Fans of Lauren Hoffman's work should brace themselves for the following bizarre revelation: she may have just retired. The darling wicked priestess of Charlottesville alt/rock has intimated that she intends to croon no more.
On a recent visit home to collect some possessions, the now-dreadlocked 23-year-old was spotted at Tokyo Rose and coerced to spill the beans: No tears, no regrets-- just gone. No more music. Moving to London. See ya. Going nightclubbing. Bye.
Musicians are weird.
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In other "end of an era" news, I'd heard reports that Devon had divorced her groovy band, Dr.Bindu, so I made plans to roll down to Trax's Ladies' Night (Thursday, June 29) to see how the solitude was suiting her.
Mary Sue Twohy was warming up the mellow gloom of Trax's bat cave interior, diverting the small (for Ladies' Night) crowd with her super-nice acoustic pop. Almost too sweet for the stage, she conversed with the audience like a childhood friend between pretty tunes (if they had odor, it would be potpourri or perhaps flowery tissue) and some unusual a capella Gaelic stuff.
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| fetchin' gretchen |
Former Baja Bean open-mic mistress and rock folkster Gretchen Casler followed with a fresh number and a few of her now almost classic originals. (I, for one, am still waiting to see "who's going to be the next boy on rock and roll death row.") She relinquished the helm of the Corner's longest running open-mic last February to pursue her performing incarnations-- solo and with her band-- so look around for her folk-rock riotousness. She's never sounded better.
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| alien sightings and stuffed animals |
Fresh from Arizona came Vyktoria Pratt Keating, apparently at work on a new record with Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson. Moving away from Virginia seems to have been a very sound maneuver for Keating, whose spaceship and dreamcatcher songwriting slant wowed the Trax crowd. Always carrying her own trippy echo-box for vocal effects, she continues to be a torch of feminine ingenuity on a sea of sheepish similarity, defying the mire of traditional girlie-strummers and radical chick-rockers.
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| devon in heaven |
Finally Devon took the stage. For the first time since I started writing this godforsaken (hallelulia!) column I was really impressed with her.
No longer limited to a dozen originals and a bunch of wretched covers (a dopey rendition of C.C.R.'s "Suzy Q." among them), she's flush with thumpy little scrappy folk-rock numbers. And they're pretty damn good.
But I've gotta give her bonus points for taking editorial risks in her songwriting. A perfectly normal modern hippy teenager with a raggedy offbeat perspective, she can talk trash and spin clever lore in the same flourish. "...I've got a secret I don't want to keep." "...won't be in this town long enough to get laid." She gets downright naughty at points but keeps it all nicely in check with her silly vulnerable rock starlet banter.
I still have to wonder if she too will be a jaded ex-rockstar by the time she reaches drinking age. She's already going through sobering changes. Hang tough, little Devon, rock and roll never forgets. (Unless you give it beer. -- Want a beer?)
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| lurking in the mayhem |
The following night the Last Days of May took Tokyo Rose's stage in stages. First the Baaba Seth drum squad set up a deep polyrythmic groove. Karl Precoda followed, taking his sweet time clicking and humming textural effects before launching his guitar assault while bassist Tom Howard tested the low end waters for ethereal pockets.
L.D.O.M. is always good for dedicated cerebral psychedelia. Epic impromptu jams erupt when the rhythm section's sheer willpower recieves affirming momentum from Howard's dub bass designations. Above all this Precoda dances like a freak shaman slowly settling into the spectral fire of his own starry magnetism.
The Tokyo Rose crowd drew up chairs to observe this raw theater of the psychedelic. Rumor has it that L.D.O.M. was offered an opening spot on Sonic Youth's summer tour-- mainstage and everything-- but turned it down. (Precoda's a U.Va. professor working on a book on the Manson murders-- I'm sure he's got important stuff to do.)
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| saving private eraserhead, the musical |
The flash of beautifully disturbing genius that followed is hard to describe. A bunch of freaks from Maine called Cerberus Shoal. Super-surreal abstract musical performance art. Experiments in controlled chaos stretched across a mutant symphony of discombobulated elements: alarm clocks, singing saws, melodicas, bells, shakers, clackers, sheets of metal, drums, djun-djuns, cigarette cases and bowed electric basses, guitars, keyboards and children's megaphones. All sown together in deliberate compositions with sustained-vowel poetry sung in chilling dissonant harmonies by male and female voices. Results ranged from eery ambient landscapes to tripping krishna freakouts to apocolyptic art-rock. All smacking of some intense organic cult ritual. A slide show of 19th century medical oddities and old asian war slides, while very unsettling, actually provided a soothing symbolic hand-hold for the whole bizarre affair.
I was absolutely enchanted by them. Couldn't take my eyes away. Never heard or seen anything like it. They went right over my head and took me with them. If I had been drunk, I would have thrown up-- no question. At one point I almost wanted-- like the thinning crowd-- to leave this profound and gorgeous nightmare. But I had to stick it out. I don't know when a work of art has so moved me in so many ways at once. Bravo.