this week in music

TEENAGE FANCLUB

Teenage Fanclub gets a little too lost in the shadows on first record in five years

Monday, September 27, and Tuesday, September 28, Bowery Ballroom, 6 Delancey St., $25, 9:00
Thursday, September 30, Williamsburg Waterfront, $37.50, 5:30
www.myspace.com/theteenagefanclub

It’s been twenty years since Teenage Fanclub came on the scene with A CATHOLIC EDUCATION, then breaking through in the U.S. with 1992’s grungy BANDWAGONESQUE, which featured such hits as “Star Sign,” “The Concept,” and “What You Do to Me.” The Glasgow band is now back with its first studio album in five years, SHADOWS (Merge, June 2010), and over the course of twelve songs and forty-eight minutes, they show that they are not nearly as edgy as they once were. Guitarists Norman Blake and Raymond McGinley, bassist Gerard Love — who alternate songwriting duties and lead vocals — and drummer Francis MacDonald still wear their influences on their sleeves, evoking the Byrds, Neil Young, Big Star, and Jerry Garcia, but they need a wake-up call from these sleepy, treacly tunes. (Listeners will need a few wake-up calls as well.) In fact, they sing about waking up several times on the album, on the TV-theme-song-like “Baby Lee,” the tepid “Shock and Awe,” and the mundane “The Past.” “Give yourself a wake-up call,” McGinley sings on the latter, “let the past come back to rescue you.” Teenage Fanclub will have to let the past rescue them when they come to New York this week for two headlining shows at the Bowery Ballroom, September 27 with the Radar Brothers and September 28 with the Radar Brothers and the Clean, before opening for Belle & Sebastian on September 30 at the Williamsburg Waterfront.

ATLANTIC ANTIC

Annual Atlantic Antic street festival winds through the brownstones of Brooklyn

Atlantic Ave. from Hicks St. to Fourth Ave.
Sunday, September 26, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
Admission: free
www.atlanticave.org

The thirty-sixth annual Atlantic Antic will fill Atlantic Ave. with frantic festivalgoers eager for the latest in art, music, food, and other forms of culture. Some one million people will be wandering among the six hundred vendors, buying tchotchkes, getting a bite to eat (look out for lobster rolls from the Red Hook Lobster Pound and desserts from Whimsy and Spice), taking their kids on pony rides, and checking out dozens of bands across ten stages; we heartily recommend the Demolition String Band at Hank’s, Shark? at Roebling Inn / Future Sounds at 2:55, Les Sans Culottes at Last Exit at 4:00, and Dinosaur Feathers at Roebling Inn / Future Sounds at 5:00. There will also be storytelling, face painting, belly-dancing lessons, drum circles, balloon sculptures, and much more. In conjunction with the Atlantic Antic, the MTA will be hosting the seventeenth annual Transit Museum Bus Festival, held on Boerum Pl. between State St. and Atlantic Ave., with newly restored vehicles, the Patcher, the AutoCar, the MetroCard Bus, the Tunnel Wrecker, children’s workshops, and free admission to the New York Transit Museum.

NEW YORK CITY APPLE DAY

The New York apple will be celebrated at street fair on Orchard St. on Sunday



APPLES ON ORCHARD
Orchard St. between Broome & Grand Sts.
Sunday, September 26, free, 11:00 am – 5:00 pm
212-226-9010
www.lowereastsideny.com

Some three hundred and sixty-three years ago, Peter Stuyvesant planted an apple tree on Thirteenth & Third, and New York has been identified with the healthy fruit ever since. On Sunday, the Lower East Side Business Improvement District will be sponsoring the annual New York City Apple Day, held in the general location where French farmer James De Lancey Sr.’s apple orchard thrived back in the eighteenth century. The afternoon will include live performances by Grandma Fantasy, Tyrone Noonan Band, Cows Like Shrimp with Sefton Stallard, and Stella Winkelman of Bell Book and Scandal; the Mark Miller Gallery will be sponsoring an art activities table for kids; and such restaurants as Café Katja, Bunny Chow, and Georgia’s Eastside BBQ will be serving dishes featuring apples. Among the other participants are An Choi, the Henry Street Settlement, Biscuits by Lambchop, the New Museum, the LES Ecology Center, Red Jacket Orchards, the Tenement Museum, and Newtown Pippin.

