The Acorn and Communipaw @ Maxwell's 7-13-10 (photos)

Acorn

The Acorn are surprising in a different way: rather than pull strings slowly from your heart, they tap them like fingers across a piano, making your feet then tap a steady beat against the filthy hardwood floor. The Canadian sweethearts are bright enough to make you smile to yourself in a crowd, and soulful enough to make you bite your lips, holding back the urge to sing along, even if you don’t know the words. 

Communipaw

Communipaw is the kind of band that comes up on shuffle when you’re walking home after a long, shitty day at work. The sunlight’s fading on the west horizon, and night is crawling slow and violet up the sky. The music matches the ache in your calves--every crash of guitar feels like another stretch, longing to end up somewhere familiar. Their kind of folk is bittersweet--it draws things out of your memory that you’ve forgotten, or recalls the things that you desperately wanted to forget. When I saw the New Brunswick band at Maxwell’s on July 13th, I was caught off-guard. Bond’s voice is both melancholy and defiant, and their lyrics have heart, the kind that your tired head would be singing if your thoughts were set to music. 

Both of these bands are great to see live, in their own different ways, but the one thing they have in common is the ability to influence the small beating bundle beneath your ribs.

--by Zandra Ruiz

More photos below. 

Live Review: Annuals @ Maxwells 6-19-10 (photos)

Annuals @ Maxwells

Words by Zandra Ruiz

Photos by Davis Peer

Annuals are a band you never forget. I saw them for the first time at Maxwell’s in Hoboken on June 19th. Before they even started playing, I noticed the members drift through the growing crowd, and I wondered who they were. They were not visibly different from anyone else there, but they walked with presence, with a calm confidence, as if they knew, in ten short minutes, the stage would be theirs. The crowd would be theirs.

And we were. 

Lead singer Adam Baker’s strident vocals are smooth the way you want your own voice to be smooth, loud the way you want to be loud. The urge to sing with him, to fill your lungs with air and belt his words until you’re breathless, is impossible to fight. You watch keyboardist Anna Spence lose herself in the music, caught in raptures of the red and gold light, and you want to melt with her into every key she plays. The beat, sometimes doubled or tripled, surges through your feet, bounces along your ribs, and it feels like your heart is out of control, taken right out of your chest, pumped through the air and thrown back at you.

Once you hear Annuals do indie-pop, you want every band to do indie-pop like them--you want every band to have as much vigor, as much energy and passion as they do. 

They have just finished an eastern tour with What Laura Says, Thinks, and Feels and The Most Serene Republic, both captivating and entertaining live bands. 

More photos below.

Live Review: Laura Stevenson & the Cans in New Brunswick, NJ 3-26-10

By Zandra Ruiz

Laura Stevenson doesn’t look like someone who would command the attention of an entire room, much less a basement packed to the brim with sweaty college kids. That’s exactly what she did, though- held our focus, played with it, kept us rapt and on the toes of our dirty sneakers.

I shouldn’t be shocked. It’s no surprise that she’s talented, but to actually hear her voice in person blew me away. She’s incomparable to any singer-songwriter I know of. Who else holds such tenuous notes, weaves through delicate structures, and manages to be both strong and gentle at the same time?

I don’t have an apt adjective to describe her. She played with the Cans, a full band including a trombone and trumpet, and was still able to be distinct. Although she played mostly new songs (a few favorites include “Mouthbreather” and  “Halloween”), she kept, at all times, our attention.