of loneliness and an element of emotional fatality introduced with “I’m Sorry.” Indulgent though it may have seemed, a thorough eight tracks worth of brooding would have solidified Make it Easy as a whole production. It’s hard to imagine “Everything I Touch,” “Almost A Threat” and “I’m Sure” as anything but outliers, regardless of how strong each track is on its own as substantial pop songs awash in riffy keys and the contagious ebb and flow of short tension and relief.

When the sparse guitar notes pluck back in, easing into “Lucky,” it feels exceedingly more comfortable. It’s just you, Goodarzi, and the smattering of keys and drums (Jack Aldrich) in the background, transparent enough to let the conversation begun in “I’m Sorry” continue on. The record’s reckoning is in “Where Do You Think,” the most powerful Midi track yet written. Goodarzi is tangible, leaning in amongst the tides of autoharp and fuzzed out guitar to trill, “There are better men out there you see/so many boys more good looking than me/where do you think I belong, if I don’t belong to you?” He continues to alternate between self-deprecation and a subdued kind of desperation among harmonies with McGovern and a pining autoharp sigh. In tense Okkervil fashion, feedback squeals once, twice and explodes into a blood-letting so comparatively abrasive and pained that it couldn’t possibly relinquish itself in any other line than a tongue-in-cheek “there’s a place in my head where thoughts of you spread/through the cracks in my bed, how I wish you were dead, how I wish you were dead.”

As of late, Midi’s taken many forms due to their member’s collegiate obligations, though Goodarzi is always a mainstay—sometimes solo, sometimes with Adam Levison (accordion, autoharp) or even Will Rutledge (Suns, drums). As far as that sad, solitary integrity goes, it’s best kept in these intimate performances—but emerge teeming with a full band. Midi aches and rejoices along with any other responsive being, and fall into each emotional step with ease. For us emotional creatures, this dynamism might just mean that this record will endure.

By Elise Granata
Sure, to Nick Corbo and other songwriters like him, spring brings with it a cargo of analogies: hope, warmth, new life, Corbo’s “thawing just in time” (“Every Song I Sing”). It also brought along his newest and longest release through American Buffalo Recordings, Animal Names.

And just as important as the sun is for stirring up the tiny microbes of chlorophyll, the tracks on Animal Names bloom and burst with the instrumentation Corbo and friends gorged them with. In a modest eight tracks, Corbo adapted some old songs and deliberately seasoned new ones with brass, keys, gang vocals and lo-fi samples. The warm bass tones in “Painted Halls,” a lonely flute warble in “The Museum of Natural History,” in “My Home Isn’t Home,” lilting keys and tides of trumpet—the shoe fits on each track, just shy of being overdone while defining a musician beyond another acoustic songwriter. His transition is best viewed in “Every Song I Sing,” a rosy acoustic ditty included on the Bird Watching in America EP. It was a track once limited to the accessory of a gang-vocal sing along, and now flourishes with bursts of trumpet, drum and howls.

Lyrically and stylistically, Conor Oberst has a hand on the shoulder of Animal Names. The fragile harmonies and stumbles of drum in “Roanoke” recall “Contrast and Compare,” the nostalgic sample of a message left by a faceless giddy girl layered with field recordings of a buzzing crowd at the end of “Rosasharn,” even an identical “to love and to be loved” (“Let’s Not Shit Ourselves”) is sung to Corbo in his memory in “The Merritt Parkway pt.2.” Then there’s the constant lyrical harping on the powerful hand of the seasons (“so I’ll dig myself a sweet farewell ‘neath the dirt and the dying leaves/and wait for the spring to come and wrap me up in the roots of her leaning trees”), states, symptomatic skeletons in the closet (“I can’t stand my own mind/America, when will we end the human war?” from a Ginsberg sample). Still, the relationship between the two songwriters isn’t a genetic one. Corbo might have what Oberst’s having at the bar, but won’t stay long enough past closing for his friend to come after work and ask about a yellow bird.


His saving grace is every song’s resolution, its suggestion of hope. No matter how celebratory the trumpet might sound, it’s never ironic. Animal Names walks with a greater levity; Corbo’s voice is less wrecked by sobs and hauntings, less spent on nights with an inch of scotch in his glass. Even in the darkest corners of the tracks like “My Home Isn’t Home,” which empties into pitchy feedback over Ginsberg’s “America,” there is still a pinhole of light from the yard—the sweet and brazen storyline of “The Museum of Natural History” picks up right after Ginsberg’s brooding lines.

It’s because of Corbo’s earnest and use-what-ya-got approach—recording in his Torrington home under the guidance of R.J. Gordon (Purchase based student producer), performing on a couple instruments on most of the tracks himself, collaborating with friends on vocals, horns and keys—that the record is able to get its sea legs and pick up an identity. And its identity is all that’s visible through the record’s transparency: his friends, influences and origins. As he writes in the liner notes, the project never would have been completed without them.


(Photos: Kellyann Petry)

In solidarity with the national and campus-centric movement at Purchase, I put together this informational zine for tomorrow's walk out against the budget hikes, privatization and lack of transparency in the SUNY and CUNY administration.

This interview was done for the summer issue of Inkwell Press that will be done soon, but probably not in time for decent promotion of the show he's doing this Saturday, July 25th at The Space via Manic Productions. 7PM, $12 with Mansions, Modern Hearts Break Faster, and The Tired and True. Read on, boys!

-Elise

April showers bring May Inkwell Press.

Changed the letter-sized paper to half-letter, so each half of a page you're looking at on the online viewer is actually an entire page in the zine booklet. So that should make you want to get a physical copy! Yeah? Yeah?

Hope you like. And have a lovely month.

-Elise