Find Me (Shilpa Ray, Santos Party House & Mercury Lounge, 12/12/08 & 1/18/09)

(Art via sweet n' sour's Flickr)(more)

Shilpa Ray - I Only Have Eyes for You (mp3)(buy?)

L's and G's, dudes and duds, Ms. Shilpa Ray (myspace) is your next great Rock and Roll Singer.

If you're lucky.  Also:  Maybe not yet!  But (a), this is the Internet, where all praise comes in the form of premature ejaculation; and (b), it's so fucking there, it really is.

She's been howling around town for a half a decade, now, most prominently as the lead in now-defunct local cult faves Beat the Devil (myspace).  The bass-drums-harmonium (and sometimes snow shovel) trio released a single, self-titled EP, which was spare and dark and, aside from the character Ms. Ray's instruments brought, a bit too regular. 

Ray hails from a strict Hindu household in New Jersey where "Western music was forbidden," has rationalized dragging the harmonium she's been playing since age eight on to the contemporary stage by calling it "shoegaze."  She shares neck-up and waist-down allegiances with P.J. Harvey, has guts that display an obvious, professed love for Janis Joplin.  The back of her throat hangs over the lip of a juke joint stage, the tip of her tongue twists along apartment hallways in search of that unseen neighbor who's always blasting jazz 78s through his hangover.

The something-old rubbing against something-older vibe comforts and haunts.  Similarly, Ray's writing alternately drops just-dated pop culture references in ways both poetic and profane.  Old Beat the Devil material rhymed "Half-off at Macy's!" with "pedophiles are easy" ("Plea Bargain"), described time spent in inside your head as "a Carnival Cruise line without Kathy Lee Gifford" ("Shine in Exile").  From the gorgeous "Beating St. Louis," available on her new CD, A Fish Hook An Open Eye:  "We watched Law & Order ‘til the shame grew numb/while the drummer danced with the Devil in his Underoos."

She avoids self-satisfied cleverness by delivering discontent.  Retro elements aren't there for cute context, the aim is less borrowed timelessness than an expression of being time-lost.  In the Biblical honky-tonk "The Coward Cracked the Dawn," Ray not only gets away with the now-tired comic trope about God having an answering machine, manages to sing the Big Guy's entire banal outgoing message and make it swoony and musical, but combines existential dilemma and petty technological frustration into evidence of abandonment, screaming "The batteries are dying in his cell!" at the sky over and over and again.  The band's approach to "I Only Have Eyes for You" could be considered obvious, punching up fellow Brooklynite Harry Warren's 1934 nugget, flushing The Flamingos' ghostly, romantic "doowopshebop;" I've no idea if any of the song's many other covers have been done in a similar fashion.  Less important than the immediacy of the attack is the way it sets Ray snatching at Al Dubin's lyrics like they're a lifejacket, the maniacal repetition and bent melody replacing any notion of creepy courtship or declaration of fidelity with the sense that she's very close to needing a cane and a German shepherd.

When and How can be trumped by a resolute Why, and above all, here, there's that Voice.  She can growl and she can bark, and she sounds like she means it when she does, but as foundation there's this full, husky moan that reverberates against her harmonium and peaks into a sweet lilt at the end of phrases.

Shilpa Ray's voice is the MGM lion with the world's biggest thorn in its paw.

Beat the Devil - Raging Bull Blues (mp3)(buy)

She calls her new group "Shilpa Ray and Her Happy Hookers" (Ray's the only woman); if there's anything positive about the moniker, it's that it might inspire casual curiosity.  Hey, made me look.  But it's self-defeating, makes the effort sound like nothing more than a lame lark, a bad Wednesday night bar band.  Other roadblocks to easy adoption:  They do not have a website, but do have a myspace page.  She's finally started selling her new eight-song CD at shows (there's currently no other way to purchase it), yet only plays one or two numbers from that recording in the band's live sets (We got "Filthy and Free" at Santos; the "Eyes" cover at Merc and a goosed version of "Looking for Mr. Goodbar" at (I think) both; Ray might reserve quieter numbers for her occasional solo gigs).  "My parents raised me to be incredibly humble and stupidly modest," she says. "I still hate them for that."