DELUSION

Laurie Anderson is back at BAM with another multimedia examination of the personal and the political (photo by Leland Brewster)

Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St.
Through October 3, $20-$60
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

Examining the twenty years of her life she has spent sleeping, Laurie Anderson’s new show, DELUSION, running at BAM’s Harvey Theater through October 3, consists of approximately twenty short mystery plays that move smoothly between the personal and the poltical, an intimate multimedia work about dreams and the state of the nation. Commissioned for the 2010 Vancouver Cultural Olympiad, DELUSION features some of Anderson’s sharpest writing in years, performed in her unique talk-singing style either as herself or as deep-voiced alter ego Fenway Bergamot. Anderson glides between several microphones on a stage that includes video projections on a loveseat, shredded paper, a small scrim, and a large screen in back, depicting leaves flying in the wind, smoke drifting endlessly, a chalkboard filled with hard-to-decipher words and images, moonscapes, a child witnessing her mother’s death, and giant live shots of Anderson herself, playing her specially made violin. Joined by Colin Stetson on bass saxophone and Eyvind King on a more traditional violin, both men primarily seen in silhouette, Anderson, dressed in her trademark white shirt and thin black tie, tells jokes and stories about age, memory, Iceland, nineteenth-century Russian space theorist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, punctuation, and her own heritage. The centerpiece of the show is “Another Day in America,” from Anderson’s latest album, the just-released HOMELAND; “And so finally here we are, at the beginning of a whole new era, the start of a brand new world,” she sings as Bergamot. “And now what? How do we start? How do we begin again? . . . And so which way do we go?” Throughout the ninety-minute performance, Anderson, who has previously staged such pieces as THE END OF THE MOON, SONGS AND STORIES FROM MOBY DICK, EMPTY PLACES, and the seminal UNITED STATES: PARTS I-IV at BAM, is warmer and friendlier than ever, filled with charm and good humor, making strong eye contact with the audience as she delves into fascinating topics with a wink and a knowing smile.

NEW YORK GYPSY FESTIVAL

Drom and other venues
85 Ave. A
September 24 – October 3, free – $40
Festival Pass: $30
212-777-1156
www.nygypsyfest.com/2010

The sixth annual NY Gypsy Festival begins tonight with Selim Sesler and the NY Gypsy All-Stars at Drom. The ten-day celebration features performances by such individuals and groups as Mahala Rai Banda, the Veveritse Brass Band, Los Magnificos Impostores, Espiritu Gitano, Tecsoi, Stephane Wrembel, Zlatne Uste, Balval, and Yuri Yunakov, at Rumsey Playfield and Clipper City Tall Ship as well as at the home base, Drom. Past festivals have included such groups as Gogol Bordello, Beirut, Balkan Beat Box, Hazmat Modine, Slavic Soul Party! and Sway Machinery, so don’t be turned off if you don’t recognize any of the names in this year’s lineup just yet; next year everyone might know them, and tickets will be a lot harder to get.

