Dr. Dog at The Blind Pig - Ann Arbor

With Shame, Shame Dr. Dog take a step into themselves. We are getting more of the voice of modern working class psychedelia with Dr. Dog. With every album, it’s not so much the cliché that they are moving forward as they are exploring different aspects of the music they create. Lo-fi records, hi-fi records, indie, pop, psychedelic. Whatever the fuck you want to call it, Dr. Dog can do it, and they do it very well. There won’t be any synthesizers, but you’ll a band squeeze every ounce out of the instruments they have.
On it’s face, Shame, Shame is a simpler approach than their previous effort Fate, nodding more to earlier albums We All Belong and Easy Beat. But deeper, Shame, Shame is a beautiful mix of these contradictions. It keeps the grit, but stays as intricate as Fate accomplishing the complexity with one of the most challenging tasks in music, making an album that sounds honestly natural while still retaining all of the depth. The album marks a contemplative, inward look into the music Dr. Dog creates.[1]
Like the sleigh bells signaling the jump on Shame, Shame, the jingle of “Stranger” that would begin the night as Philadelphia’s Dr. Dog came to Ann Arbor’s Blind Pig. What makes the latest batch of songs from Shame, Shame so lively in concert is, despite the barebones production the songs are still so full, that live, with the additions of all the nuances of all their live arsenal: varied harmonies, an acoustic guitar here, a shaker there, the songs take on a whole new life as they are almost overflowing. It’s almost as if they are finally getting to put their final stamp of approval on them with a searing live performance.

Also joining the five regular members of Dr. Dog was Dimitri Manos, who played on percussion and guitar occasionally, and the addition of a stripped down, but attentive light show. Small things, like the simplistic whirling organ of Zach Miller and echo laden guitar of Scott McMicken while the band is bathed in all blue light during “I Only Wear Blue,” make for little ties to pull the whole show together. All six seem to fluently flow through these songs, limbs swirling around the stage.
Although he, for the most part, left some of his howl off Shame, Shame, bassist Toby Leaman hasn’t lost that quick snarl and skin curling scream that he executes so beautifully on songs like “Army of Ancients.”
Thematic chaotic light chases during “Mirror Mirror” are…well…mirrored on stage by the band thrashing through the small dingy club’s mirrored side walls as they are immersed in the washes of light. The waving caroms of the guitar harmonies of’ “The Ark” saunter up and down before leading into one of only two songs of the evening that we written before 2008’s Fate, with We All Belong’s “The Way The Lazy Do.

“The Rabbit, The Bat and The Reindeer,” a guaranteed high energy, usual closing song, landed squarely in the middle of gentle interlude to wind up the energy through the roof, as it was bookended by the slower “Station” and “Someday,” both of which highlight the quiet, softer aspects of Leaman’s vocal range with a smooth high and low wave.
Another warm whirl of the organ from Miller leads into “Where’d All The Time Go?” lead by McMicken’s vocal line, before it is capped with an absolutely fucking loaded solo from guitarist Frank McElroy that fuels the crashing end climax before the thud into the slow churn of “The Beach.” Leaman’s retches out notes, with his snarl cuts just as quick on the slow chunky tune.
Next “Hang On,” would again be driven by Miller’s flailing across his keyboards before “Shadow People” started starkly with McMicken’s voice over an acoustic strum finally building into an undeniable humming rattle before exploding into the piano saunter and surf guitar ping. “Shadow People” wasn’t particularly a song that stuck out before the show, but like most of the songs of the night Dr. Dog played it leaving you no other option but to fall in love with it. To close the hour and half set, they sprinkled in their only other older track closing with the road weary travel diary of We All Belong’s “Worst Trip.”

 After a quick break, the six-piece returned for an encore to wrap up the entire show, blending the endings to their last two albums. “Jackie Wants A Black Eye” and the closing title track of Shame, Shame, both led into the weaving “My Friend,” Fate’s closing track. “Jackie” is sparse live, accented with merely a chorus of hand claps and McMicken’s lone acoustic guitar leading smoothly into the slide guitar amble of “Shame, Shame.” To close the show, “My Friend,” intertwines the themes coursing though the evenings trailing psychedelic levels.
The Philly psych rockers seem so effortlessly locked into the basics of these songs that they are able to pinpoint what they want to add live at will. As guitarist Scott McMicken told Glide earlier, “…what that always comes down to --and I realize this more and more we're a band--is your level of performance. It can be a song of three instruments, if you can really hone that part, and play off everybody else, and really find your space, the song will lack nothing.”
They, for simplistic emphasis, play the fuck out of these songs. They make you love the new songs as much as they do because they put everything they have into these songs live.

Scroll down for complete setlist & more photos.

