Freak Scene #77: Mal Devisa Shows Sweeping Range on 'Palimpsesa'
Plus, the Wood Brothers chat about mindfulness before opening a tour Aug. 7 in South Deerfield.
A Guide to Music in Western Mass. (and sometimes Connecticut)
There’s a mindfulness theme this week in Freak Scene, though it’s not one that I planned. But Mal Devisa’s new anthology Palimpsesa is a collection of self-aware songs, and the Wood Brothers open a tour in South Deerfield Aug. 7 in support of their new album Puff of Smoke, on which they extol the virtues of being mentally and emotionally present in a given moment. So, breathe in, breathe out and let’s go.
Deja Carr doesn’t go for half-measures on her latest release as Mal Devisa. On the contrary, Palimpsesa is a sprawling 29-track look inside the Amherst singer, rapper, songwriter and producer’s multi-dimensional creative drive on a mix of earlier material and new, previously unreleased songs.
Many of these tracks date as far back as a decade or more, and first appeared on self-released cassettes or digital files that aren’t easy to find. Putting them together in one place not only makes them accessible, it offers an overview of Carr’s artistic range. She’s fierce and formidable on “Next Stop,” a gritty boom-bap rap track with a take-no-prisoners vibe as she examines what it means to be Black in white spaces, while demonstrating her own knack for vivid imagery and taut wordplay. On “Crowd Pleaser,” from 2018’s Shade and the Little Creature, Carr dials in a vintage Bond-theme aesthetic with strong, sultry vocals over clattering drums and a tuba-like bass part (actually a bass guitar run through various effects). Later, “The Skies” is an instrumental piece that consists solely of Carr on bass accompanied by muted percussion.
The first part of Palimpsesa comprises songs with fuller musical arrangements. “Icarus-Breakthrough,” a track from Mal Devisa’s 2021 release Wisdom Teeth, blends drums, piano and woozy synthesizers with jazzy vocals, while “Dominatrix,” from 2016’s Kiid, finds Carr flinging rhymes through a wall of blaring synthesizers and a chittering drum part. “Dangerous” (also from Wisdom Teeth) is true to the title, with a coiled watchfulness in the skeletal musical arrangement fleshed out by layers of vocals as Carr honors Michael Brown, the teenager shot and killed by a cop in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014.
The latter half of the collection drifts toward Carr’s more experimental side, and she’s often singing with minimal accompaniment. “Contracts,” from the 2018 EP Mystery Train, is just a beat with Carr rapping on the verse and singing on the chorus, both of which repeat in a way that swiftly becomes hypnotic. On the previously unreleased (as far as I can tell) track “My Potential,” she sings over a melodic bass part that could have been lifted from Motown at its height, and her voice echoes through a curtain of reverb as though she’s singing in a cool, dark space. “Slept On,” another unreleased track, is maximal minimalism, with Carr throwing her voice around over a bassline that comes and goes as she alternates between a murmur and full-throated belting.
With such a wide array of sounds and musical approaches on Palimpsesa, what emerges over the course of the 88-minute anthology is a portrayal of an artist with the talent and imagination to pull off whatever kind of song she’s feeling. Henceforth, here’s hoping that Carr makes her music as widely available as possible, as often as she can.
The Wood Brothers Seize the Day on ‘Puff of Smoke’
The Wood Brothers have some tips on their new album, Puff of Smoke, for keeping things in perspective. Rather than buy into main-character syndrome, for example, opening track “Witness” suggests trying out the role of onlooker. Instead of obsessing over things you can’t change, “the trick is not to give a damn,” Oliver Wood sings on “The Trick.” The title track has a carpe diem message, too: make the best of every moment, because each day comes and goes like a puff of smoke.
It’s all part of a mindfulness theme that underpins the trio’s ninth LP, which comes out today. Puff of Smoke is a collection of 11 new songs rooted in, well, roots music, but with a wide-ranging experimental, often improvisational streak. Oliver Wood formed the band more than 20 years ago with his brother, Chris Wood (of Medeski, Martin and Wood) on bass and and multi-instrumentalist Jano Rix on percussion. They’ve been roaming through the American songbook ever since, drawing on Appalachia here, New Orleans there, with elements of jazz, weird synthesizers (see “The Trick”) and a general delight in finding new ways to express themselves musically.
Before starting a tour Thursday, Aug. 7 at Tree House Brewing in South Deerfield, Oliver Wood got on the phone to talk about the band’s new album, and how the trio stays present.
The Wood Brothers release music at a pretty steady clip. To what extent is each new record a kind of a pendulum swing away from the one before it?
Put it this way: We don’t know what we’re going to do for a new record, but we know what we’re not going to do. So, a lot of times you will react to your previous work by saying, “Well, we just did that.” You know, in other words, you want to do something different, and I think we've learned that the weirder we try to be, the more we fun we have, and so the more experimental we get. And part of that experimentation meansnot repeating and finding a new sound, finding a different guitar to play, or getting out of the previous box, whatever that was. We want to make something that is new to us and that we are excited about, and at this point, trust that it's going to sound like the Wood Brothers, because it is us doing it. If we decide to make something Latin disco thing, or something like that, it's still going to have us in it.
