Recap: Thao With The Get Down Stay Down and The Portland Cello Project at The Black Cat

“I’m sorry that all of my songs are about breaking up,” Thao Nguyen admitted near the end of her set Friday night at The Black Cat. “Don’t listen to them.” At any other rock show, such a statement would likely come off as merely apologetic emo-ism. But under the circumstances, Nguyen’s line was both a refreshingly self-aware assessment of her cathartic new record, Know Better Learn Faster, and an appropriate response to the moment. Seconds earlier—after a string of songs about lost love, emotionless sex, and lovers' quarrels—Nguyen invited a noticeably shaking indie kid and his girlfriend onstage (masked as a celebration of “Fan And Friends Appreciation Night”), so that he could propose to her in front of a few hundred complete strangers. Kind of cheesy? Maybe. But still adorable? Absolutely.

The proposal was the second of two endearingly out-of-place moments over the course of the night. The first was the opening set from The Portland Cello Project. As the name implies, PCP is a chamber quintet of cellists that aims to “bring the cello to places you wouldn't normally hear it,” as one band member put it (like, say, a loud, drunken rock club). The group has an intriguing aesthetic, bouncing from original classical arrangements to a range of quirky rock and pop covers (from Pantera to indie-folk rockers Norfolk And Western, from Britney Spears’ “Toxic” to a high-energy rendition of OutKast's “Hey Ya”). But, based on the crowd’s incrementally rising decibel level throughout the set, the band's sound was more befitting the cocktail hour of a hip wedding reception than a rock show (aforementioned engaged couple, take note).

The set from Thao And The Get Down Stay Down was considerably more upbeat and engaging than its predecessor's, despite the less-than-uplifting subject matter of the band’s most recent recordings. In addition to her understated guitar skill (which was on full display Friday night), Nguyen’s voice is indie-pop gold—sultry and soulful, angsty and gritty, like Cat Power doing an impersonation of Iggy Pop. Perhaps Thao describes her musical style best in the verse to “Fixed It!”: telling the “sober truth” in a “sleepy tone.”

The band’s sound is especially powerful in songs of pain and sexual dissatisfaction; tracks early in the set like “Body” and “When We Swam” seemed to ooze sincerity. After the latter, Thao took a moment to poll the audience on the lyrics in the chorus. (Apparently “Bring your hips to me” sounds an awful lot like “Open your hips for me” when sung in her smoky mezzo-soprano.) To prove that her lyrics weren’t always gloomy and depressing, Nguyen reached deep into the band’s discography, choosing “What About” and “Moped” from her 2005 debut, Like The Linen, and a handful of tracks from her 2008 breakthrough, We Brave Bee Stings And All (including “Big Kid Table,” “Fear And Convenience,” “Feet Asleep,” and “Bag Of Hammers”).

The band spent its early years in the D.C. suburbs, a fact Thao alluded to early in the show by greeting the crowd with “It’s good to be home.” Maybe it was just an effect of her intoxicating blitheness onstage, but the now San Francisco-based songstress did appear to feel at-home throughout the set. Somewhere in the encore, between toothbrush-bows on her guitar in “Moped” and a jam-heavy extended version of “Feet Asleep” (which featured all the members of the show’s three bands), Thao effectively summed up her reaction to the night: “This is like the best homecoming dance ever.”

http://www.avclub.com/dc/articles/thao-with-the-get-down-stay-down-and-the-portland,35134/

Review: Le Loup's Family

In the past two years, D.C.’s Le Loup has evolved from an experimental solo project to a cohesive art-rock collective. The band’s 2007 debut, The Throne Of The Third Heaven Of The Nations’ Millennium General Assembly, was predominantly a pet project of frontman Sam Simkoff—an intriguing assortment of psychedelic banjo jams, tweaked-out drum machine backbeats, and other experimental bedroom tinkerings. Le Loup took a drastically different approach to its aptly named follow-up, Family, retreating to a North Carolina cabin (and later a basement in Silver Spring), disconnecting all communication with the outside world, and collaborating during the songwriting process. The result is an intoxicatingly warm and complex album, which captures a sound that’s simultaneously familiar and experimental, accessible and esoteric—a sound that manages to borrow respectfully without seeming stale or contrived. This note of collaborative maturity will be on full display when the quintet hits up The Black Cat tomorrow night.

It’s difficult to discuss Family without sputtering off a list of vaguely comparable indie acts—the layered cooperative vocals and dissonant tribal arrangements of Animal Collective, the harmonic country charm of Fleet Foxes, the achy vocals of Justin Vernon. But such analogies tend to imply that Family is little more than an art-rock pastiche, which is a disservice to Le Loup’s distinctive sound. The record’s first few tracks play like a tasting of internationally flavored Americana: “Saddle Mountain” opens with banjo-sprinkled Gregorian chants, “Beach Town” seamlessly floats from a danceable samba beat into an Afro-pop jam, and “Grow” swells like a Panda Bear cover of an early-'60s doo-wop hit, backed, no less, by a rhythm that might have been stripped from the studio recording of “Be My Baby.”

From there, Family takes on a more billowing, folky tone, shifting focus to the band as a collective unit. On “Family,” “Forgive Me,” and “Sherpa,” for instance, every verse, refrain, and chorus is shared among the five band members. There’s a certain comfort in the flattened structure of these harmonies—the entire band shares a single melody as if it were a collective family belonging. The record culminates in an eight-minute epic, “A Celebration,” arguably the best track Le Loup has put out yet. There’s a polished sense of composition here, driven by Robert Sahm’s intricate, unpredictable percussion, Simkoff’s echoing vocals, and a slew of perplexing effects in the periphery.

It’s worth noting one potential cause for frustration in Family’s second half. Le Loup has a tendency to begin tracks with faint, at times almost inaudible atmospheric textures—say, the minute-long hodgepodge of swishing water and ticking clocks to start “Sherpa” or the opening swirls of synths and guitars in “Go East”—which ends up feeling a little too overboard. This near-dead air can be exasperating for anyone that’s jonesing for a quick hook fix, but there’s also a hypnotic allure in these movements. If you can manage to keep your finger off the fast-forward button, it’ll make the subsequent build-up that much more rewarding.

Perhaps it’s just a coincidence that Le Loup included a song named “Go East” in Family, or maybe it’s a deliberate response to Throne’s “Look To The West”—as if to acknowledge the band’s journey over the past couple years. Gone are the days of a talented loner fiddling with a Casio in the D.C. suburbs. On Family, Le Loup emerges as a tight-knit band of talented instrumentalists, a band that fully embraces collaboration and appreciates the power of sticking to its roots.

Grade: A-

http://www.avclub.com/dc/articles/le-loups-family,34966/