DUMBO ARTS FESTIVAL

“Sushi” is performed in the windows of the BoConcept furniture store at 79 Front St. hourly between 2:00 & 5:00 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Multiple locations
September 24-26
www.dumboartsfestival.com

The 2010 DUMBO Arts Festival will feature hundreds of events Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass, three days of open studios, juried exhibitions and installations, concerts, dance, a digital summit, book signings, walking tours, performance art, a visual poetry marathon, children’s activities, and more, much of it free. The New York Photo Festival is premiering “Capture Brooklyn” at the powerHouse Arena, No Longer Empty will take over a suite in 111 Front St. as well as scaffolding outside 25 Washington St., Tom Verlaine will be playing at Galapagos with Billy Ficca and Patrick Derivaz, and Jonathan Lethem will be celebrating the launch of the paperback version of CHRONIC CITY. Among the other myriad participants and special events are the Brooklyn Ballet, Jane’s Carousel, storyteller LuAnn Adams, E. J. Antonio, the Strung Out String Band, Daniel Fishkin, Crystal Gregory, Mighty Tanaka, Bubby’s seventh annual Pie Social, a Steampunk Salon Saloon, and a bug-eating discussion with chef and artists Marc Dennis.

Anyone can be a star in Nelson Hancock’s two-part “That’s (not) Me” at DUMBO Arts Festival (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

We particularly recommend Nelson Hancock’s “That’s (not) Me” outside on Main St. and inside at 55 Washington St., an August Sander-inspired project in which you can take a photograph of a friend or stranger, then switch places, then take a self-portrait, and you get to take home each photo of yourself; “Sushi,” in which Felisia Tandiono, Kashimi Asai, and Nung-Hsin Hu perform as three pieces of sushi in the windows of BoConcept at 79 Front St.; Andrea Cote and Michael Drisgula’s “Clay,” in which Cote will sculpt your head in clay while Drisgula documents it on video, with the same piece of clay used for all sitters; Fountain Art Fair favorite Allison Berkoy’s creepy projection “Asleep #3,” hidden away in a loading dock at 30 Washington St.; eteam’s “Gallery Cruise” at Smack Mellon on 92 Plymouth St., where you can relax at a table in the Tea Room, which offers a view of the Atlantic Ocean through a pair of windows; and Demetria Mazria’s “Take-Less” at 30 Washington St., composed of plastic take-out containers that form the number 2629, representing the number of such containers used (and then thrown out) every second in the United States. (We were looking forward to Janet Biggs’s “Wet Exit,” but it was canceled at the last minute.)

JP, CHRISSIE AND THE FAIRGROUND BOYS

Chrissie and JP share their unusual relationship in song (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Irving Plaza
17 Irving Pl.
Saturday, September 25, $34.50, 8:00
212-777-6800
www.myspace.com/chrissiehyndejpjones

Last month, longtime Pretender Chrissie Hynde gave New Yorkers a sneak peek at her her latest project, previewing songs from FIDELITY! (Rocket Science, August 2010), the debut album of JP, Chrissie & the Fairground Boys. Hynde, Welsh singer-songwriter JP Jones, and Big Linda guitarist Patrick Murdoch performed an intimate show at Rockwood Music Hall, with Hynde looser than ever, joking about her age and calling herself dirty names, immediately setting up a warm, friendly rapport with the audience, a few of whom spoke a little too much to Hynde, who eventually had to only somewhat playfully call for security. Meanwhile, Jones could barely take his eyes off Hynde, amazed that they were together, in one way or another. The new album is centered around the are-they or aren’t-they relationship between the fifty-nine-year-old Hynde and the thirty-one-year-old Jones. “His time is tomorrow / mine was yesterday,” Hynde sings on “Perfect Lover,” the opening track of the album. “I found my perfect lover / but he’s only half my age / He was learning how to stand / when I was wearing my first wedding band/ I found my perfect lover / but I’ll have to turn the page / I want him in my kitchen / and standing on my stage.” JP, Chrissie & the Fairground Boys will be standing together onstage with their full band on September 25 at Irving Plaza, playing their songs of unrequited love and love gone wrong, including such beautiful numbers as “If You Let Me,” “Courage,” and “Leave Me If You Must.” They ended the Rockwood Music Hall show with a funny, improvised version of Moby Grape’s “Murder in My Heart for the Judge,” by the 1960s group that Hynde said was the major influence on her new group, so look out for that one as well. Massachusetts-based singer-songwriter Amy Correia opens up.