Salt Lake City Upcoming Concerts: Clumsy Lovers, Impaler, Ted Leo, G. Love & Special Sauce

By Brian Staker, 4-20-07

	Caption: Stake Pick o' the Week: Elf Power

Clumsy Lovers

I’ve recounted the tale of the Clumsy Lovers here at least once before: their assemblage of folksy rock (or rocksy folk) itself the stuff of folklore, musicians in Vancouver, Canada playing at parties and born into band status by pretty much popular demand. And that’s their great strength still, that watching them you don’t feel like you’re witnessing some journeying songsters motoring around to make their way, relative strangers united to the audience only by sweet sounds. They could be some neighborhood band just playing out to have some fun. Pick up an album, they are all pretty much the same, sound arrangements but impossible to convey the live experience. Everywhere is the Clumsy Lovers’ neighborhood. In that way they aren’t clumsy at all.

April 20, Urban Lounge
Also appearing:
April 19, Bozeman MT (Zebra Cocktail Lounge)
April 21, Twin Falls ID (Earth Day Festival)

Impaler

It’s either a cautionary tale or marketing savvy how-to lesson: St. Paul, Minnesota gore-metal band Impaler seemed consigned for the dungeons of obscurity until Tipper Gore and the Parents’ Music Resource Center (an oxymoron if I’ve ever heard one) decided the band was, among others, the cause of a myriad of ills riddling the nation’s youth: from crack smoking to teen prostitution to probably athlete’s foot. Remember the parental warning labels on CDs? That strategy really worked, didn’t it? To help bands sell more, that is.

Inclusion on the “offensive albums’ list aligned them with the strange bedfellows of Prince, Cyndi Lauper and Judas Priest, probably increased their album sales an exponential digit, and extended their career oh, months longer than ‘Warranted.’ Though the group didn’t survive the 80’s, Alice Cooper acolyte Bill Lindsey didn’t shy from resurrecting the group in the late 90’s and early 2000’s, the decade which we are already almost counting down to the end of. VH1 might recall this era as ‘the war on terror’ and 80’s bands terrorizing us with their reunion tours.

April 21, Bar Deluxe
Also appearing:
April 19, Colorado Springs CO (Union Station)
April 20, Aurora CO (Hubba’s)

Ted Leo and The Pharmacists

Ted Leo is one of those names in the indie music world, like John Vanderslice, who have uncompromisingly carved out their own niche, realized their own ideas of the way they wanted their music to sound. In Leo’s case, after working with numerous outfits for over a decade, rustling back and forth between punk and pop on the spectrum, and the remarkable thing is executing these ideas in the songwriting mode with astonishing self-assurance almost from day one. On his latest, Living With the Living (Touch & Go), he adds political protest to the fray. One of the great individualist musical voices of our day.

April 21, In the Venue
Also appearing:
April 20, Boise ID (The Venue)
April 22, Englewood CO (Gothic Theatre)

G. Love & Special Sauce

I don’t really have to explain it to you, do I? The laidback, sweet soulful rap of G. Love & Special Sauce is unmistakeable. Fifteen years and seven albums later, Lemonade finds them on Jack Johnson’s Brushfire label,and it’s a perfect match. Free from major-label pressure to sell huge amounts, they can stretch out and relax, as you will do too. Though the crowd at the Depot might well be moving enough to shake the place off its tracks. (It was a former Union Pacific depot in a former life) Like G. Love has anything to prove.

April 21, The Depot

Elf Power **Staker’s Pick O’the Week!**

Lo-fi impressarios, wierd name, Elephant 6 cohort. Natch, Elf Power is my Pick O’the Week. I’ve tried not to let my own personal bias enter into the selection process as I’ve penned this column oh, thirty-three odd years as of this week, but Elf Power is so damn cool! Unless Elephant 6 ‘leaders’ Apples in Stereo who have grown more into a power-pop phenomenon or Olivia Tremor Control whose sound devolved into obscure novelty, Elf Power has maintained an uneasy balance between folk influences, psychedelia and sheer sonic experimentation, while keeping song structures intact.

Their latest, Back to the Web (Orange Twin) rolls more over to the acoustic guitar side of the spectrum, but etherial lyrics and Asian drone sounds intimate sonic landscapes past and future uncharted territories. This is the experimental spirit at its best, not dabbling for its own sake but searching, in service of artful results.

April 23, Kilby Court
Also appearing:
April 22, Denver CO (Larimer Lounge)
April 24, Boise ID (Neurolux)