Eugene weekly., June 10, 2004, Page 27, Image 27

BY VANESSA SALVIA
Eclectic Poison
Variety at Sam Bond's, Kaswell's fingerstyle blues
at Luna.
I
t was back in January when I first told
you about San Francisco’s The Slow
Poisoners . They’re back, and perform-
ing with The Hinges and The Ovulators at
Sam Bond’s on Thursday, June 10.
Bandleader and visionary Andrew Poisoner
says, “About eight years ago, I was in Paris
on my birthday and I had a vision of surreal-
istic rock and roll marrying the weirdest
lyrics possible to roots-influenced music.”
He’s succeeded on both accounts, as his
music celebrates the bizarre a bit like
Jonathon Richman meets Marc Bolan. “I
wanted a band flexible enough to play
country music and psychedelic music and
pop music and even R&B influenced
music,” he adds.
Originally, Poisoner enhanced the typi-
cal rock format (guitar, drums, bass) with
that ultra-cool instrument, the theremin.
That morphed into adding two cellos to the
lineup, which, he says, “got really unwieldy
and everything was feeding back on stage
‘til it sounded like it would all explode.”
They stripped down again to the stan-
dard rock combo plus keyboards, but are
now down to two, thanks to bandmates
having difficulty appreciating the touring
lifestyle and the squelching of personal
ideas when bringing someone else’s musi-
cal vision to life.
“I had my vision and other people want-
ed to make it a metal band and by God I just
wasn’t going to do it,” Poisoner avows.
Poisoner produced a 1999 CD on Pop
Smear, Great Spiders and Diamond
Powder; the title derived from the book,
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the
Madness of Crowds. It was published in
1841 with a chapter called “The Slow
Poisoners,” relating “the dastardly art of
doing away with someone by placing such
a small amount of arsenic in their drink on
a daily basis that they don’t know anything
is wrong until they can’t get out of bed.”
(Spider powder and diamond dust was a
recipe revealed in this book as a good one
for slow poisoning.)
Poisoner ran with that image saying,
“That is so weird, that would be a good
name for a band!” After that the band had
an opportunity to travel to Memphis and
record at the legendary Sun Studios, which
Poisoner says “prompted us to be more
twangy in our sound but just as psychedel-
ic in our head space.”
In 2003, the band recorded the second
album for Heyday Records, Days of the
Soft Break. “I went through a period after I
discovered Bob Dylan late in life when I
decided that no other music was necessary,
and I think you can hear that influence on
some of the tracks,” says Poisoner. While
some of the songs sound as if they were
sung with a British accent, Poisoner assures
us that was not a deliberate intent,
“although some people find it charming.”
He theorizes that perhaps the delivery aris-
es from having ingested a lot of British
bands during his formative years, or per-
haps it was “all the acid.”
“Occasionally a group of words will get
stuck in my head which will become the song
title,” says Poisoner, then he’ll fool around
with a guitar until the music feels right and
the words “spool forth from my brain like a
murky muddy stream.” Despite the discom-
fort the band’s name can inspire, Poisoner
has no interest in creating depressing music.
“I was raised on the Beatles so I have
ingrained in my brain the desire to make
hooky chord progressions,” he explains.
Also on the 10th, check out fingerstyle
blues guitarist Gordon David Kaswell at
Luna. Kaswell’s style ranges widely over tra-
ditional American and British folk to con-
temporary rock tinged with jazz. He has built
an impressive performing career, but
Kaswell is also known among his peers as a
talented composer. He composed the film
score to The Passionate Harvest, an award-
winning documentary about coffee agricul-
ture, and co-authored “The Performer,” a jazz
tune that was featured in the ABC docu-
drama, A Murderous Affair, and sung on
“Saturday Night Live.”
Several high-profile clients (Bellissimo
Media and Symantec Software among
them) have also hired the talented musician
to compose original music for their adver-
tising campaigns.
Kaswell honed his acoustic guitar craft
while playing coffee houses in Boston. Since
those days of struggle, he has produced two
CDs: Java Roads, which features the com-
plete music from the coffee documentary,
and Overnight Sensation. One song from
that release, “The Price of Freedom,” was a
finalist in the 2003 Willamette Valley Folk
Festival songwriting contest.
Interested in “Cosmic Americana?” Yes?
Check out Albuquerque’s ThaMuseMeant
Friday at Cafe Paradiso. With that self-
description in hand, be prepared for a night
of jam rock, bluegrass, jazz and folk com-
bined in a way that enhances all the senses.
Catchy songs, vocal harmonies, guitar, har-
monica, bass, mandolin and fiddle provide
an eclectic foundation for percolating per-
cussion. Lightning-fast mandolin and fiddle
picking drives this predominantly acoustic
group’s musical alchemy, but while you
might think you know where the song is
headed, the group will throw in a chord
change or a mid-song time shift to project
their audience farther out into space.
Vocalist/bassist Aimee Curl has a voice
that channel surfs between an earthy wailing
and a high mountain yodel, while singer,
songwriter and guitarist Nathan Moore pens
storytelling tunes a la Bob Dylan and has a
voice to perfectly complement Curl’s tone,
when they do decide to add vocals, which is
not often. Preferring to let the music reign,
TheMuseMeant takes a kaleidoscopic view
of the tunes, eschewing nothing if it gets a
good groove going or encourages more ener-
getic dancing. This rootsy quartet has been
together for nearly 10 years, residing in New
Mexico when not touring.
ew
The Slow Poisoners
play Sam Bond's
Thursday, June 10.
JUNE 10, 2004 27