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 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.

"I'm not working as much as I've been," said 78-year-old Lonnie Brooks in a recent phone interview. "I had in mind to try to retire, but my boys keep tellin' me, 'Let's go out there.'"

I asked him when he decided he wanted to retire. Without missing a beat or belying the joke, the Louisiana-bred Chicagoan deadpanned: "I was thinking about this about 16 years ago. But I needed money, so I kept on."

Brooks' "retirement" decision coincided with his last studio release of new recordings, 1996's Roadhouse Rules - which in retrospect seems to have ended a two-decade solo run on the Alligator label, including 1979's classic Bayou Lightning. The All Music Guide called him "a Chicago blues giant" with a "unique Louisiana/Chicago blues synthesis unlike anyone else's on the competitive Windy City scene."

For the music career of singer/guitarist Coco Montoya, thank the persistence of John Mayall.

It's not merely that Mayall called Montoya to ask him to join the legendary Bluesbreakers band in the early 1980s. It's that he called back when Montoya - who had quit music as a profession after a stint drumming for Albert Collins in the 1970s - hung up on him.

"I didn't think it was him," Montoya said in a recent phone interview, promoting his Saturday bandshell performance at the Mississippi Valley Blues Festival. "I was bartending at a British pub. ... So I thought it was some of the English cats in there teasing me. ... He called back. 'No, this really is John Mayall. ... Do I have to come down there ... ?'"