Dr. Dog
The Blind Pig, Ann Arbor, Mi
4/15/10

The Stranger
I Only Wear Blue
The Old Days
Army of Ancients
The Breeze
Mirror, Mirror
The Ark
The Way The Lazy Do
Station
Rabbit, Bat & The Reindeer
Someday
Where’d All The Time Go?
The Beach
Unbearable Why
Hang On
From
Later
Shadow People
Worst Trip
-----------
Jackie Wants A Black Eye
Shame, Shame
My Friend

[1]“This band also carries a strong element of sickness in their music, a crazed quaking of uncertainty, an errant foolishness that effectively mirrors the absurdity and desperation of the times, but I believe that they also carry a strong element of cure, a post-derangement sanity. And I also believe that their music is as important as the product of any rock group working today, although you better never call it art or you may end up with a deluxe pie in the face. What it is, instead, is what rock and roll at heart is and always has been, beneath the stylistic distortions that last few years have wrought. This band is not for the ages—nothing created now is—but they are most implicitly for today and tomorrow and the traditions of two decades of beautifully bopping, manic, simplistic jive.” – Lester Bangs wrote this in 1970. Obviously he wasn’t writing about Dr. Dog, but he might as well have been. Their music is timeless traditional rock and roll in all its beauty. Tinges of punk, psych and blues all intermingle seamlessly. For those of us who will always love it, it never went away.

Pietro C. Truba

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Bela Fleck: The Africa Project

Bela Fleck: The Africa Project

Feat. Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni Ba, Anania Ngolgia & John Kitime

The Hill Auditorium, Ann Arbor, Mi

As Malian ngoni player Bassekou Kouyate said simply, “Bela play American banjo…I play African banjo.” As Bela Fleck started the first of two sets of his Africa Project tour, with some solo material, he took the stage alone, with his weapon of choice, the banjo. The entire, two-set, roughly two hour show was fueled with flavorings from Bela’s trips through Africa playing with, among others, players of the Ngoni, an African ancestor of the banjo.

The Africa Project which Bela started during time off from The Flecktones in 2004, has since given birth to Grammy award winning album Throw Down Your Heart and an award winning documentary (of the same name) chronicling the trip in which Bela visited a slew of different African and Malian locations. However, joining Bela on stage were just a small sampling of the artists, as two groups for joined Bela for the 33-city run of college towns in support of the release of more tracks from the project. Anania Ngoglia and John Kitime took the stage as Bela left them for two solo songs. Ngoglia, a mult-instrumentalist from Tanzania would play the Wagogo thumb piano, or ilimba for the evening. Kitime, also from Tanzania, played acoustic guitar, and also is one of the film’s producers.
Bela would then join Ngoglia and Kitime for two songs, one of which was speckled with chicken noises from Ngoglia to resemble his girlfriend, who Bela comically said “…Apparently she sometimes she sounds like a chicken. Sometimes she does not.” Bela and Ngoglia would duel back and forth as Ngoglia left Bela grinning ear to ear as they played back and forth at each other.

Taking the stage next to replace the trio would be an ensemble of Malian musicians, Bassekou Kouyate and Ngoni Ba (The Big Ngoni.) Bassekou was joined by seven other musicians, including three other ngoni players, Fousseyni Kouyate on ngoni ba, Barou Kouyate on ngoni and Moussa Bah on bass ngoni. Also Ngoni Ba were Malian vocalists Amy Sacko and Ma Soumano, as well as percussionists Alou Coulibaly and Moussa Sissoko. Bela looked back at the percussive drum that looked, in his words, like a very big bald man’s head poking up in the air. The drum looked like a globe and was played like a djembe, or any hand drum, as knuckles and palms created different beats and raps on the hard shell. The eight piece group would take the stage alone led by Bassekou who would provide a most charismatic front man. Bassekou’s fingers flew across the tiny fretboard of the ngoni as he either horsed down on a wah pedal to give the ngoni a quick jolt, or was at the stage front propping his foot on an amp leading the band. Bela would join as the two would recount stories of Bela’s travels to Africa and battle a few multi-lingual hecklers before playing one more song before a short intermission.
The second set would feature a slew of combinations of the musicians on stage in an hour of stellar, tag-team wrestling style musical creation. Bela would lead the different groups through the myriad of styles, blending the banjo in seamlessly with the two different regions of African music, which for lack of a better expression, created one extremely unique and entertaining experience. The second set and encore also featured fiddle player Casey Driessen, from Bela’s Sparrow Quartet. With the addition of Dreissen, the trios, quartets, octets, howevermanytets rotated on and off stage creating diverse combinations of players feeding off one an other. All twelve musicians finally were on stage for the final song of the set and the encore of the Grammy award winning title track of the project “Throw Down Your Heart.”

The surprisingly long show, just over two hours, was fueled by lots of improvisation and on the fly setlist creation, all with the ever changing musical chairs setup that led to some incendiary musical moments. This tour is a great glimpse into Bela’s ambitious project and the subsequent melding of world music into his playing style, all well worth the price of admission. Show dates are on Bela Fleck’s website www.belafleck.com and screening dates on www.throwdownyourheart.com. 

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by Pietro C. Truba
originally for Relix.com