Tenements will move into Fontana's for a three-week Wednesday-night August residency
Fontana’s
105 Eldridge St. between Grand & Broome Sts.
Wednesday, August 3, 10, 17, $5, 9:00
212-334-6740
www.fontanasnyc.com
www.tenementsmusic.com
In the mid-to-late nineteenth century, immigrants flooded into New York City, many of them moving into the newly built tenements of the Lower East Side. So it is only appropriate that the Brooklyn-based musical quartet known as Tenements, consisting of no native New Yorkers, will be playing a residency this month at Fontana’s on Eldridge St., celebrating the release of its debut album, Greenling. Led by Ohio native and onetime Texan Jeremy Gordon on vocals, guitar, and keyboards, Peru-born Alejandro Haaker on bass, Michigan native Steven Welbourne on lead guitar and keys, and German-born Isaac Schmidt on drums, Tenements plays harmonic-based indie pop that features lilting rhythms and robust choruses, rooted in Americana but angling into alternative psychedelic prog rock on such tracks as “Hard Heartbeat,” “Rats of the Ninth Ward,” and “Saints.” The album closes with the monster title track, which we wished went on for at least another ten minutes. Gordon’s abstruse lyrics deal with war and the future, family and a search for home, calling for action. “Give all / Give all for your cause / Give all,” he sings in “Ones and Zeros,” “it all costs something now.” In “Saints” he concludes, “Oh, sleep now, safely / Oh, sleep now, soundly / And rise, rise now.” In the anthemic “The World Is Alright” he proclaims, “We will wait for you here in the wide-eyed city’s summers”; indeed, Tenements will be waiting for you in the wide-eyed city’s summers, playing a three-week Wednesday-night August residency at Fontana’s beginning August 3 with Ella Joyce Buckley and Asphalt Green, followed by a Gypsy-acoustic set August 10 with Woodpecker, and finishing up August 17 with Two States and Kalli.