items tagged with Redstone Room

My first listens to And Other Anagrams, the full-length debut of the Quad Cities trio Ragaman, brought to mind something Andrew Bird said to me in a 2007 interview: “I don’t know what a bass line is supposed to do.” The context was finding collaborators who didn’t play “stock footage,” who fight pop formulas in the creation of pop music.

Bird and Ragaman share an endearing softness and a natural aversion to subjugating intelligence, and both seem constitutionally incapable of conventional approaches, from instrumentation to style to structure. Ragaman employs the sitar as the lead on “Everyone You Know,” for example, and it’s the perfect essential detail: Taking the traditional rock role of the electric guitar, the instrument is comfortable yet foreign, and its chattiness anchors the song. The break of “Ankle Bells” features what sound like kazoos and trumpets – although I suspect some of that is mouth-mimicry.

Singer/songwriter/guitarist Lars Rehnberg, bassist/engineer Gordon Pickering, and percussionist Leif Rehnberg make up Ragaman – an anagram of “anagram,” a joke referenced in the album’s title. Their style is a pop stew with distinct flavors – jazz, funk, and world music intermingle and take turns dominating. But it’s unified enough by its ambition, its breezy texture, and the vocals and playing of Lars Rehnberg – a former co-worker at the River Cities’ Reader.

The Minnesota-based Finnish-American instrumental folk duo Kaivama – performing at the River Music Experience on March 10 – has been around for less than two years, and multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Rundman acknowledges that “the whole band has kind of happened in reverse. We got a gig before we existed as a group. So we had to form the band in order to play the gig.”

And its self-titled debut album came out less than a year after the group’s genesis – before it had even toured.

Rundman attributes this to demand. The Finnish-American population, he said in a phone interview last month, is small but active, and that audience frankly doesn’t have many options when it comes to traditional music from its ancestral home.“It’s a niche,” he said. “We’re some of the only choices they have as far as that goes.

“But apart from the demographics, I think it’s because Nordic music is really beautiful. I don’t say that because we’re such a great band; I say that because ... it’s just beautiful music. ... It’s just undeniably gorgeous music. ... The raw material is wonderful.”

He’s right, but also too modest. With roughly the same number of traditional tunes and originals, Kaivama is expertly poised between the old and new – aged melodies adorned by modern flourishes. A warm, jaunty keyboard, for example, matches Sara Pajunen’s coolly nimble fiddle on opening track “Schottische 150.”

In an interview, Robert and Scott Cerny – who will be playing as the Cerny Brothers on December 23 at the Redstone Room – said their album Dream grew out of one song: “I Want You to Run.” The record’s second track, it fuses elements of country, folk, and bluegrass with polished vocal and lyrical stylings that sound more like pop.

Starting at an ambling pace, “I Want You to Run” mixes a simple drum and high-hat beat supporting steel and acoustic accompaniment that rolls into the first verse: “I want you to run / Past your childhood home / To the great unknown.”

This verse embodies the major thematic element of the album – that yearning to leave, that desire to take a chance and have someone else come along to share the experience. The writing here has a simple elegance and unforced honesty that work with the intricate pick work to create a sense of urgency. Here there’s a radical optimism that’s at the core of the entire album, a refusal to believe that dreams are better deferred than pursued.

The Envy Corps sell a T-shirt that proclaims the Iowa- and Nebraska-based band is “Radiohead for Coldplay Fans.”

Vocalist and bassist Luke Pettipoole said in an interview last week that he came up with the idea with his tongue in cheek, and that he’s been surprised how receptive fans have been. “People really seem to enjoy it,” he said. “I don’t know if they’re making fun of us, or we’re making fun of Coldplay, or what.”

But it’s possible there’s no mockery involved at all. After a one-record stint on major-label imprint Vertigo (which released 2008’s Dwell), the Envy Corps returned this fall with the self-released full-length It Culls You. Beyond the way Pettipoole’s phrasing and frequent falsetto bring to mind Thom Yorke (“I sing the way I sing,” he said), the album sounds like the child of Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief – and in the best way possible. Spacious yet full, odd yet alluring, the parentage is obvious but It Culls You never feels like you’re listening to a clone. If Coldplay figures in, it’s in the way the Envy Corps favors accessibility over alienation.

