Here At The Home: Remembering Tribe

By Chelsea Spear

Photo from Tribe Online

An excerpt from my diary, circa seventh grade: “Listening to Tribe makes me feel like I’m drinking wine at a party with my parents, wearing a velvet dress.” Ah, the purple prose of preadolescence. Scratch the surface of my attempts at poetic music criticism, though, and you’ll find a grain of truth.

During their decade-long tenure, the Boston quintet created music that was both festive and formal. Their first local hit, the provocatively-titled “Abort,” was propelled by a galloping rhythm and built to an irresistibly shuddering crescendo that would be welcome at any house party. Their debut LP Here at the Home sounded like a treasure chest of lush melodies, gilded with sepulchral organ parts and choirs of background vocals. The band’s tight arrangements and singer Janet Lavalley’s wine-dark croon sounded heady and intoxicating, but the traditional song structures and melodies had a sense of sonic safety for a young listener. My tastes might never mature enough for more discordant sounds of the avant-garde, but at that time, Tribe was almost more subversive. Like the truths you’d heard at a party when you were up past your bedtime.

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Movie Review: The Red Machine

By Chelsea Spear

In the annals of unlikely buddy teams, the portrayal of a working relationship between a rock-ribbed naval officer and a wisecracking thief seems so obvious, it’s a wonder it hasn’t been done before. Stephanie Argy and Alec Boehm’s compulsively watchable heist flick The Red Machine hinges on such a surprising bond. Set against the conflicted relationship between the US and Japan in the years before World War II, Argy and Boehm create a fascinating world.

The place is Washington, DC; the time, 1935. The Great Depression is at its height, and war between the Allies and Axis powers is over half a decade away. Cryptologists in the nation’s capitol are working to decode a series of messages sent from the Japanese consulate. Two unlikely accomplices must work closely with one another to aid in the cryptologists’ plight: Eddie Doyle (Donal Thoms-Cappello), a voluble, fast-talking safecracker, and F. Ellis Coburn (Lee Perkins), a disgraced naval officer as mysterious as his first initial. Coburn regards Doyle with silent contempt, while Doyle works to get thrown off this project by trying to get on Coburn’s last good nerve. In spite of their fractious bond, the immovable object and unstoppable force work together to create a caper that will allow them to get the goods on their opponents.

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NaNoWriMo 2012

By Chelsea Spear

I do my best work when I have a sense of structure, when I’m allowed to bash something out on a quick turnaround time, and when I can work independently within a community. Thus, National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo as it’s known to its fans and followers) seems like something so well suited to my sensibilities that it’s a wonder I haven’t done it before. November of 2012 will be my inaugural year working on NaNo.

For the uninitiated, NaNoWriMo is fairly straightforward. Aspiring novelists must write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. Freelance writer Chris Baty founded NaNoWriMo in July of 1999, but later moved it forward to November “to more fully take advantage of the miserable weather” in his hometown of San Francisco. Throughout the years, NaNo has grown from a small event in which Baty participated with a small clutch of friends, to an event that spans the globe and has spawned a number of best-selling books. (If you read Water for Elephants or The Night Circus, congratulations: you have enjoyed the fruits of NaNoWriMo.) A lively community has sprung up among aspiring writers in Boston, replete with overnight write-ins and games of Word Wars on the regional board.

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Music Review: Rick Berlin & The Nickel and Dime Band, Always On Insane

By Chelsea Spear

An old saying about the Champs-Elysses: If you stand on its corner long enough, you’ll run into someone you know. This adage is also true for Boston rock legend Rick Berlin‘s career. Berlin has honed his barbed sense of pop music over almost four decades, fronting the ambitious bands Orchestra Luna and Berlin Airport and playing a weekly residency at the drag bar Jacques Cabaret.

A series of very fortunate events positioned Berlin as an unlikely overnight success. A longtime fan sent him a check for $10,000 out of the blue, which allowed him to record his latest long-player, Always On Insane. Not long after its completion, rustic rock favorites Dr. Dog invited Berlin to open for them at their recent Boston engagement, introducing him to a younger audience.

