__Tue Aug 28th__ FREE SHOW: Tom VandenAvond, Soda Gardocki

Tuesday August 28th, 2012
Another F’n Promoter Presents:
Tom VandenAvond
Soda Gardocki
10PM
FREE

Soda (and his million peice band) is an ingenious creation who assimilate the American music lexicon and bend it into new and wonderful shapes. Their nearest competition would be The Pogues, although they sound nothing alike. The Pogues famously took old Irish drinking songs, traditional ballads, and the mystique of the Emerald Isle and shot it through the veins of punk rock. Soda & Co. are doing the same for Americana. Soda’s gruff and mysterious voice recalls the haunted Tom Waits, and his tales of lying women and sinners and early death bring to mind the warped world of Nick Cave. SODA is moved by the pure love of folk, blues, and punk like Frankenstein’s monster was moved by a jolt of lightning.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1eD4SPmYI0[/youtube]

Soda used to light up the frets in the kinetic pop punk band Wax, and among the many other members are more than a few seasoned hardcore punks. Theirs is the twilight world of dirt roads and mysterious groves of trees and the open prairie full of strangers on the outskirts of town. It’s dusty and greasy, tender and cold-hearted all at once. “Lakeshore” is a sad-eyed waltz, a goodbye letter from a man who just can’t be bothered to try anymore. “Christine” features some plucked and reverbed guitar and shuffling rhythms and some crazy blowing on a mic’d harmonica. These 10 tracks are all vignettes of American gothic, stories of the cold landscape of the great empty spaces, played by a fantastically crowded band. On slower numbers, like “Sinnerman” the multitude of musicians create their own thread in the tapestry of the song. Far from playing all over each other, they open up the space in the music.”

Tom VandenAvond embodies everything that makes alt-country awesome. He’s got a surly, drank-too-much-last-night-and-now-I-gotta-perform attitude, a killer take-no-shit slogan (“You may all go to Hell, and I will go to Texas”). One can hear wisps of such late greats as Jimmie Rodgers or even Huddie Ledbetter in VandenAvond’s songs, which alternate between good ol’ country and low-key folksy ballads about murdering cops in churches and other lurid subjects.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYtgazKm_kg&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

His vocals are rich with twang and as raw as whiskey, and he could quite possibly match Tom Waits someday for grit, as he croons out subdued menace at times. But even when VandenAvond spins a yarn in “Lost on the Bottle” about possibly engaging in alcohol-fueled spousal abuse (“Some days I got mean things on my mind/There’s an odd chance I might treat that woman unkind/If she don’t pay me mind she might wind up in the pines”), you get the feeling it’s sung with a playful wink.