How does that manifest on Puff of Smoke?
I’ve described it as a little bit all over the place. Musically, I feel like we really tried some things and really diversified from track to track. Our goal is for there not to be a genre that is identifiable. When somebody asks, “What kind of music are you guys?” well, there's a lot of hyphens that's what we like. We like to create a new recipe, and it’s a lot of the same ingredients, because we kind of do what we do, but there’s always an alchemy.
Given your tendency toward experimentation and not wanting to repeat yourselves, do you establish parameters from one project to the next?
I think of them as limitations. A limitation for us creatively could be time, but it could also be technology, and we've embraced over the last couple albums the use of analog tape — not for the beautiful old analog sound, but more for the process, which has a lot more limitations to it. With digital technology, you have the option always to change and fix and sort of polish whatever you're working on. We’ve found that using computers, you may be telling yourself in the back of your mind, “You can always fix this later, we can always try this again. We have infinite hard drive space.” And if you take that out of the equation and just think of it more as a snapshot, like you're being captured on analog film and you want to try to capture something in the moment, that makes it a lot more exciting, a lot more fun, and makes us a lot more present while we are doing it.
You mentioned being present, which seems like a theme on the new album. Was that in your minds going in, or something that emerged after the fact?
I think both. We talk a lot about this. First of all, in our lives, I think all of us are very interested in learning to live a happy life. All of us are interested in being present and understand how that contributes to our peace of mind. I don't want to overuse the word “mindfulness,” but it's a pretty good word for something that you can practice in your life that maybe helps you get through difficult things and helps you enjoy joyful things, et cetera. And I think that same principle goes for creating art. When you're really mindful and present, that's when your most creative and authentic self is able to come out. A lot of the songs, I think, are about how we're trying to live, and what feels good or what feels bad, and describing it.”
What role does mindfulness play onstage?
Sometimes you can have nights where you make a mistake, you forget a lyric or play a wrong chord or something on the guitar, in my case, and then just sort of dwell on that and beat yourself up and lose the connection that you had with the other musicians. Or you can have a triumphant moment and get lots of applause and then judge yourself in a positive light. But it's that judgment part that really throws you in either direction, and so we're always talking about, as a band, ways to stay connected with each other and ourselves that are sort of things from meditation, like breathe and or sometimes it's an auditory thing. If I get distracted or I’m feeling like I'm having trouble concentrating. I might just listen to my brother's bass and just sort of focus on that in the background, or the hi-hat of the drum set or something like that. And it's one of those things that just keeps you present. Those sort of life lessons that apply to making art, it’s pretty fun to combine those things.
The Wood Brothers perform Thursday, Aug. 7, at Tree House Brewing in South Deerfield, with Mason Via (tickets).
Upcoming Shows
Enfield, Conn., punk band Illicify play today, Aug. 1, on a bill with Dog Disaster (also known, apparently, as the New York/Connecticut queercore band Cat Crash?), Sparko and Cricket at Witch Bitch Thrift, 105 Whitney Ave., New Haven (tickets). Illicify’s rugged new single, “NARCISINSTINCT,” came out July 18.
Northampton’s Outro perform this Saturday, Aug. 2, at Holyoke Media with the Western Mass. band Adam Reid & the In-Betweens, Twin Foxes from Providence and New York band Freezing Cold. It’s a Flywheel show, with more info here.
BubbleTeaGrunge, promoter of the Witch Bitch show above, is also the force behind Riot Grrrl’s Not Dead Fest, featuring Cat Crash, Film & Gender, Showgirl, Froggy, Lady Lychee, Jack Flowers & the Petaltones and, making their live debut, Connecticut’s Splat Rat. The festival happens Aug. 30 at United Presbyterian Church in Milford (tickets).
The Iron Horse in Northampton hosts the Gaslight Tinkers Aug. 22 (tickets), Dean Johnson with Lou Hazel Sept. 27 (tickets) and Leo Kottke Oct. 12 (tickets).
West Springfield hardcore band Restraining Order play an album release show Sept. 11 at the Drake in Amherst (tickets). The group’s new LP Future Fortune is due the next day; here’s the first song:
Rehash, a “’90s-inspired four-piece” from Florida, play the Drake Nov. 1 (tickets).
Djo, the musical persona of Stranger Things actor Joe Keery, comes to College Street Music Hall in New Haven Sept. 27 with Post Animal (tickets).
The Space Ballroom in Hamden, Conn., hosts Spanish Love Songs Sept. 10 with World’s Greatest Dad and Bike Route (tickets).
That’s it for this week, but Freak Scene will be back next Friday with more new music. You can send music for coverage consideration to erdanton at gmail or reply to this email. Check out these guidelines first.
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