Kyle Woolard—the fuzz-folk, almost-Mark Kozelek songwriter behind Uncle Jemima—e-mailed me in October to let me know that he’d joined up with local trio Astronomers. Not long after, the band booked an EP release gig at Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar, and local musician/producer Lance Brenner sent me a note to let me know that the band’s six-song EP, Think Fast!, was available for listening online.
|
The right stuff? Local rock act Astronomers team up with producer Lance Brenner for the bottle rocket dance-rock album, Think Fast! |
Here we are, two weeks after the EP release show and a month after Woolard first contacted me, and the Astronomers’ EP is only now entering Feedback’s orbit. And there’s plenty to say about the six tracks and the space-rock cadets that lit their fuses.
Remember when Coldplay borrowed from the New Order songbook on “Talk” and “Speed of Sound” and became, briefly, less cloying? Nate Bolling has the words to accompany the band’s anxious jitters on tracks like “The Singularity” and “Perpetual Emotion”—we won’t dock him points for that particular pun. And Brenner’s production is a reminder that, before he busied himself with production work for Corsair, Travis Elliott and Pantherburn, he has an ear for pop-punk hooks that makes the genre seem a lot less saccharine.
The Astronomers’ EP was a reminder that it’s easy to make a meal of a single album or film or painting. This week, Feedback decided he’d survey the buffet, see what he’d missed recently and load up his plate. Starting with…
WTJU: Specifically, “Auntie Beast’s Radio Theatre” on Wednesday nights at 11pm. Last week, DJ Sarah Lawson started the last-call show with The Black Heart Procession’s “All My Steps” and moved on to Karl Blau and Kurt Vile before peaking in the middle of the show with Sleater-Kinney’s “Heart Factory.” Both Lawson and DJ Lady D play pop that can flirt with heaviness, but not in an existential, up-all-night way. Listen late and listen up.
•
Four County Players: The Barboursville theater packed its newly utilized basement, dubbed “The Cellar,” for Mafia on Prozac—enough to add a date for November 20. The yule-tide B.B. gun comedy A Christmas Story opening on December 4, so book your tickets now. And don’t shoot your eye out.
•
Second Street Gallery: Sandeep Mukherjee’s exhibit of four Duralene paintings remain up through December 31, which should give you enough time to sort through your feelings of vertigo. Standing in the middle of the gallery and panning the room gives the feeling that Mukherjee’s work is racing forward around craggy black mountains to embrace you. Approaching one piece at a time inverts the effect, pulls you towards tree rings, pond ripples, a nautilus shell.
•
DJ eSc’s Poptarts mixtape series: The best DJs look at mixes as if they were logic problems—equations in which solving for X means finding a rational transition from a remix of Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the U.S.A.” to Natalie Imbruglia’s “Want.” Eric Cross, a.k.a. DJ eSc, is our rhythmic Rain Man—persistent and productive, able to leap between buried remixes of Madonna’s “Frozen” and Pussycat Dolls with a single, indulgently sweet trip through his record collection. You can find hours of his mixes archived at escisme.blogspot.com.
Open Studio stretches out
When Open Studio caught up with dancer Rose Pasquarello Beauchamp, a founder of inFluxdance and one of the main forces behind the new dance minor in UVA’s Drama Department, she was in the thick of planning “Structurally Sound.” Beauchamp tasked her dance students with choreographing dances that they could perform while wearing things like braces and restraints—medical tools as uniquely inhibiting as they are enabling.
After hearing Beauchamp’s comments about the show, Feedback decided he’d head to Helms Theatre last Monday to catch the one-off performance of “Structurally Sound.” Read the Feedback blog at c-ville.com for more on the show.
