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MR. AIRPLANE MAN
NEW AND NEWER


If things had gone as planned at last Saturday night’s DMZ/Mr. Airplane Man gig at the Middle East, there would have been a Boston garage-rock first: the Lyres were scheduled to make a surprise show-opening appearance, in effect allowing loony-tune soul-punk madman (and frontman for both DMZ and the Lyres) Jeff "Monoman" Conolly to open for himself. The occasion for these well-laid plans was auspicious enough: a new album by Mr. Airplane Man, the girl-girl, guitar-drums duo who have become Boston’s great garage-punk hope. The Lyres didn’t play, but there was plenty going on without them.

Indeed, the proceedings attracted West Coast eccentric Long Gone John, proprietor of the California label Sympathy for the Record Industry, who signed the Airplanes a couple years back after being tipped off by Memphis blues-punk granddaddy Jeffrey Evans. It might’ve helped that the last outfit Evans had brought him was a blues-punk duo called the White Stripes. Even so, Mr. Airplane Man are about as far from the White Stripes as you can get while still being, well, a blues-punk duo. Margaret Garrett’s ruptured, Delta-style slide playing and delicate, finger-picked reveries sound older, darker, and more forlorn than Jack White’s portable Zeppelin songbook. Tara McManus’s backbeats tell a story in and of themselves — her playing mimics the evolution of rock and roll from the spare, hypnotic trance thump of Mississippi hill-country fife-and-drum music through to Diddleybeat rumble, with rhythms that carry the weight not only of accent and drive but of narrative, too.

Until just recently, Mr. Airplane Man songs fell into two camps: ghostly traditional country-blues songs in the tradition of Jessie May Hemphill, Howlin’ Wolf, and Fred McDowell, and snarling atom-bomb garage punk along the lines of Doo Rag and the Gories. The new Moanin’ has its share of both, including a version of McDowell’s "Sun Sinkin’ Low," the title track (by Wolf), and the traditional spiritual "Jesus on the Mainline" — the latter two of which they’ve been playing since the late Mark Sandman recorded their early demos. But when Garrett prefaced "Very Bad Feeling," she introduced it as a new kind of Mr. Airplane Man song: a "pretty one." Along with "Not Living At All" (already a clear crowd favorite) and "W*nderin’" (which didn’t make the set list), "Very Bad Feeling" finds Garrett playing with a poetic, dark-hued melodic sensibility that falls somewhere between Suzanne Vega and (on "Not Living at All," at least) the early Lyres. At this point the group’s proficiency is evolving so quickly that the songs sounded better live than they do on the album; and though Moanin’ was just hitting stores last week, at the Middle East Garrett and McManus were already debuting newer material slated for their next release. Stay tuned.

BY CARLY CARIOLI

Issue Date: October 3 - 10, 2002
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