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Music Review: Dark Dark Dark, Who Needs Who

By Chelsea Spear

If Who Needs Who dropped in the early 1990s, Dark Dark Dark would have appeared in Sassy magazine’s “One to Watch” column. This band is the real deal. Frontwoman Nona Marie Imrie has a striking voice, their songs are catchy and insightful, and their arrangements and the spare production cast a spell over the listener. This Minneapolis-based quintet has a great album in them. The band’s third long-player isn’t quite that album.

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Micah Sheveloff, Exhibitionist

By Chelsea Spear

Listening to Micah Sheveloff‘s solo debut brings to mind a variant on everyone’s favorite movie trailer voiceover: “IN A WORLD. Where smug, solipsistic bros have taken over the airwaves. ONE MAN. Can save the ‘singer/songwriter’ genre from navel-gazing boredom.”

While Micah Sheveloff easily fits into this niche, his work lacks the snoozy self-absorption that has given it a bad name. His music, with its rich melodies, rolling bar chords, quotable lyrics, and that lived-in marvel of a voice, elevates his material from the closing credits of Grey’s Anatomy to something more transporting and otherworldly.

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Basquiat Goes To The Cinema

By Chelsea Spear

Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child, 2010

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s life seems all but made for the silver screen. The art world star lived fast. During his 27 years on the planet, he created a complex, engaging body of work. In addition to his solo paintings, he collaborated with Andy Warhol and formed the No Wave band Gray. He died young as the result of self-destructive habits. And he left a good-looking corpse. The half-life of flickering 16mm and unforgiving video reveals a young man with the sulky charisma of a 1950s screen idol.

About a decade after Basquiat’s death, he began surfacing in the movies. His life has the potential for either a brilliant big-screen epic in the style of Lust for Life or a misdirected attempt at catching lightning in a bottle. How have the different films about Jean-Paul Basquiat stacked up?

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Searching For Sugar Man

By Chelsea Spear

Who is, or was, Sixto Diaz Rodriguez? A lifelong resident of Detroit, and the son of Mexican immigrants who moved to the Midwest to work for Ford. A “prophet, “a wise man”, and a “wandering spirit” in the eyes of his coworkers on construction crews. A social activist who ran for office in his hometown, and who brought his five daughters to protests. A man of modest means who lives an ascetic life.

For a brief period in the 1970s, Rodriguez was a solo artist who released two remarkable albums—Cold Fact and Coming From Reality—that reached an audience so small, the cliché “cult hero” would overestimate it. While the albums sold an estimated six copies in America and quickly lapsed out of print, Cold Fact made it to South Africa not long after it came out here. Rodriguez’s anti-establishment lyrics, combined with his driving melodies and funky arrangements, made him a folk hero to South Africans bristling under apartheid. That Rodriguez was rumored to have committed a grisly suicide before a live audience only deepened his legend.

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Jezzy & the Belles, Compasses & Maps

By Chelsea Spear

One of the reasons why I got into music criticism was to discover and herald to the world up and coming artists. Thus, writing less than positive reviews of new artists’ self-released work causes me a small amount of pain. Someone took great time and expense to write, arrange, record, and press an album, and I don’t want to downplay their hard work by speaking ill of them in public. However, once in a while the dirty task of shrugging off a self-released album must be done.

And so it came to pass that Jezzy & the Belles‘ debut album, Compasses & Maps, came into my possession. I volunteered to review it on the strength of a few YouTube clips that established Jessica Eisenberg’s strong musical and lyrical abilities, and had looked forward to hearing a rising star for the first time. Sadly, the balance of the album’s nine tracks left a bland impression.

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On The Airwaves, Postmeridian: Q&A with Glenn di Benedetto of Parlour Bells

By Chelsea Spear

Nate Leavitt, Glenn di Benedetto of Parlour Bells
Photo © Derek Kouyoumjian

After the Parlour Bells ended an epic set at the funeral for Boston radio station WFNX, former ‘FNX program director Paul Driscoll was heard to say “I think I have a crush on the whole band!” It’s not hard to see why one would become besotted with the rising Boston quartet. Their darkly romantic pop songs engage the listener with anthemic melodies, cinematic arrangements, and seductive vocals. Fans of Orange Juice, Peter Murphy, and Sparks might find room in their hearts for these up-and-comers.

On a balmy mid-July day, I called up charismatic vocalist Glenn di Benedetto to learn more about the Parlour Bells. (more…)