Beneath Iowa City is a black blind and beautiful warren riven with secret passages. We are musical rabbits, noisemaking ferrets, multiplying in the spring chill.

Wednesday, May 21, 2008



May 20th - Skye, Real Live Tigers, Some really good chick and Caleb Engstrom, Brown Birds
at 300 Kimball House

"Everyone knows Pablo Neruda, right?"

It's the thing only someone from Iowa City would say to a music crowd, and even then only if you're actually in Iowa City. Her stage patter, then, might need some adjusting. But Skye, half of Skursula, has other things right, soloing in violin and voice, plus some loops (all the rage these days). It's haunting minor keys, slow, trance-inducing, in other languages, as twenty-odd people sit around her in the living room of a house that sits alone on a dark, curving lane.

Then tearing into "a little bit of Bach" with blood on the bow, bright rennaissance melodies first edged with a slight anger, then suddenly plunging into some circular room on the edge of space. A bricolage of ramantic tendency. At the very real risk of trivializing it, this would be the weapon of choice for those new steampunk kids the Times is so gaga over.

Then Real Live Tigers - who is one guy with awkwardly robotic vocals, strumming a guitar, rather tamely. Objectively, it actually verges on the amateurish, and song titles like "Winter Blues Number One" definitely make me wish I could muster the kind of bitter commentary I used to be full of. But one thing Iowa City has taught me about is mercy, and faith - to watch, waiting to see what happens next.

He has a song called "Hidden Places." He says it's about house shows, places like the one we're in. The first lyric is "Fuck what you heard," sung in that suddenly-revealed-as-at-least-slightly-self-conscious seriousness. In a club I would probably ignore this. But in someone's living room, I couldn't, even if I wanted to. And once he gets the entire room singing with him, its not at all about how good he is.

(Also, I could have sworn I knew the guy - turns out he's from Austin. I'm pretty sure he was at KVRX back in the day. Can't all be winners.)

I forget the name of the next performer, so feel free to help out. She started off like a spookier, less self-exploitative Fiona Apple - Kurt Weil with an acoustic, orchestratic woozy swerves through oddly subdued underground barrooms. "Would you like me better if I had honey eyes? Would you jump up on me if I put up a fight?"

Caleb Engstrom joined her for a song or two with that falsetto of his. I'm not normally a huge fan of Caleb's - motherfucker can write a hell of a song, but he hasn't quite gotten past the point of just making good music to actually being interesting. He's still just a little too Acoustic Jawbreaker - Romanticism is one thing, but I think he sums it up himself: "I guess with all of this I'm trying to do something honest." Well, guess what - honesty sounds like bullshit 98% of the time, while art has slightly better odds.

I couldn't quite tell what some of the noise mavens were making of all the sweet melodies and romantic poetry - the crows was a bit of a weird mix. But if I had any doubts, things were made much more clear when Brown Bird came on - he had a beard, and a guitar, and a song "about building boats and trying to make babies." That's what's known as a Trifecta. I'll grant he nearly had the gravelly gravitas to pull off the melodrama of his sad-sweet template, and I can't tell you exactly what separated him from, say, Bon Iver
- but in his badman songs of iniquity and loss, the blood turned to corn syrup and food coloring. When you introduce something as a "love song for two women, but one of them is dead. Amelia Earhart." - then you successfully revive my cynicism. And when the central lyrical conceit of another tune is a metaphorical steamboat on "the river that runs through me," that cynicism comes to full flame.

I'll cut Caleb some slack because he's 21 - but if this guy is old enough to grow that much facial hair, he should know better.