Live in L.A.: Ferraby Lionheart, Great Lake Swimmers, Marissa Nadler and Eleni Mandell

Ferraby Lionheart, Great Lake Swimmers, Eleni Mandell, Marissa Nadler
at Hotel Café, June 21, 2007
By John Payne
Music: Stream the upcoming album by Marissa Nadler.

An intriguingly balanced night of the newer various strands of, er, uh, well, acoustic rock or pop, I guess you’d have to refer to it. Post-post Americana in one shape or another figured heavily in these performances – lots of acoustic guitars, banjos, strap-on harmonicas and so forth, of course loads of irony-tinged but heartfelt, yearning sincerity, etc. – but the seemingly infinite possible varieties within the form was what was really on striking display.

Gentle but firm, Farabey Lionheart strikes you with the focused intelligence underlying his down-to-earth, laid-back persona and his engrossing story-songs. With eyes shut and a slight grimace, he delivered a lyrically involving and musically deep set drawn from his very fine recent EP and upcoming Nettwerk full-length. He’s a real musician, his acoustic guitar- and piano-accompanied pieces showing great technical craft and, interestingly, dual cues drawn from the burnished Dylanish strains of ‘60s folk and, almost perversely but not quite, what sounded like Elton John channeling Cole Porter; his love-and-loss-and-love-again-type subject matter was thus often given a rather bubbly and bouncy musical field of play, which gave his songs a resonant ambiguity and highly visual impact.

Great Lake Swimmers from Toronto followed with a satisfying set of material from their several alterna-folk-country albums. Singer-guitarist Tony Dekker led his well-tuned and dynamically deft ensemble with a refreshingly humble clear-headedness; his unfussily plaintive voice, a banjo and harmonium on one of their best songs, “Where in the World Are You,” provided that melancholy but mellow frame of mind you want on long drives toward the sunset, the warmth of the orangey glow slowly fading to gray.

Eleni Mandell’s nourish country-blues-cocktail whatever mix was initially a tad disappointing, seeming, I dunno, a bit 2003, but I decided I was being a jaded schmuck when shortly into her she set won me and a vocerifous crowd over with her familiar sassy smarts and nimbly adventurous musical view. Strumming a mini-acoustic and subtly shaking a loose-limbed, white-frocked tailfeather, Mandell drew from her catalogue of pithy but moving songs; she’s got an excellent combo backing her, including Kevin Fitzgerald on keenly polyrhthmic drums; Ryan Feves on nimble bass; and the super- inventive Jeremy Drake, on heavily tremeloed twang-axe, whose beautifully atypical counterpoints to the sound at large produced head-turning moments with alarming frequency. And that is very good thing.

Those who dearly departed before the unbilled Marissa Nadler’s set missed something really special. The young Rhode Island-based singer-guitarist specializes in a ghostly, gothic sort of world, an atmosphere that permeates her digital-reverbed songs of a life gone to dust. . . I just felt a cold wind blow through … Well, when she intoned “The summer of love is over,” it was unsettling, and when she sang – like a butterfly – “when they took your bones away…” it was downright chilling.

She plays mostly 12-string guitar, with alternate tunings to aid the hypnotic, droning effect, and hers is that more classical or European base for harmony, with Bachlike bass lines; she was given extraordinarily sensitive bass accompaniment by Jonah, who’s other day job is with the exceedingly heavy metal gods Earth. Meanwhile, as the ghost of Judee Sill hovered nearby, Nadler did some nice covers, including Leonard Cohen’s very fitting “Suzanne” and something by Townes Van Zandt. Nadler’s debut album, Songs III Bird on the Water, comes out in August – it is all the abovementioned and more, and you’re advised to seek it and savor.

– John Payne

All photos by John Payne

Marissa Nadler - Under an Old Umbrella

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