The solo/side project is as old as mythology itself. Back in the day, the Greeks peppered their tales of gods and heroes with thrilling cameos, digressions, and spin-offs. Who among us can forget good old Herakles popping into Hades to rescue Theseus? It’s like back in the fifties when Miles Davis rescued a young John Coltrane from relative obscurity! Of course, the ancients didn’t always need demigods or even the House (band) of Atreus (a clear corollary to Motown) for a worthy solo effort or side project. Sometimes a guy like Ajax grabbed some time in the spotlight. Maybe he wasn’t as epic or timeless as his better-known peers, but he offered a solid diversion nonetheless (not unlike Ringo’s Blast From Your Past).
As far as music goes, this sort of mixing is de rigueur in the jazz world, but not as common – or successful – in the pop scene. Damon Albarn’s brilliant Gorillaz offers an exception here, while his interesting but hardly classic project the Good, the Bad and the Queen supplies the rule. The solo/side project is more sidereal than stellar, more fleeting than Fleetwood Mac. Often, it fills in a gap between bigger releases by the whole band or suggests a testing of the waters. And so it came as a pleasant surprise to me that three of my favorite albums of 2011 were solo/side projects.
In the indie-rock pantheon, it doesn’t get much more Olympian than the Super Furry Animals, Fiery Furnaces, and Sleater-Kinney. Members of these divine bands – Gruff Rhys of SFA, Eleanor Friedberger of FF, Carrie Brownstein and Janet Weiss of S-K (who team up with Mary Timony of Helium to form Wild Flag) – have dropped their more familiar epithets to walk disguised among the mortals. Despite their distinct sonic palettes, Rhys’s Hotel Shampoo, Friedberger’s Last Summer, and Wild Flag’s eponymous debut all share a vacation vibe. Fortunate enough to have caught the tours behind each release, I’d like to briefly describe the results.
On their self-titled debut, Wild Flag play an angular yet poppy brand of rock that evokes both Wire and the Go-Go’s. When M and I saw them at the Paradise, the one extra piece of stage equipment was a fan aimed at Janet Weiss’s raven locks. Apparently, its sole purpose was to provide the beloved 80’s video effect of the slow-motion stiff breeze. No one called attention to this Aeolian touch, but it managed to convey the group’s sense of humor and their ability to play with rock tropes. More importantly, the band played a consistently tight and highly energetic set. Standouts included party anthems “Romance” and “Boom,” which feature handclaps, shout-along choruses, and thundering Zeus-ical drums. The band played the album in its entirety and closed with a bonus cover of Television’s classic “See No Evil.”
As the Fates would have it, the opener for Wild Flag was Eleanor Friedberger. Her solo effort Last Summer is as breezy and ever-so-slightly melancholic as its title. The set itself had a casual groove that matched the velvet jeans Friedberger had donned for the evening. Playing album tracks and even newer songs, she toned down the rapid-fire delivery often showcased in her Fiery Furnaces performances. While highlights “My Mistakes” and “Roosevelt Island” lacked the keyboard fuzz that sounds so dizzyingly pleasant on record, they still worked well because Friedberger packs such great narratives into her lyrics. The former tune wonders, “why keep time traveling / if it doesn’t get better on the second time around?” The latter re-imagines the Velvet Underground’s ominously frenetic “I’m Waiting for the Man” as a spacey romp.
Finally, the latest Gruff Rhys solo album Hotel Shampoo plays up the singer’s appreciation for the Beach Boys and his openness to . When we saw Rhys at the Brighton Music Hall, he was backed by a great Welsh surf-rock outfit called Y Niwl (pronounced ‘Uh Nule’). Upon taking the stage, Rhys first played a 45 of The Cyrkle’s “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore,” a Bacharach/David composition sampled on Hotel Shampoo’s catchy lead track “Shark Ridden Waters.” Other strong showings from the new album included the mod-sounding “Christopher Columbus” and the sweet “If We Were Words (We Would Rhyme).”
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