It started in the john, where all great shows start. I met Josh as we both washed our hands at the Fairplay Hotel’s ground-floor
restroom, and after a few minutes of life-on-the-road talk in the hallway I found out he was trumpet player Josh McKibben of the Happy Bullets, a buzzy little Dallas band playing the hotel’s dining room a few hours later.
We stuck around. And it’s a good thing. The band, playing night No. 1 of the South Park Music Festival on Sept. 9, painted its joyous gospel across the Victorian walls of the packed room with a giant brush dripping with anachronistic, otherworldly pop-dust that demanded the attention of everyone at the modest, second-year Fairplay festival.
Its blast of back-porch symphony – cello, trumpet, banjo and dueling guitars – is a potent pop celebration capped by sugary vocalists Jason Roberts, Tim Ruble and Andrea Roberts, the latter of whom doesn’t quite match the band’s reservoir of unabashed enthusiasm. Still the band killed it and was at its best during songs such as “The Vice & Virture Ministry,” which reads like a super-succinct Decemberists track but sounds more like Brian Wilson on some really killer painkillers.
– Ricardo Baca
DeVotchKa
Colorado’s most debauched (and devotched) launched their beloved DeVotchKa on their way to a high-profile CMJ showcase in New York with a packed-to-the-gills party at the Bluebird that featured all the foot-stopping Slavic bombast and ballast that has marked the band’s nine years. There were soap bubbles hovering above a crowd drunk with equal parts sweetness and surliness. They swooned over the studly Nick Urata playing the theramin with, yes, a bottle of wine – while proving once again he’s the only man in America who can pull off the ruffled tuxedo-shirt look. Sure, he’s hot, but what’s hotter than watching a shy Jeanie Schroder bow a bass string or blow into a sousaphone lined with Christmas-tree lights as gentle backlighting highlights the huge red flower in her hair? The boys – and girl – played all the hits, but the highlight by far was an upbeat cover of the Velvet Underground’s “Venus in Furs.”
– John Moore
Pravada
Jesse Lee can go from reclusive, background cellist to evocative, guitar-slinging frontman with fearful ability.
Lee’s Pravada is a thoughtful, upbeat pop group that strays from the expected songwriting crutches and instead stands freely on his own skill and charisma. He was convincing Saturday at the Fairplay Hotel (part of the South Park Music Festival) with “Holding Hands” and other such smacks of pop bliss, and he doesn’t stop there: He also plays cello in another popular Indianapolis band, Margot & the Nuclear So & So’s, the clear buzzband of last weekend’s mountain festival.
But it was Pravada’s subtle pop structures that left the deeper imprint. The music creeps and lingers with a haunting resonance and impressive dexterity. It smartly tells a story of breaking out – and it helped that Lee was joined by many of his Margot bandmates, including vocalist Richard Edwards, who is himself a big Pravada fan.
– Ricardo Baca
