Tag: hi-tone-caf

The son of late blues and gospel great Robert Wilkins, North Mississippi’s Reverend John Wilkins has continued his father’s blend of country-blues and gospel, layering it with a more modern, electric hill-country blues sound. He introduced his sound to the wider world with his terrific 2011 album You Can’t Hurry God, which came across as the Sunday morning answer to the Saturday nights of late hill-country masters Junior Kimbrough and R.L. Burnside. “Don’t let the hearse be the first thing to take you to church,” Wilkins pleads on an album that features soulful, spirited reworkings of blues and gospel standards such as “You Gotta Move,” “Let the Redeemed Say So,” and the elder Wilkins’ trademark “Prodigal Son.”

Wilkins played an afternoon set at last year’s Gonerfest and will keep similar company this week when he opens for Jack O & the Tennessee Tearjerkers at the Hi-Tone Café on Saturday, April 7th. (For more on Jack O-related activity, see the Music Feature, page 24 of this week’s issue.) Showtime is 9 p.m. Admission is $8.

A handful of local acts band together at the Hi-Tone Café this week to raise money and awareness for GrowMemphis, a nonprofit organized to support urban farms and gardens in Memphis and to advocate for local food policy. Formerly a program within the Mid-South Peace and Justice Center, GrowMemphis has recently spun off into a separate entity.

Headlining the benefit show is the Wuvbirds (pictured), an enjoyable new-ish band made up of a pair of couples with notable Memphis music backgrounds. Corey and Kate Crowder were in Two Way Radio, an indie-pop band that had a bit of a moment in the wake of Kate’s co-starring role in Craig Brewer’s $5 Cover. Jared McStay is a local scene veteran who fronted the beloved ’90s band the Simpletones (late Simple Ones), and his wife Lori Gienapp McStay was the original drummer in the garage-blues band the Porch Ghouls and partnered with Alicja Trout in the ultra-fun Ultra Cats. Together, as Wuvbirds, the quartet concocts a warm, welcoming, finger-snapping pop sound rooted in mid-Sixties soul, girl groups, and Phil Spector-style pop. The band released a debut single last fall.

Rounding out the bill are Jeffrey James Hulett (of Snowglobe and his spinoff band, the Haul), Chris Milam, and the Near Reaches. The GrowMemphis benefit is Saturday, March 31st, at the Hi-Tone Café. Doors open at 9 p.m. For more information on the organization, see growmemphis.org. — Chris Herrington

Gonerfest veterans from San Juan, Puerto Rico, Davila 666 is about as sure a thing as a live band as you’ll find these days. Their sound runs the pre-punk-rock gamut — mid-’60s pop melodicism, Stooges swagger, Stones groove, Velvet Underground combo of the twinkling and atonal — but somehow manages to sound like more than mere record-collector-rock mimicry. This startling command and musical ambition make them much more than just good genre music. And, on stage, they are a howlingly good time. Davila 666 returns to Memphis for a second time this year, performing at the Hi-Tone Café on Thursday, November 3rd, with the Barreracudas and Manatees. Doors open at 9 p.m. Admission is $10.

The local indie-rock/noise-pop group Mouserocket may have begun as a solo side project from the tirelessly prolific Alicja Trout (River City Tanlines, Lost Sounds, the Clears), but it has evolved into one of the city’s strongest and most intriguing musical partnerships. With the addition of co-bandleader and music-scene veteran Robby Grant (Big Ass Truck, Vending Machine), Mouserocket has produced three excellent LPs over the years, including the band’s newest, Cicada Sounds.

“It started morphing when I got Robert Barnett [Mouserocket drummer] to record on a couple of songs,” Trout says. “From there, I got Robby for guitar and Ron Franklin on keyboards to play some songs like ‘Song of Broken Glass,’ ‘Walking Lizard,’ and ‘Stomp Around’ [from the band’s eponymous 2004 debut LP], which were songs that did not work for the Lost Sounds.”

Eventually Franklin left the group to pursue other interests, and bassist Hemant Gupta and cellist Jonathan Kirkscey joined the fold, rounding out the current lineup.

Mouserocket came into full bloom as a project with the 2008 release of Pretty Loud, a more cohesive and confident marriage between Trout’s infectious pop songwriting and the darker edge of Grant. The sophomore album was a clear success for the band, garnering positive reviews from Pitchfork and Terminal Boredom.

By 2009, Mouserocket had once again amassed enough new material to begin work on another album and decided to venture out of the home studios of Trout and Grant to record what would become Cicada Sounds. But there was a stipulation.

“One requirement for this record was that we wanted to work fast,” Grant says. “For two reasons, really: One, we are all doing a lot of other stuff, and two, we didn’t want to spend a ton of time in the studio since we didn’t have a lot of money. Alicja and I do a lot of home recording, so it’s kinda hard for us to justify paying money to record.”

Enter producer/engineer Scott Bomar. The band entered Bomar’s Electraphonic Studio in late ’09 and recorded and mixed Cicada Sounds in under five days.

“Bomar said he could do it quickly. We were really happy with what we ended up with,” Grant says.

“Scott told us we were the most sober band he’s ever recorded,” Trout says. “I think he did a great job. It’s the first record where all the songs have the same recording sound because we did them together at Electraphonic. I also think this group of songs is consistently more mainstream viable, though that was unintentional.”

Intentional or not, Trout’s songs on the album — particularly standouts like “I Can’t Keep My Hands Off You” and “Hello (Talk to Me)” — are some of the catchiest and most instantly memorable works she’s ever committed to tape and serve as a perfect complement to Grant’s more complex (though equally engaging) contributions.

