Review: Stockholm Syndrome @ BK Bowl
Stockholm Syndrome @ Brooklyn Bowl – September 12
Faced with reviewing a show like the barnburner Stockholm Syndrome put on at Brooklyn Bowl, you’re tempted to focus on the visceral impact. But for the uninitiated, know first it’s a quintessentially Jerry Joseph band, and that means punch. The soulful, merciless Joseph was the combination bar band howler, insightful folk-poet and razor-witted iconoclast long before the Hold Steady’s Craig Finn and other more fashionable frontmen, and he clearly loves this lineup.
But it’s not only Jerry Joseph and friends, it’s Jerry Joseph and entirely like-minded hellraisers. It means the protean Wally Ingram behind the kit, and the heavy-heavy-heavy, yet amazingly supple Dave Schools bass anchor. It means the one-two punch of Danny Louis and Eric McFadden, both mischievous improvisers, both preferring the unpredictable palettes of acid blues and psychedelic jazz to modal rock solos. It means you take that fivesome, jack up the whole glorious thing to ear-splitting volumes, and spin tales of love and disaster at a relentless pace ad with the verve of a garage band.
It’s a supergroup that’s often transcendent and only occasionally feels like a collection of excellent players passing the baton around. So well do these musicians gel onstage, in fact, that you wonder if the decent-to-quite strong range of original material they’ve released so far could become great if any of them had his full time and energies to devote to it.
READ ON for more on Stockholm Syndrome at the Bowl…
But that’s neither here nor there. On a rainy Sunday night in Brooklyn, and the opening Sunday of the NFL season no less, came a sparse crowd that had dwindled to a handful of stalwarts by the time the band exited the stage close to 1 AM. No matter; more room to rock. There were problems – the mix was shaky, with Louis, especially, barely audible for most of the night – and occasionally uneven pacing. But they were super-charged from the get-go: the snarling boogie of Counter Clock World bleeding into extended guitar flights and setting the pace for an affirmative run of songs that stretched some 20 minutes longer than most of the one-set shows the band played this tour.
The highs were a great many: McFadden’s piquant country mandolin lifting the tender White Dirt, the frappe-thick bass-and-drums breakdown in Bouncing Very Well, Joseph pinballing from irascible, grungy blues-rock (Emma’s Pissed) to bittersweet country soul (Vic Chesnutt’s Flirted With You All My Life), the whole band locked and loaded for a hefty Henry segued into Joseph’s should-be-a-classic Light Is Like Water, careening jams and triumphal crowd singalongs and all. Oh, and a cameo: Joseph’s buddy James Patrick Dalton lending some buzzsaw harmonica to an unhinged, near-15 minute Jacob Ladder.
If there’s a hindrance for Stockholm Syndrome, it’s that the songs that come from outside their roster of originals – the Joseph staples like Light, Jacob and Wisconsin Death Trip, the jittery acid-country of McFadden’s Miranda, the Chesnutt cover – often overpower the ones that do. It isn’t weak material by any means, it just still sounds like the catalog of a band that worked up a few solid songs as an excuse to play together: play tight, play loud and play long. They have another album on the way and it stands to reason it’ll be a keeper, but then, you don’t seek out Stockholm Syndrome to find a band with smoothed-out edges. The band always feels temporary, and plays like it’s the last time it’ll ever happen, with blessed abandon.
SET: Counter Clock World > Empire One > Milk, Emma’s Pissed* > That Which Is Coming, White Dirt, Miranda, Henry > Light is Like Water, Flirted With You All My Life, Bouncing Very Well** > Apollo > Drive^
E: The Jacob Ladder#, Wisconsin Death Trip
* with “Rama Sita / Shalom Salam” rap
** with bass and drum solos
^ with band intros and “I’m Workin On It” rap
# with James Patrick Dalton on harmonica