If humility or modesty seem antithetical to a potential rock goddess, they mostly extend to matters practical... where they might comingle with a simple lack of discipline.  If you prefer a rock star with the inability to maintain inhibitions, that's on display on stage.  At Santos Party House in December (where Ray introduced her band thusly:  "We are the Spice Girls"), in what looked like a beige wifebeater with a stray peacock feather hanging from her brow, she looked like no one so much as Candy Slice, turning from the mic between lines to bang her head, generally as out of control as anyone harnessed to a harmonium could manage.

A month later at the Mercury Lounge, she'd traded her bourbon for water (it was a Sunday night) but still ended the night with half a head of hair matted against her face.  "I'm sweating like a pig!" she laughed.  She laughs a lot, at almost everything, which is endearing for a while, then a little unsettling.  Stage banter careened through subjects ranging from catheters to Texas Toast to horn-sized zits to tweens discussing Twilight in the ladies room.  "I believe all the garbage I say.  I take myself very, very seriously," she said, not.

If a willingness to go splat on stage isn't a deep enough casserole of crazy for you, there's a thread of self-loathing running through her lyrics.  Well beyond that old Jake LaMotta nod up there, you'll find:  "I'm ashamed when I'm jealous/I'm ashamed when I'm in love/I'm ashamed when I'm resurrected on my own"  ("Woman Sets Boyfriend on Fire"); "In my mind I can't be happy/I stink of depravity/Just an aching dark cavity" ("What the Fuck Was I Thinking," which sums itself up with, "I'm a freak"); "I'm so messed up but I got nothing to prove it... I'm not a good person.  I'm not a good anything." ("Looking for Mr. Goodbar").

Except she is.  Because no one actually wants their rock heroes to self-immolate, the most important crazy about Shilpa Ray is that she's crazy good at doing this.

Shilpa Ray - Beating St. Louis (mp3)(buy?)

There are problems.  Including Ray and her sideways accordion, there are six members (two guitars, bass, drums, keys) in this band and they put out way too much sound, much of it plugging up the exact same sonic space in which the singing takes place; given Ray's propensity to slur her words, not a lot of lyrics survived either club's PA system.  On the CD, the arrangements are often nicely done; up there in "St. Louis" those're some nice guitar fills, the electronic beats work well; on stage everything mushes together.  The best moments at the show came when most of the band dropped out, even when Ray relinquished the damned squeezebox.  The prescription seems simple, strip everything down and build it up until you have nothing more than you need (which might also help highlight some kind of progression throughout, some songs just haul everything out and sit there)... but watching her it's clear that Shilpa Ray needs all that noise, that she gets off on the cacophony.

There can seem to be control problems with her vocals, especially when she hurls shit out like Nuke Laloosh.  If you're smitten enough to make excuses, though, those aren't problems at all.  Extreme moments will wander off-key, but those hearken back to a time when red-needle distortion, not Auto-Tune, was the prescribed corrective.  There can be emphases on odd beats, breaths taken in awkward spots, but she makes these feel like non-choices.  Her phrasing is more than correct, it's definitive.  She can sing plain-but-tight lines like "Coward's" "You ungrateful fuck, you're out of luck" or "My girl, I'm gonna conquer some countries!" (the bouncy "Filthy and Free") into aural landmarks.

Not that she's pausing long enough to figure out where she's at.  The new CD is quite good, but the live set's most memorable songs have yet to be recorded.  There's a great new tune called "Erotolepsy;" the title's from Jude the Obscure but chunks of the song show Ray out-bloodhounding Deputy Marshall Samuel Gerard, demanding a hard-target of every dollhouse, steakhouse, whorehouse, poorhouse, madhouse... And "Chelsea Clinic Physical," an unreleased song from the Beat the Devil era, has been oomphed up and fleshed out into a giant jammy anthem.  A natural set-closer, it's built around calls of "Do you love your freedom?"  It should be available right goddamn now and should be a great doggamn hit.  But this is the Internet, and we get impatient around here.

Shilpa Ray and (sigh) Her Happy Hookers will be appearing at (Le) Poisson Rouge on February 5th (tix) and at Southpaw with Harlem Shakes on Valentine's Day as part of BAM's Sounds Like Brooklyn Festival (tix).  You should go, and you should buy her record.

Also there:  Radio Flyer Review (Santos)

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It's real nice to have good music to write about again.  Hooray 2009. Related:  Awwww.

