Mary Timony announced her final number at the Black Cat Wednesday night as "The New New Song," and that was fitting, since most of her 45-minute performance explored gripping new material, a stripped-down departure from her more ornate solo work.
Timony has often worked with delicate, tendril-like song structures accented with violin and keyboards, as she did on her 2002 release "The Golden Dove." But in Wednesday night's set she stuck to thick electric guitar tones, and combined with the drum kit of Devin Ocampo (who banged skins for the unjustly forgotten Washington outfit Smart Went Crazy and now plays guitar for the local band Medications), the duo's sound was gritty and bare bones. Still, Timony's songs never followed a simple White Stripes-like path. With spiral-staircase chord progressions and lyrical snippets that evoked mystic spells and relied heavily on metaphor, the density of her past work was evident, but Ocampo's stomping drum work flushed the tunes into a clearer place. The resulting sound suggested a pool of art-garage rock with withered flowers floating on its surface. In the early 1990s, Timony played with Washington sensations Autoclave, and then led Boston-based Helium for the balance of the decade. Now she's D.C.-based again, and if Wednesday's set is any indicator, the album she's currently finishing should prove she's also returning to the rocking roots of her consistently compelling career. -- Patrick Foster from washington post.com |
