A recent performance by Kate Maki in her home province of Ontario.
By Todd Lavoie
Front porch romantics and summer sunset swooners, set your heartstrings a-flutter in anticipation. Canadian alt-country-folk songstress Kate Maki will bring her enchanting "No Depression" melodies to Café du Nord Thursday, April 24, opening for weirdly wonderful Giant Sand mastermind Howe Gelb. Trust me: if you've ever tumbled weak-kneed and flustered over the down homey charms of a blue highway-rambling singer-songwriter in your lifetime, you'll fall hard for Maki. I certainly have.
Boasting an arrestingly gentle, plainspoken delivery, Maki fashions impressive levels of pull-up-a-chair-and-stay-awhile intimacy out of uncluttered arrangements and emotionally direct lyricism. A cross between Suzanne Vega and Iris DeMent, perhaps, though I do detect threads of similarity with Gillian Welch - albeit with considerably less of that tattered black-and-white Dorothea Lange photo vibe going on here - as well as with fellow Ontarian Sarah Harmer.
It's immediate, familiar-as-an-old-friend kind of stuff - and yet it's all quite stimulating and at times even challenging. It ain't easy to craft deceptively simple, homespun little charmers like those on Maki's recently released American debut, On High (Confusion Unlimited/Ow Om) - a lot of folks try and fail, often out of succumbing to cliché or insisting upon self-perceived limitations of the genre. Not an issue here: this 27-minute introduction is loaded with forcefully understated little wonders. Can't wait to hear 'em live.
Prior to On High, Maki released two albums in her native Canada. Given their scarcity here in the States, I have yet to see - let alone hear - either of them. So, let's look at On High. The album's genesis can be traced back to 2004, when Maki first met Giant Sand's Howe Gelb. Gelb was in Ontario at the time, working on his 'Sno Angel Like You (Thrill Jockey), and the two clicked during the recording sessions. Chalk it up to busy schedules and national borders, I suppose, but it took some time for the pair to reconvene - and such results!
Not only did Gelb produce the full-length - puffing considerable amounts of atmosphere into the project along the way - but he also released it on his own Ow Om label. His attentive touch can also be heard in the album's instrumentation, having contributed guitar, piano, Wurlitzer, and a few quintessentially Gelb-ian odds and ends like bottles and train whistles.
"Truth is on the windowsill / age is on my skin / skin is on my aching bones / trouble lies within" - quite an opening statement, certainly, but Maki dresses up the take-it-or-leave-it candor of these words with delicately sweet phrasing on "Highway," the first track on On High. A gentle rhythm pushes along underneath, occasional sighs of pedal steel twirl above the clear ring of an insistent acoustic strum, and then a gliding chorus: "Let my heart find a home / let my voice stand alone." The song isn't just a fantastic starting howdydoo, but it also makes a great lead-in for the ever-so-slightly wobbly two-step of "Blue Morning," a shuffling number powered by head-swaying runs of honky-tonk piano and the rousing chorus, 'I can't go with you / You can't go with me / and we can't let it go."
A similar sentiment to that of "Blue Morning" pops up on its follow-up, "Wanted Ads," a gracefully constructed study of relationships gone sour: "All I want to say is lost / all you want is lost / This is everything for you and I." Accompanied only by an acoustic guitar, Maki's narrator wonders whether she and her better half are as rock-solid as they'd like to think: "Is it worth its weight in stars? Are we better behind bars?"
Maki's most adventurous moment arrives with "To Please," a brilliantly tap-inducing Tin Pan Alley number consisting of clop-clop-clop percussion and old-timey rinky-dink piano and - best of all - an endearingly awkward solo turn by Gelb on a soda bottle, blowing away like an alternate-universe Zamfir. Only the staunchest Calvinist could not crack a smile at this adorable little ditty, and the cheeky kiss-off of the lyrics is priceless: "Take that look upon your face / wipe it on your sleeve / I don't care what you want / don't care what you need / I've got myself to please."
Equally fetching is the future dating-mixtape favorite "Badminton Racquet," a delightful 84-second declaration of dorks-in-love very much in the vein of the Velvet Underground's "I'm Stickin' With You." "We keep together like a badminton racquet / bouncing little birdies everywhere," Maki and bandmate and drummer Nathan Lawr enthuse over a cute guitar pattern before launching into a whistling solo which could be best described as the musical equivalent of a basket full of puppies. Entire courtships should be built around this song.
On High also has its moments of considerable emotional depth: witness the heart-stopping showcase "Message Forgot," an utterly gorgeous canopy-of-stars-evoking country-folk meditation on the passing of time. Here, backing musician Dale Draves provides plenty of sob-material with mournful runs on the pedal steel, and Gelb's Wurlitzer sighs are positively Spooner Oldham-esque, rich and soulful and full of Muscle Shoals spirit. Maki turns in a fascinating performance, recalling moments of Victoria Williams in her ability to sound simultaneously fresh-faced and bubbly but still long in the tooth. Of course, the lyrics sure do help: "Getting old / getting older / slowing down / getting wiser / closing in on the sky / You notice you care less / you feel less afraid / falling out of disguise."
KATE MAKI
With Howe Gelb
April 24, 8 p.m., $15
Café du Nord
2170 Market, SF
digg •
del.icio.us •
sphere •
google
•