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Forest Fire (myspace) opened at the Merc.  They were fine, though their best bit was this speech from lead singer (who looked like Christopher Reeve-as-Clark Kent):  "We're technically not a big enough band that we can turn down requests, yet.  We just can't play any songs but the ones we learned for this set."  You can download their album for free, legally, here.

Atarah Valentine (myspace) opened at Santos and, wow, yikes.  Definitely not my thing, and though he seemed like a sweet kid and there was some love in the room for him, I couldn't help but think he'd fit right in as a nightmare contestant during the audition rounds of American Idol.  One bit of constructive criticism:  None of his songs managed to have an ending.  Even those who wanted to applaud couldn't figure out when to do it.

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"Xtra Compressed for Maximum Listener Fatigue."  Brills.

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Before the Santos show I walked into Wendy and Lucy (which I keep calling Wendy and Lisa) having heard nothing other than accolades for Michelle Williams' performance and that the film was from the director of Old Joy (which I had yet to see).  And left devastated.

Though I haven't seen many movies over the past year - I've kept up with some of the Oscar-bait (Milk is important, but too pragmatic to be a great film, more stuff like Penn dancing on the steps, please; Slumdog Millionaire is good stuff as long as its framing device is an excuse to tell an interesting story, less so when the framing device becomes the story; WALL-E is undeniable, but after its remarkable first half-hour the rest gets too frantic and pat - and wordy!) - I cannot imagine any 2008 film having a greater effect on me.

The plot is so slim that it seems wrong to reveal any of it.  Williams is Wendy, Lucy is Wendy's dog (something I would have known had I ever seen the poster); they're making their way from the Midwest to Alaska in hopes of finding cannery work.  Something goes wrong.  That's it.

Sucker-punched in my sweet spot:  Wendy's driving to Alaska, sleeping in her car, heading to Ketchikan like the kids I met on the ferry up there.  And it's a dog movie, and I saw it at a time when I probably should not have been seeing any dog movies.  For anyone who has ever said to a dog, "I know," out loud, as an apology, there's some rough going here.

The huge difference between Wendy's story and any lark in which I engaged is that her entire support network has fallen away and her means are meant to grant her a one-way trip.  There's something in the lifeblood of this country, still, that screams Go West, and the film's thinning fannypack effectively posits the current credit crunch as a 21st-C mirror of Dust Bowl days.  Only Wendy's compact doesn't have the ragged humanity, or the company, of a truck full of Joads.  She has Lucy, and a destination, and not much else.

The triumph of Williams' performance is that she keeps Wendy human.  It is not a showy performance, it is not a showy film.  She and director Kelly Reichardt resist the urge to hold the girl up as a symbol of her generation, an archetype, a saint.  It would be so easy to do so, we're told next-to-nothing about Wendy; other than a brief phone call to a sister back home, we've no idea what set her off on a haphazard quest.  There's nothing demonstrative in the girl's personality, no charm, no sense of opportunism or outrage.  She does some dumb things, she's human, maybe the whole thing is a dumb thing.  Williams and Reichardt keep her from being a void by focusing on her powerlessness and denying her victimhood.  The lack of backstory is a lack of options.  The focus is on isolation, how gossamer the structure of society can be once certain bonds are no longer there.  Every step you take is falling, falling.

The film could not be any more different than Into the Wild, an obvious comparison.  That was a direct portrayal of real events, its lesson that the American countryside can be pretty and that people are worth knowing.  The people Wendy meets along the way here are kept strangers, though they are all recognizably human.  There is some kindness, some cruelty, mostly (a sometimes apologetic) self-interest.  Wendy and Lucy reminded me most of a couple works I haven't experienced for some years, Lars Eighner's book Travels with Lizbeth - where I saw the phrase "dumpster diving" for the first time - and Agnes Varda's Vagabond.

Reichardt is one heck of a director, accomplishes the difficult task of making a well-planned film feel passive.  She includes just enough details to make her story a story and her people people, just enough movement to acknowledge the frustration of aimlessness. This is a different film than Old Joy, which enjoyed the traditional benefits of personal interplay and a lush, zen center.  (The two films share the director's dog, Lucy, who plays a dog named Lucy in each.)  Wendy is a slow film, and a short film (80 minutes), and a great film.

It is still playing at Film Forum, where it has been held over again and again.

tags: shilpa ray  concert reviews  movie reviews  

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