SHOWDOWN: John Vanderslice @ Johnny Brenda's, tomorrow

There'll be no orchestra tonight, but Vanderslice typically brings a couple multi-instrumentalist co-conspirators along for the sonic ride.

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SHOWDOWN: John Vanderslice @ Johnny Brenda's, tomorrow

POSTED: Wednesday, October 31, 2012, 11:31 AM

Filed Under: Music The Showdown

When you’re John Vanderslice — exacting songwriter and studio tinkerer of the highest order, a man who used to spend about three months just setting up drum mics — it’s a big deal when you flip the script and make an entire album in three days. The San Francisco indie-pop savant experimented with the brevity thing on last year’s White Wilderness — a collaboration with the Magik*Magik Orchestra that sounds nearly as dense, melodically rich and playfully skewed as his other, more painstaking recordings. Whether or not he returns to his meticulous old ways on the next album, Vanderslice the live performer remains the same: warm, spontaneous, loose, animated and joyful, even when he’s singing paranoia- and pathos-soaked narratives about terrorists, small-town dreamers, crippling depression or Romanian gymnasts. There’ll be no orchestra tonight, but Vanderslice typically brings a couple multi-instrumentalist co-conspirators along for the sonic ride, and we hear Eric Bachmann of co-headliners Crooked Fingers may join them.

Thu., Nov. 1, 9:15 p.m., $15, with Crooked Fingers, Johnny Brenda’s, 1201 N. Frankford Ave., 215-739-9684, johnnybrendas.com.

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