We’ve arranged a couple of ticket giveaways for upcoming concerts: two lucky concertgoers will get to see Ben Harper (who I interview in my column this week) or the Flaming Lips for free.
Speaking of things that come in twos, I wanted to share a couple of musical items. A lot of different music makes its way to my desk. There are packages, drop-offs, e-mails with mediafire links—you name it. All of them make it into my CD player, but not all of them beg to be written about. Two recently did: Barling and Collins‘ New World Odor and the Cinnamon Band‘s new EP, All Dressed.
Barling and Collins released New World Odor in late March.
Rarely have members of history’s great duos—Thelma and Louise, Simon and Garfunkel, Williams and Sonoma—used each other as an excuse to be so bawdy as guitarist Stephen Barling and cellist Brandon Collins. On their new full-length, New World Odor, Barling casts a demented eye toward silly topics: e-mail spam, staying up all night and a bunch of other stuff I wouldn’t write in this family-friendly blog. But it’s the deadpan delivery and that makes their Barling and Collins’ new record an undeniably fun listen. (The duo plays every Sunday night at Miller’s.)
On New World Odor he sounds like a foul-mouthed Loudon Wainwright who never gets sentimental, and who hasn’t left town in far too long. On "Charlottesville Lady Arm Wrestlers" (Go Punctuator!), "The ref says she’s going to need more than looks, so I bought his ass off with a stack of CLAW bucks." Amid the silliness come songs like "Deeper Forest," Barling shows that he can shred with the best of them. Hilarious, virtuosic and totally local. There’s a full hour of the stuff on this disc. What more could you want?
B.C. performs "Charlottesville Lady Arm Wrestlers" at the Blue Moon Diner in January. More below.
The Cinnamon Band’s All Dressed EP.
The Cinnamon Band has been turning heads for two years now. But they first attracted the notice of Dan Boeckner, of Wolf Parade, while opening for Boeckner’s sideproject, Handsome Furs at the Satellite Ballroom in the spring of 2008. They’ve since shared more than 30 bills with the Furs, and their new EP All Dressed sounds in no small part like a product of Boeckner’s patronage: Recorded at Wolf Parade drummer Arlen Thompson’s Mount Zoomer studio in Montreal, the bombastic Staunton duo retreads the burned-down barns and melted highways of last year’s Springsteen-laced Buena Vista EP.
Where blues musicians took the one-four-five and turned into a world of their own, the Cinnamon Band takes a simpler formula—reliably, or predictably, the one-four—and pummels until it sounds like something new. Opener "I’m Asking You" starts the EP with more bombast than the band can summon for the other three tracks. But as they settle into another kind of Springsteenian groove (less "Badlands," more "I’m On Fire") listeners can still glimpse the intensity of the band’s live show.
There will be a midnight release show for the band on April 23.
The Cinnamon Band at the Southern in March.
What’s the best local duo?
