Breaking The Rock And Roll Combination At Day One Of Odessa Fest, Nightlight, Chapel Hill Friday 23rd by Iman Lababedi

Some metaphors sit on your head until you write em.

Odessa records owner Paul Finn and I are stuck outside of Nightlights late Friday afternoon knocking back Pabst Blue Ribbons and taking turns trying to open the combination lock of the gate to the club.

Various members of several bands playing tonight park their cars and take a crack at it but in the end Paul drives home, picks up a screwdriver and unscrews the hinges.

And that, my friend, is exactly what happened Friday night. Odessa records didn’t break the code of rock, they took down the hinges and broke in a different way.

Wesley Wolfe

First up was Wesley. Earlier that afternnon I mentioned to Wesley how I hated bands who didn’t talk to their audience. They were, after all, entertainers. Wesley looked worried about what he should say, “Hello Chapel Hill…”

He shouldn’t have worried. With just a guitar and a loop machine (and Paul on keyboards for one song), he was charming, just chatty enough and much loved by the audience. Even when he couldn’t get the loop working right for “Gone For Good” (may I recommend he youtube some live on stage Tune-Yard, she is great at it ) off his Tuesday released first album Storage, Wesley shrugs it off with a wry smile and a “I played it better this morning.”

But not much better. He went to Florida last week and played a string of dates in anticipation of tonight’s set and it was a smart move because he did NOT WANT TO SUCK with the bands following him. Instead he had the calmness that allowed for passion you can only get from rehearsing in front of an audience.

If you haven’t heard Wesley Wolfe, he is a classic singer-songwriter in a line from Chapel Hill alumni James Taylor and Marshall Crenshaw (Storage is Crenshaw’s first album without big label financing, thirty years later) and he lives and dies on his songs and they are all great though the set is a little lobsided. Wesley opens with the excellent “Your Friend” off the newly released Odessa comp Odessiac Arrtctosk Plation. He follows it with a song I’ve written about incessantly on Rock NYC “Only Ray Of Sunshine”, and follows those with “Gone For Good” and “Sorry Only Counts The First Time” and though “Primary Colors” is waiting in the wings, it still feels weighted. All his easiest material upfront. But maybe not. A fabulous set and it needed to be because…

Waumiss

have gone heavy metal on our ass. If you stream em on myspace Waumiss have that ambient tinkle folkie Brooklyn groove thang going on. Not tonight, tonight they are channeling their inner Ozzy. Lead singer Caroline Blomquist. says “More vagina on the mic” and they basically take it from their.

Guitarist Clarque Bomquist of Kingsbury Manx has a lotta fucking vagina on his lead guitar and the riffs are more metal, less heavy, though in conversation he namechecks Metallica’s first two albums as major influences.

They don’t fix Caroline’s vocals and that’s a real shame because the set is like a bomb exploding in your middle ear and with vocals it woulda been a hard to act follow. Actually it woulda been a hard act to follow anyway except…

Shit Horse

are not just any band.

When Finn discusses Shit Horse he almost jumps out of his skin with excitement and around thirty seconds into their first release, a cassette with a free mp3 download, They Shit Horses… Don’t They? (punning off the great 70s movie) it is obvious this is about as great as rock and roll ever gets. With Josh Lajopie -a pretty fucking rock and roll star in his own rights who leads Americans In France, on one side, and John Jaquiss, a rock hero who will be doing this all the rest of his days, you still can’t get over Danny Mason.

Danny dances, he drops back, he falls forward, he sees no difference between the stage and the floor: he moves between both with ease. And between wondrous rock choruses from John and Josh he testifies in free form poetry like Patti Smith meets Otis Redding (or maybe more like George Clinton) meets the Sex Pistol in an all pistols blazing, startling and original mash up. You’ve never heard anything like this. Never. Danny Mason introduces himself as “local legend” and it is an understatement. It is zero disrespect to tell the rest of the world that Shit Horse is the band to beat.

I will write more when I post the Danny Mason interview but next up is the scary

Inspector 22

nobody in their right mind, and I’ll leave that comment to dangle, would want to follow Shit Horse. Except the sound is so different. As you may have noticed by now there isn’t an Odessa sound, more like a buncha musicians playing any type of music and without labels.

Inspector 22 is Todd Wesley Emmert, a singer songwriter and artist (the paintings are glorious and surrealistic and some are on the wall at Highlight) and, unlike the down to earth Odessa musicians who morph on stage, on stage and off Emmert is the same man. He has piercing blue eyes and an awkwardness which suggests a strong introversion.

He writes all the songs and used to play them by himself but he has a band now featuring long time Kingsbury Manx bassist Ryan Richardson. Together they play rock takes on obtuse quasi folk topped by
a nerd on steriods serial killer singsong vocal and lyrics as likely to be about cannibalism or mother’s murdering their children as falling in love.

The set is so intense and Todd such a mesmerizing (it is like looking at Houdini) presense this band is unlike anything elsein an evening that INCLUDES DANNY MASON!!!

And now it is well late and the last act is up and it is another buncha local heroes

TRANSPORTATION

Transportation are a three piece classic rock band filtered through UK rock of the 70s (sometimes they sound so much like Queen it’s weird) but filtered, intentionally or otherwise, through a college good time bar band aesthetic. It is a pure blast, especially on “Graduation” from their last album Daydreams and the last song which was the purest encore I’ve ever heard. After Ben Dunlap, Stephen Murtaugh and Robert Scruggs played a hard, crowd pleasing half hour set and had packed up their gear and guess what? Worth the refusal for a terrific singalong on a song I can’t find, “The Yard”. Ben is the mouthpiece and guitarist but Transportation are a real democracy and the real thing.

They are the great American band who could be Tom Petty big if the wheel of fortune had stopped in the right place. There will always be a place in rock and roll for a band as great as Transportation.

Or any of these bands.

They are all great -like I said yesterday, Inspector 22, Kingsbury Manx -all these folks: they aren’t waiting for the wheel of fate. It has turned and it has pointed to these guys and they deserve every ounce of praise.

Where to start?

The new Weley Wolfe album is where to start.

then the compiliation

then shit horse

then EVERYTHING ELSE.

I don’t wanna hear a fucking word about how music used to be better. This stuff is awesome. http://www.odessarecords.com/.

Get out your credit card and support your local indie label. As someone else once put it: these bands will change your life.

Breaking The Rock And Roll Combination At Day One Of Odessa Fest, Nightlight, Chapel Hill Friday 23rd by Iman Lababedi

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