Though the venue dropped the cover charge in a last-minute attempt to boast attendance, Wednesday night's Gang Gang Dance/Marnie Stern performance at the Turner Hall Ballroom still drew barely a few dozen people. I'll spare you the "this is why Milwaukee can't have nice things" lecture, though. It's easy to see why most of the city sat this one out.
Both co-headliners have received widespread praise from Internet tastemakers, including essential thumbs up from Pitchfork, but they're miles removed from the comfort zone of say, Fleet Foxes, who sold out the Pabst Theater earlier this fall. Neither Gang Gang's undanceable dance music nor Marnie Stern's shrill art-rock has a tenth the reach of Fleet Foxes' familiar folk-rock.
As if in premature defeat, Stern began her set a few minutes before the bill's 8 p.m. start time, ripping through her first song before the house music had even been cut. Apparently schooled on basement-show etiquette, most of the young, meager audience flocked to the front of the stage, where they amiably flailed along with her squirrelly guitar licks. She couldn't have asked for a better crowd, though obviously she could have asked for a bigger one.
Prim, blonde and quietly dressed, Stern makes an unlikely art-rocker, and playing the part clearly exhausts her. Her songs spasm from point A to point B taking the squiggliest route, yet she chased them feverishly, breaking into a thick sweat. By set's end, plumes of disheveled, golden hair hovered above her face, which like her chest had been flushed bright red. She flashed a bleary, post-coital smile before unplugging her guitar.
Gang Gang Dance benefited from a fuller crowd, but couldn't offer the spectacle or personality of Stern's set. The quartet's worldly, ambient textures built slowly and paid off not in washes of guitar or powerhouse choruses, but rather fits of percussion. By the third or fourth drum circle crescendo, it became too apparent the band wasn't hiding any other tricks up its sleeve.
(Photo credit: Erik Ljung)
Remember when bands cared about albums as an art form? Instead of
slapping together a dozen tracks because, hey, they'll just end up on
everyone's iPod shuffle anyway, musicians considered how their songs
might congeal as a whole or form some sort of dram
Elvis Costello's frequent collaborator T-Bone Burnett produced Secret, Profane & Sugarcane,
an Americana-inflected album working with country and folk traditions
for images of sawdust floors set to mandolin and fiddle. Costello
intended one s
You wouldn’t expect to find T-bone and sirloin dinners at a place with stool seating and a location next to a shop hawking cell phones and cigarettes. But one of the city’s most evocatively named eateries, ZaZa Steak & Lemonade (4919 W. Capito
The enduring fantasy of older men is that a gorgeous
young woman will fall in love with them, find them sexually arousing
and long to imbibe their wisdom while sitting at their feet. That
fantasy is the spring driving Woody Allen's often-hilarious f
Away We Go, a droll comedy-cum-drama by director Sam Mendes (American Beauty),
perceptively explores the lives of more-or-less ordinary 30-somethings
lost in a world without much meaning. Verona (Maya Rudolph) and Bu