After singer/songwriter Rachael Yamagata was freed from her contract with Warner Bros., she called producer John Alagia about making her third album. She didn’t send him songs to consider, and they didn’t discuss material. The next day, they were making arrangements to get equipment and musicians to his house in Maryland.

“Within a few weeks, we were ... actually doing it,” Yamagata said in a phone interview this week, promoting her November 12 performance at the Redstone Room.

Moving quickly was a response to “several years of kind of being in this holding-pattern experiment with major record labels,” she said. “It was a lot of leap-before-you-look scenarios. I just knew that if you got the right people in the room, we could make it work.”

And the right people wanted to help. “I think people look at me maybe as an underdog of sorts, always wanting good things for me,” she said. “A lot of my peers I think have felt the frustration with me about ‘Where’s your next record?’ or ‘Why aren’t you on the road?’”

Self-taught guitarist Joe Robinson won Australia’s Got Talent in 2008, and he earned the top prize at the 2009 World Championships of Performing Arts – meaning that at age 20 he carries the ridiculous title of Senior Grand Champion Performer of the World. Guitar Player readers tapped him the best new talent in the magazine’s 2010 poll. He released a pair of solo instrumental acoustic albums as a teenager.

All of that hints at a young man with talent and ambition. Now it’s time to see whether Robinson’s chops can match his drive. Because what Joe Robinson really wants to do is sing.

He will play at the Redstone Room on Friday, September 2, and the show promises to be significantly different from his two CDs, which showcased a surfeit of compositional and performance skills in the jazz and blues veins.

As “This Masquerade” begins on her recently released live CD recorded at Davenport’s Redstone Room, Pamela Reese Smith’s voice emerges from the piano prelude of Manny Lopez III as a husky, tuneful whisper, growing louder and more intense from phrase to phrase. As she builds, she blends breathiness and fullness to create a wistful and passionate melody. Her use of a light, breathy tone establishes the mournful mood of the song, especially when singing the word “lost,” imparting confusion and hopelessness.

Her voice continues to soften and grow with the lyrics. When singing the phrase “this masquerade,” she starts quietly and then allows her voice to expand as she holds out the line –communicating strength, despair, and other feelings.

Throughout the album, Smith employs this effectively expressive technique, and her big voice creates a deep, encompassing sound. But at times she misses the pitch a little, and the heavy richness of her voice becomes a disadvantage.

Jonathan Tyler has described his band’s major-label debut, Pardon Me, as a “handshake album” – an introduction.

But unlike that description or the apologetic title, there’s nothing polite about the full-bore rock produced by Jonathan Tyler & the Northern Lights – which will perform at the Redstone Room on July 7.

USA Today concisely summarized the appeal of the band in naming Pardon Me a pick of the week last year: “Did you think they’d quit making bands that groove as hard as they rock? You know, like ZZ Top, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Aerosmith? Listen to this riff-heavy blast, the title track from this band’s debut album, and think again.”

Blue Grass resident David G. Smith calls himself a “50-something,” and on Saturday he’ll mark the release of his first solo full-length album at the Redstone Room.

It’s undoubtedly a late start, but Smith said in a phone interview this week that he has genetics on his side. Two of his grandparents made it to their mid 90s, and one lived to 105. So by his calculation, “I have a 20-year career ahead of me.”

It’s off to a good start. Non-Fiction is a solid debut for the longtime songwriter – acoustic rock that’s sometimes funky and sometimes gentle, smartly produced and performed with conviction.

David Lowery saw no reason to make a solo album.

For more than 25 years, he’s been recording and releasing music with his bands Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker – a pair of “very diverse and flexible ensembles,” he said in a phone interview last week. “And so usually pretty much any piece of music I write, I can kind of put it with either one of the bands or the other.”

And both bands remain active, regularly touring together since 2002. “I know the Cracker and Camper audiences overlap like 90 percent,” he said. “And it’s just a little artificial sometimes to feel like, ‘Tonight the billboard says Cracker, and we’re only going to play Cracker songs.’”

But in February, at age 50, Lowery released under his own name The Palace Guards, a collection of nine songs that, he has said, gives “a sense of what it is that I’m kind of bringing to the bands.”