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Call of the wild
Damon & Naomi’s blue cheer, Grizzly Bear’s roar, and Zombies’ rap
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The consensus at Damon & Naomi’s CD-release cocktail party a week ago Tuesday at ZuZu was that the blue caipirinha cocktails didn’t taste very good, but they were unusually potent and, even better, free. "I haven’t been this drunk in 10 years!" said one happy reveler. The drinks were in keeping with the album’s title — The Earth Is Blue (on their own 20/20/20 label), a sly reference to Brazilian singer-songwriter and demi-god Caetano Veloso’s "Araça Azul" — as well as with its content. The disc was inspired in part by Damon & Naomi’s tours of Brazil, where the caipirinha (and its key ingredient, the distilled sugar-cane brandy cachaça) is quite popular. Joined by saxophonist Bhob Rainey and trumpeter Greg Kelly (who also play on the album), the duo favored the crowd with a four-song set: the Everlys’ "I Wonder If I Care As Much," Tim Buckley’s "Song to the Siren," and, from the new album, the D&N originals "Ueno Station" and "House of Glass." Best off-stage tête-à-tête: Mission of Burma’s Roger Miller chatting up Malcolm Mooney, former lead singer of legendary krautrockers Can, who’s moved to the area from New York State, where he’s worked for years as a visual artist and art teacher. Look for a full-fledged Damon & Naomi concert to take place on April 16 at the ICA. Next door at the Middle East that night, something crazy happened about halfway through Grizzly Bear’s eight-song set: an audience of hipsters whose movements had been restricted to the occasional tasteful head nod started snapping their fingers and clapping their hands. For any number of blissed-out psych-folk bands, that response would have been nothing to write home about. But this was Grizzly Bear, and the lo-fi, slowly circling meditations on their debut — Horn of Plenty (Kanine), a fuzzily introspective, elliptically emotional set that’s full of dark beauty but is definitely not a crowd mover — bore little resemblance to what played out on stage. Begun in 2003 as the solo project of Ed Droste (a former Bostonian whose mom was in the house), the Grizzlys took the stage as a quartet, with a rich, psyched-out growl that served notice they’d escaped the sleepy confines of their Brooklyn zoo. The songs’ familiar moans were swathed in feedback-heavy guitar chords instead of looped tape hiss, and in shaking off layers of drowse, the band blossomed into a limber, instrument-swapping psych-orchestra-in-miniature. These Bears could have fit perfectly into the defunct Elephant Six menagerie of Olivias, Apples, and Milk Hotels. Most promising of all were the three new songs introduced at the Middle East — including a number so sunny that you could imagine the Bears were secretly the Byrds in shaggy indie-psych drag. Back at ZuZu on Wednesday night, the indie hip-hop collective ZWA, or Zombies with Attitude, lurched to the mikes in tattered clothes and powdered faces. Given a name like that, you won’t find their signature conceit much of a shock: back-from-the-grave corpses shouting rhymes only George Romero could love. (Sample couplet: "I’m not part of your world/Ever since I died on the tilt-a-whirl.") But the trio — Mac Swell and TD from Big Digits and U.V. Protection’s Karen Tsiakals — ably represented the undead ("I’m the epitome of Z-O-M-B-I-E") while unearthing a few choreographed dance moves that haven’t seen the light of day since the "Thriller" video. And on one song, they even resurrected a long-dead hit by bringing the Thompson Twins’ "Hold Me Now" — or at least its chorus, which was cannibalized for the hook — back to life. Now that’s scary. (Jon Garelick sipping with D&N, Simon William Vozick-Levinson in Grizzly-land, and Ryan Stewart in Zombie-ville contributed to this report.)
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