Cicada Sounds is being released exclusively in digital format by the New York label Shoulder Tap. Though the reasoning behind this decision was primarily financial, according to Trout, there were other motivating factors.

“We’re tired of seeing our CDs used as coasters and our LPs on the top of bird feeders to discourage squirrels,” she says. “I was at a party last year, and some guy was letting his kitten ride around the turntable on our album Pretty Loud — and that was the last straw.”

As a live act, Mouserocket has always been known as a loose but intense affair, dominated by a spontaneity that comes across as playful and adventurous but never fully improvised or jammy.

“Our greatest asset is not practicing,” Trout says.

But for Friday’s release show for Cicada Sounds, Mouserocket will do something they haven’t done in a long, long time: They will practice more than once before a gig.

“Nothing is really difficult with this band,” Grant says. “That’s kind of our modus operandi. Mouserocket is pretty effortless for us. We’ve gone four months without practicing, and then we’ll play a pretty decent show. It’s weird that we’re doing two practices for this one coming up.”

Mouserocket record release show for Cicada Sounds, with El Cento and the Fuzz

Hi-Tone Cafe

Friday, July 8th, 9 p.m., $5

mouserocket.bandcamp.com

I’m an old familiar tune that you used to hum/Set your watch back, baby, when you see me come,” John Paul Keith sings on the title track to his new album, The Man That Time Forgot.

Keith, even in a city that’s a magnet for tradition-minded musicians, is particularly adept at a wide variety of “roots” forms — Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly-style rock-and-roll, Tex-Mex and honky-tonk country, garage rock, early-’60s soul, folk rock, smoky jazz-blues, and Marshall Crenshaw-style power pop — and his new album’s title hints at this mastery.

But Keith was leery of using it as the title, an idea that producer/label owner Bruce Watson (who is releasing the album via Big Legal Mess, an extension of his Mississippi-based Fat Possum label) pushed.

“At first, I was like, I don’t know about that. It was a little grander than I’m prone to doing,” Keith says, acknowledging that the title hints at his classic bent.

“I looked at it as partly that way and partly as the state of my career,” Keith says. “I’ve been around the edge of the music business and had a couple of close calls with a wider audience but never quite got there, and the title kinda summed that up too.”

A Knoxville native, the well-traveled Keith had been in several bands in several cities — including a short-lived major-label deal for his Nashville band, the Nevers — before relocating to Memphis several years ago and eventually falling in with Midtown musicians Jack Oblivian and Harlan T. Bobo, with whom Keith has now gone on two European tours.

The Man That Time Forgot, due for a local release this week and a national one later this month, will be Keith’s second Memphis album, following 2009’s Spills & Thrills.

The first album was billed to John Paul Keith & the One Four Fives, citing the backing band whose primary/studio lineup now includes drummer John Argroves, bassist Mark Stuart, and keyboard player Al Gamble.

Cutting down to a solo credit on the new album was mostly a realization that the full listing would be both cumbersome and confusing next to the album title, but it was also a nod to the reality of the band’s touring situation, which finds Keith tabbing other local musicians on all three instruments from time to time.

“I wish I could take out [the main lineup] all the time,” Keith says. “But fortunately, Memphis is an embarrassment of riches.”

The new album is another showcase for Keith’s sharp songwriting and facility with different strains of classic American music.

“I try to find a way of doing something that’s interesting to me musically without it being a cliché,” Keith says. “I’m not necessarily always successful, but you try your best, especially lyrically, to find an angle or twist that hasn’t been done. I think the best songs are written without an instrument. Write the song in your head, with the melody and lyrics, without having a guitar or piano. That’s when you’re onto something.”

Often, Keith says, he’ll start with a song title and work from there. One example on The Man That Time Forgot is the jazzy “I Work at Night.”

“I had that lick for several years and couldn’t figure out how to get into the song,” Keith says. “I just came home one night and the phrase was in my head. I had been working at the Hi-Tone Café, working the door, and playing music, working at night.”

“In the middle of the night when good people sleep/That’s about the time I earn my keep,” Keith sings.

“One thing that happened after the first album came out is that I lost my day job. I had an office job for a few years and I lost it,” Keith remembers. “That freed me up to tour, so it was a blessing in a way. I was in a panic there for a few months. But I stopped panicking because I had gigs and money was coming in. It wasn’t a lot but enough to keep the lights on. Two years later, here I am, still doing it.”

In addition to regular home gigs and touring, Keith and his band’s command of different roots forms and limber, dance-friendly sound has made them a popular choice for party and event bookings, a sideline that’s helped Keith avoid the need for a regular day job and keep his focus on music. The band works with local management company Resource Entertainment Group on those bookings.

“We get weddings and private parties, and those generally pay better than club gigs,” Keith says. “But the cool thing about it is we’re able to pretty much do our normal thing. We don’t get too obscure, but we still do our originals and no one’s ever complained. Resource Entertainment has been real cool about it to. They told us, ‘Look, just do what you do.'”

One recent gig had Keith and his band playing a wedding reception at the Hi-Tone, where the 84-year-old grandmother of the bride spent, literally, hours on the dance floor.

“She was a hoot,” Keith says. “We loved her to death. She made our day. We usually do good with that demographic.”

At one point, Keith asked the dancing grandma what she wanted to hear. An Alabama native making her first trip to Tennessee, she wanted to hear some Elvis.

Keith and company — more prone to cover Chuck Berry than Elvis — played “Mystery Train” and then taught themselves “Don’t Be Cruel” on the fly, as younger couples joined the older lady on the dance floor.

“It’s not a One Four Fives gig unless we play something we don’t know how to play,” Keith says.

The Hi-Tone Café

Saturday, June 4th

9 p.m., $7