Live at Schuba’s, Chicago
A night of small surprises started with a band packed into a tight formation, two standing and two sitting, mere feet apart, as if performing in an elevator. Alternating between two microphones—one clean, one fuzzed-out—the frontman finally identifies himself as “Josh from the M’s,” which, in Chicago, is all one has to do to get attention. Nevermind that the playbill listed his band as “Sano (Josh from the M’s);” his music was a strange kind of intimate that made it easy to tune out but difficult to ignore.

Josh Chicione, as it were, is not only a member of Chicago’s superstar M’s (directed by Jonathan Demme), but also a hypnotic solo artist. Sano is his band (though it features support from other M’s), and Sparklehorse’s sad-sack dirges would be an appropriate comparison if Chicione didn’t write sleepy songs that drone in on themselves, like some cold flower emanating from the blue light of the Schuba’s stage.

Benjy Ferree followed; from Washington D.C. by way of Hollywood, Benjy must have had messed-up teeth as a kid because he wore a harmonica brace with the eagerness of a kid’s last visit to the orthodontist. Only Bob Dylan and Neil Young can pull it off with such confidence, and they use the harness as a way to deflect attention; Benjy Ferree, on the other hand, is a living, breathing front-porch barnstormer.

The eponymous band name serves Benjy well; he fulfills its vaudevillian promise with folksy songs that draw an imaginary school-play backdrop behind him and his band: a tobacco farm with stalks poorly colored and three identical clouds in the cerulean sky. Straw would be a fitting accoutrement for Benjy, who already has a flopped-down hat and plaid, but despite all the window-dressing, the real draw of Benjy’s music is that it has no pretenses of authenticity—no rustic reference points, no painful emotional core; just nice music made for the simple joy music creates.

You’ll notice a glaring lack of song titles in this review; that’s due mostly to unfamiliarity with the bands recorded output and my bad memory. For The Ponys, headlining this third night of Tomorrow Never Knows, unfamiliarity was fine—they played almost exclusively new songs from their forthcoming Matador debut, Turn the Lights Out. Always nice to hear a band debut new songs, so long as it’s not a reunion tour where the hits are politely interspersed among over-produced new stuff.

Last spring, I sat alone at a Radiohead show where they played a bunch of new songs. Hearing the crowd hush for these new revelations was inspiring and pathetic—like finding a new gospel of Radiohead, you could sense a collective reverence, excitement, and disappointment.

Hearing the Ponys new stuff was, needless to say, a less emotional affair. Their music tramples over several genres, but they never feel the need to switch guitars or move to complex tunings. And despite their hardened sound, the band—performing for the first time in five months—played with a certain joy, making us eavesdroppers on a weeknight practice. During one new song, the band paused for a measure or two before slamming the next chord together; this sort of difficult maneuver is usually a confident bit of rock bravado, but when The Ponys nailed it tonight they all turned to one another and smiled in disbelief.

Seeing a band’s guard go down humanizes them in some way, or maybe that’s just the democratic nature of Schuba’s low-stage and non-existent backstage. When they returned for an encore, they rewarded us with a few familiar songs, most notably Celebration Castle’s incredible “Glass Conversation.” Not unlike Warrant withholding “Cherry Pie” until the midnight hour, but one senses The Ponys future doesn’t include county fairs.