Tuesday 02.14.12: Valentine’s Day Song Massacre aka The Sad Hour: GRANT LANGSTON / THE DRIFTWOOD SINGERS / MATT ADAMS & THE BLANK TAPES / AARON BALLARD / ALEX MASLANSKY / THE FAR WEST / YELLOW RED SPARKS / DON CHIANT / RYAN FULLER (FORT KING) / STEFFALOO / MICHAEL UBALDINI / ANDREA COHEN / DEATH TO ANDERS / AARON KYLE / AARON BALLARD / ANDY SIARA & CLARE PALADINO / SOFT SWELLS @ Echo

7:30pm / FREE / 21+


Grant Langston ||Listen || Watch
Up to this point, the press and critics have been dancing all around nouns and adjectives regarding Grant Langston’s music, but I say it’s progressive country, and I say the hell with the rest of my maundering critical peers ’cause that’s the musical county line where Merle first turns back to head to Austin, and the Eagles then travel to SoCal, leaving Langston to tool down the highway with his rockin’, rollickin’, bootscootin’, salt-of-the-earth tavern troubadoring right behind Dwight and Stevie Earle.

Langston totes a broad sense of humor around no matter where he may be and has even gotten his ass kicked off the stage for obscenity (shades of Rodney Carrington!), so you know you’re in for a good time whether catching the guy in concert or on disc, but he also has a serious balladic side, as in Just Pretend You Love Me Tonight, which isn’t as cynical as the title first seems. Rather, the guy’s lamenting what has passed in the welter of living a human life and all the distances and glacialities such activity can bring. It’s honest, practical, warm, and a lot more affective than a passel of others’ compositions trying too hard for wistful profundity.

This guy also plays a mean guitar when he wants to and, man, that’s one beautiful Chet Atkins Gretsch he’s holding on the liner cover shot!, a museum piece. Ironically enough, though raised in Alabama with its Grand Ole Opry Nashville vibe and omnipresence, Grant came to hate country music and left the South to hit L.A.…where he suddenly heard Willie, Waylon, Johnny Cash, and all the rebels. Despite a love for Led Zeppelin, that was what he needed to let him know he could marry the old back-home sound with rock and get his groove on down the road. If Marshall Tucker could do it, so could he. Thus we have this sparkling fifth CD threatening to drag all the Eagles / Poco / Charlie Daniels fans back into a country-rock fold that has been conspicuously waning of late. Thus, all you shitkickers, fenceline pickers, Texas grinners, and rock & country sinners, bend an ear to Stand Up Man and know that it ain’t time to bury John Wayne’s ghost quite yet. In fact, it just might be that the Duke himself, were he yet with us, might wanna hoist a stein and sit back to enjoy him a mess of Grant Langston, winking and toasting the newfangled grit of an old tradition that always seems to find its way back from the North 40 and Mason-Dixon line.Acoustic Music

The Driftwood Singers || Listen||Watch
“The Driftwood singers write songs. This in itself is not uncommon, there is a long history of people who write songs. What makes The Driftwood Singers stand out is that they have tapped into a history that pulses with vitality, despite its aesthetics having been formed upwards of 100 years ago. The Driftwood singers write old songs. They write, damn good, damn old, songs. Dedicated to their craft, their close harmonies and sublime arrangements have them compared often to the Carter Family. Inherent in their work is something darker though, that underlines familiar early American themes of transience, mortality and yes, damnation while brimming with contemporary discontent. Their gospel songs are conflicted, their murder ballads are not fraught with bloodlust, and their drinking songs beg for hope. Whether in duo or with the whole Driftwood ensemble they are not to be missed.” The Driftwood Singers

Matt Adams & The Blank Tapes || Listen || Watch
Matt Adams wrote this new album, HOME AWAY FROM HOME, in a van in probably half of the states in America, pulling lyrics together as the cops actually pulled him over (“Drivin’ Out Of My Mind”) and figuring out melodies on a ukelele in Baltimore (“Don’t Mind,” which he played that very night) and finally putting it all together on a 8-track cassette recorder that’s got just as many miles as the van by now. So the songs on this album came from a million different places but he puts them together in such a way that they feel like they’ve been together forever, and he calls it Home Away From Home because that’s what he was thinking about when he was looking out the windshield of that van.

One of his friends—taking a break from rehearsing his own band—actually also described his music as a “home away from home for a lot of people.” That’s the kind of thing you say about those rare musicians able to carry their whole world with them, and that’s Matt Adams—part California country and California anglophilia and California rock ‘n’ roll, and though he’s such a natural fit for the San Francisco bay that they should name a MUNI stop in his honor, there’s something in him too of the complete and casual confidence of the Southern California soul surfer—do you know what those are? They’re the ones who surf for spirit, not for sport, and when you think of sunsets over endless water you are thinking like a soul surfer and you are thinking maybe a bit like Matt Adams, too.

He grew up playing open-mics in Orange County, but when he moved up north to the Bay Area he loved it and he’d play everywhere—Rolling Stone found him in a coffeehouse and demanded someone sign him, and he’d put together bands to play bookstores and backyards and beaches and house parties and sometimes even on the bus, and only one time was he ever politely asked to wrap it up. (“Bus drivers seemed to dig it,” he says.) He was glowing with energy; he painted his own album art—and flyers!—and made a cover album of songs mostly by his friends except for one by Dave Davies.

On previous albums, he tempered the loud with the lovable, but now on Home Away From Home, he goes fully and wildly electric—not just because of all that time spent on top of a motor but because the time was right, too. “I’ve played enough kind of happy upbeat joyful stuff,” he says. “Now I’m trying to express that more serious darker side. I’ve always had this album in me. But now it felt right to have it be the next step”

When he recorded this album in a shed behind a house in Oakland, he set up amps and drums and somehow put the individual powers of Ray Davies, Leonard Cohen and John Fogerty all in the same room—he had his electric guitar snarling and sparking over songs about hearts (stopping or beating even harder) and flowers (growing) and cops (who need to get lost) and it ended up as ten songs that can be called timeless in ten years but which were so precise and alive that they’d be at home in any decade since the Telecaster became available for public sale.

Think of Buddy Holly or Neil Young or Joe Ely or Bill Fox or Robert Pollard and now guys like Greg Cartwright—they were born to one day stretch a finger over a fretboard and make something old sound new yet again. And so here comes Matt Adams with more songs in his head at any given time than he can even reliably count—he slid from eighty to over a hundred last time we made him index—and an album of the ten he knew he could connect together to make something bigger than itself. He calls this one Home Away From Home, and he’s right.
-Chris Ziegler