Last night (Friday, April 14) at 11 I watched one of a peculiar set of KPBS reruns of Live at the Belly Up from 2013, a decade ago. KPBS has been dredging up these old shows from their archives for quite a while now, and this one featured an oddball group called Vokab Kompany and a progressive alt-country group called Brawley. Vokab Company was fronted by two rappers but employed a full band – synthesizer, electric violin, keyboards, bass and drums, along with a guest saxophonist, Jesse Molloy, who was by a wide margin the hottest, sexiest guy in the band (the bass player played shirtless and it was a nice try, but the sax player had it all over himin the looks department). Vokab Komnany played six songs stretching out over half an hour of the 52-minute time slot, and for the most part they7 avoided the infuriating rap mumble that comes from speaking their words in double time – if you’re going to reduce mu sic to just rhythm andlyrics, the very least you can do is render the lyrics actually intelligible instead of spitting them out at warp speed, as so many rappers seem to do. There were a few times the band’s two frontmen did that, but mostly they spoke clearly and understandably. What Vokab Kompany did that made them different is they had an actual band of live musicians backing them up - not just a D.J. spinning records and beats – and the band behind them created some exciting world-music grooves even though I still can’t stand most rap.
They did six songs, most of them about traditional rap subjects like dancing – “Get Up,” “Gunslinger,” “DeLorean,” a medley of “El Axe” and “Wake Up,” “Radio Silence” (also the name of one of Elvis Costllo’s most eloquent songs) and “Keen Eye.” My favorite song of theirs was “DeLorean,” which they prefaced by saying it was inspired by the Back to the Future movies and the use of a converted DeLorean sports car as a time-travel device in those films. The co-leaders mused on how nice it would be to have a DeLorean that could do time travel – and one of the people who would have undoubtedly relished the chance to go back in time and fix some of his own mistakes is John DeLorean himself and his involvement with drug dealers to raise the money to save his company – he was arrested and convicted, but the verdict was reversed on appeal. Brawley, a band whose output is much more to my taste musically, is a project of local singer-songwriter Nena Anderson, who began as a white soul singer who got compared to the Black soul great Etta James. (The prototypical white soul diva, Janis Joplin, covered Etta James’s “Tell Mama\” on one of her last recording sessions, but Janis’s version wasn’t released until 1982 and, predictably, James totally blew her away on the song.)
But Anderson is also a fan of country music, and she started Brawley to showcase her skill at that genre. Though this show was 10 years old, Brawley’s current Web site, https://brawleyup.com/about/, lists the same band personnel – Anderson and Adrian DeMain (who looked oddly Hawai’ian or Polynesian to he) on guitar and vocals, David Berzansky on pedal steel guitar, Jo, Aistom pm p;d=fashioned upright bass and Dale Daniel on drums ≠ as appeared on thai show, and the band still plays live at the Belly Up Tavern in Solana Beach. Alas, Brawley got only four songs – “Promises,” “Everyday” (a band original and not the Buddy Holly masterpiece “Every Day,” alas), “I Fall in Love Too Fast” (also a title that hearkens back to an older song, “I Fall in Love Too Easily”) and “One More.” I certainly would have liked to hear more from them and less from the Vokab Kompany. Anderson sang lead on all the songs except “Everyday,” where she relegated herself to backup vocals to DeMaiin’s lead – and DeMain was clearly the lead guitarist, though Anderson played her rhythm parts on an oversized guitar that reminded me of the ones Sister Rosetta Tharpe used to play.. The best part of Brawley’s music, not surprisingly, is Anderson’s voice; it’s a powerful, well-controlled instrument with enough of an “edge” it’s easy to imagine her singing soul. She brought the soul “edge” to her country vocals in Brawley and she probably brings a bit of country to her soul work as well. I’d like to hear more from this amazing local vocal treasure!
