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Music
I don’t want to seem blasphemous by stating that Ian Hunter died for the sins of glam kids and punks that followed in his wake. Rousing versions of David Bowie and Lou Reed songs (“All the Young Dudes,” “Sweet Jane”) and a self-penned roughneck sound with cuttingly cynical lyrics that gave The Clash their inspired spark doesn’t make you a god. It does, however, make you a prophet or a harbinger or a guy good with a rant or forty.
After having been the smartly caustic (yet warmly emotional) frontman of Mott The Hoople throughout the early '70s and an equally smarmy disarmingly tender solo act ever since, the curly-haired (still, at 72) Hunter knows how to reach his cult, the likes of which nearly sold out (only one ticket remained!) World Café Live on Thursday night.
Despite having members dispersed across the country, WHY? remains a productive purveyor of hummable confessionals. The group’s recently released Sod in the Seed EP contains enough witty wordplay and memorable melodies to keep fans sated until the full-length Mumps, etc. is unveiled on October 9. City Paper caught up with frontman Yoni Wolf as the band continues its worldwide tour. WHY? plays Union transfer tonight.
City Paper: You’ve mentioned during previous Philly shows that you used to spend a lot of time in this city. What’s your connection to Philly?
Yoni Wolf: My parents are from Philly so I used to come back all the time to see my grandparents, my aunts and uncles and shit.
CP: A couple years ago, you left the Bay Area to live with your parents in Cincinnati. What inspired this move back home to Ohio?
YW: I’m not sure exactly. It just kind of felt right. I had gotten rid of my apartment in Oakland because we were going to be touring for a few years. So I did and I was just kind of getting sublets here and there between tours. And after the last bit of touring on Alopecia and Eskimo Snow, I was kind of sick and I just went to stay with my parents and decided I am going to stay in Cincinnati. So I bought a house and stayed there.
CP: During the time when you were living with your parents, you’ve said that you had very little contact with the outside world. Was this a source of relief or stress?
YW: It was what it was – a necessary thing at the time. I developed a routine of going to the gym, yoga classes, and Whole Foods. That was all I’d pretty much do: go to the gym, Whole Foods, and then album. I would work almost every day on demos for the new album.
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Backed by bassist Jason Narducy and drummer Jon Wurster, Bob Mould tore through Sugar's 1992 classic Copper Blue, start to finish, with no words in edgewise. After that he played a few from his new album, Silver Age and a threw in a little Hüsker Dü, too. Bob sounded great, like Sugar in its prime. Way back when, I saw Sugar and Magnapop in Philly but I can't for the life of me remember where that show was. The Troc? Nick's? Anybody remember?
Every year, there's hundreds and hundreds of performances at the Philly Fringe and Live Arts Festival, and unless it's one of the big shows, it's sometimes hard to tell what you're going to get. Here at Critical Mass we're sending writers to as many shows as we possibly can for 75 pocket-sized reviews over the course of the fest. Check back in with us at On The Fringe every day for real talk on what these things actually are!
SHOW: The Consul
GROUP: The Philadelphia Opera Collective
GENRE: Opera
ATTENDED: Fri., Sept. 7, 8 p.m.
CLOSES: Fri., Sept. 14
BRIEF SELF-DESCRIPTION: While trapped in a stifling, dusty waiting room surrounded by strangers, a young woman discovers that everything she is and everything she loves boils down to a single piece of paper. When the whole world closes in around her, will one piece of paper be enough protection?
WE THINK: The trope of the "mad scene," in which a (nearly always) female character expresses losing her mind with a flood of showy coloratura, was highly overused during a certain period of opera. It was basically a go-to excuse to let a diva show off her pipes and for the composer to break musical rules. (Think Ophelia in Hamlet.) A lot of operas foster the sterotype that the whole art form is uniformly big and bombastic, where every single person who goes crazy does so suddenly in a big theatrical way rather than just quietly sobbing in a corner. The grand postures, epic plotlines and bellowed vocals of opera's pre-modern eras were designed to be seen and heard from the back of a large concert hall rather than close up, so you can excuse them for lacking some subtlety.
But The Consul, an English-language opera that won the 1950 Pulitzer Prize for music, is a lovely little example of the possibilities of the small scale. In tiny Jolie Laide Gallery, the audience in the front row (particularly on the left side) is literally within inches of the performers (close enough to feel a breeze as actors go by) and the acting is... actually acting, which is wonderful in an art form where productions can sometimes dedicate all their efforts to the music. The young cast sounded uniformly great; they had clearly thought about how to make the space feel intimate rather than cramped, and how to handle selling it to the back row when the back row is only a couple yards away. The Consul follows the wife of a political dissident, who in the first act has to go on the run from the secret police of their unnamed, East Germany-ish country. Nearly the entire second half is set in a surreal bureaucratic purgatory as Magda attempts to get visas for herself, her husband, his mother and their baby to cross the border in a maddening battle of paperwork with the secretary at the consulate. The story gets heavy into some brutal, emotional stuff — no rose-colored glasses here on the standard outcome of opposing a totalitarian state, and I cried twice, which doesn't happen all that much. You get the feeling that you're watching how madness should be done: Not as a bravura four-minute aria, but agonizingly drawn out over an entire opera.
While I work on the next round of Fringe reviews, enjoy this blast from the past with my pals The Bigger Lovers. Tonight they celebrate the 10th anniversary of their album Honey in the Hive at Johnny Brenda's.
For years, Isaac Jordan (of 2000down.com) has been one of Philly’s staple party-rockin’ DJs. After a recent tenure in Barcelona, he moved to NYC but that doesn’t stop him from holding it down in his hometown every week. Step into the bumpin’ main room of Rumor and let loose as Jordan tears up a variety of classics and current bangers. The side-room DJ booth is held down by Matthew Macchioni (first and third Saturdays) and John G (second and fourth Saturdays).
Sat., Sept 8, 9 p.m., $10, Rumor, 1500 Sansom St., 215-988-0777, rumorphilly.com.
Now that the Made in America weekend is over, we can laugh about the things that did and didn’t happen.
Neither the Barnes nor the surprisingly-shut-down-for-the-holiday Rodin crumbled under the weight of the unwashed masses. Oddly enough, the masses weren’t that unwashed.
Beyonce didn’t sing with her husband. Bruce Springsteen didn’t sing with Pearl Jam.
Jay-Z and Beyonce never made it to Stephen Starr’s Barclay Prime on Friday night though they made reservations (the pair did get food served to them and their crew by Starr’s Buddakan and Morimoto on saran-covered china on Sunday in the VIP deck).
Somehow Kanye and Kim Kardashian had the headspace to go see a movie in Union Square in Manhattan then helicopter themselves respectively onstage and in the wings of Made of America.
And your city didn’t burn or blow up just because 80,000+ people ran roughshod along Art Museum Row.
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