Triple Play

Over the course of a week, from July 21 to July 27, RIBCO will offer an impressive array of acts: half of The Sea & Cake on Saturday, the national-pastime-themed supergroup The Baseball Project on Thursday, and the up-and-coming garage-rock duo JEFF the Brotherhood on Friday.

An interview with The Sea & Cake’s Sam Prekop can be found here, and an interview with JEFF the Brotherhood’s Jake Orrall is below.

We interviewed The Baseball Project’s Scott McCaughey last year, and that article can be found at RCReader.com/y/baseballproject. In addition to McCaughey – known for the Young Fresh Fellows and the Minus 5 – the band includes Steve Wynn (of Dream Syndicate and Gutterball), Peter Buck (of R.E.M.), and Linda Pitmon (who has regularly worked with Wynn).

As we wrote last year, songwriters McCaughey and Wynn help the band transcend gimmickry: “The songs don’t settle for easy recitations of historical highlights. Some are pure celebrations – such as the punky ‘Ichiro Goes to the Moon’ – that exude a love of the game through their understanding of it. But most of the songs are more complicated.”

More information and tickets for all these concerts are available at RIBCO.com.

Jake Orrall said that major labels these days wouldn’t put out something like Hypnotic Nights, the just-released album from JEFF the Brotherhood.

They might have in 1994, he said in a phone interview last week, in advance of his band’s July 27 show at RIBCO. And if that seems an odd date to choose, consider that was the year DGC released Weezer’s self-titled debut, popularly known as the Blue Album.

You’ll have no difficulty making the stylistic link between the two records, both packed with candied rock hooks, punkish drive, infectious melodies, and gleefully arrested development. As Stereogum casually put it: “Whenever people say to me, ‘Man, I miss Blue Album-era Weezer,’ I reply, ‘Then why the hell aren’t you listening to JEFF The Brotherhood already?’” To which the A.V. Club added (discussing JEFF’s 2011 album): “They’ve sidestepped Rivers Cuomo and created the album he’s no longer interested in making.”

The irony is that Hypnotic Nights was released by Warner Bros.

The venerable Chicago band The Sea & Cake will release its 10th album in September. Singer/guitarist/songwriter Sam Prekop told me it will be called Runner. And ... well, that’s about all he offered initially.

“I haven’t actually listened to it,” he said in a phone interview last week, promoting his July 21 RIBCO show with The Sea & Cake bandmate Archer Prewitt. “It’s like a really fond memory already. I’m like: Why listen to it and attempt to take it apart?”

Prekop said he’s in the “recovery period” for the album – the time between when it’s finished and when he and the band need to learn the songs for live presentation and to prepare a new show. He said that at first he dreads reworking the songs for concerts, comparing the process to how most people feel about (and procrastinate with) taxes and homework.

But something with deeper roots could be contributing to his ambivalence about The Sea & Cake. The long-running outfit – which the All Music Guide called “the elder statesmen of impressionistic indie rock” – might just be inherently frustrating to Prekop’s admittedly “restless” nature.

The sound on the Statistix’s American Dream EP is rough, with echoing, thin, buried drums, and vocals that are often blown out and as a result sometimes have an unpleasant, visceral piercing quality. The bass on the 37-second-long “Punk as F---” is bloated and warped. The volume varies from track to track.

It is, in other words, pure punk, assaulting ears for less than 13 minutes over its eight songs.

None of this is a complaint exactly. The Quad Cities trio is simply conforming to the movement’s shabby-DIY template: full-throttle and full volume, with little patience for nuance – with little patience, period.

(Editor’s note: This concert was canceled on June 13.)

What’s essential to know about the Redstone Room’s June 14 headliner can be summed up succinctly: Richard Lloyd was one of the guitarists of Television, the seminal band whose 1977 Marquee Moon is widely considered a great debut, an unmistakable influence on post-punk and alternative rock, and a classic, period.

The All Music Guide calls it “a revolutionary album, but it’s a subtle, understated revolution. Without question, it is a guitar-rock album – it’s astonishing to hear the interplay between [singer/songwriter/guitarist] Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd – but it is a guitar-rock album unlike any other,” composed entirely of “tense garage rockers that spiral into heady intellectual territory, which is achieved through the group’s long, interweaving instrumental sections ... .”

But to reduce Lloyd to a member of Television – whose initial incarnation disbanded in 1978 after two sterling studio albums – is to diminish a more-than-respectable career as a performer and songwriter outside of that band, and to rob the world of a fascinating person.