“Can’t tell if ‘Stereolab Impression’ means someone’s kinda singing in French, or playing bad jazz,” we wonder to each other before catching a set in the small room at Elsewhere on a recent chilly night from Starcleaner Reunion, a group of New Jersey youths who have since floated northward, closer toward the Other Ridgewood, playing music described by one blogger as “like if Stereolab had spent a lot of time hanging out in Ridgewood.”
Live, the group is capably led by the charismatic Jo Roman, who sings, plays keys, shakes a tambourine & sometimes even produces a small, bead-sized maraca and then shakes that too. It’s hard to say exactly how she and her gang of four or five indispensable Bushwick haircuts (“Each with his own kind of Bushwick haircut,”1 we observe) quite pull off the full Emperor Tomato Ketchup, but they sure do and Roman’s stylish French whispering on the microphone certainly helps a lot and feels convincing in a room full of middle-age shoegaze academics. Said whispers touch on subjects like: the dust on window seals, the moss on brick walls and drinking tea. And it’s in the way Roman says a word and then how she whispers it to herself a few times afterward; as if letting all one hundred of us in on a secret.
The group’s latest release is Café Life. Listen to it here.
Photos taken by Andrew Karpan.
- ed note: some assorted varieties of ‘Bushwick haircut’ are, as follows; Curly Receding, Dayjob Business, Post-Beatles Bowl, and Unwashed Shoulder-Length. ↩︎
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