Great American Music Hall
San Francisco, CA
March 3, 2007

The now New Mexico-based musical entity, at the core of which are guitarist Nathan "Nabob" Shineywater and keyboardist Rachel "Rabob" Hughes, headlined the second of two nights of psychedelic rock offered by the annual indie rock showcase, NoisePop. On this outing the band included percussionist Elias Reitz, trap drummer Ben McConnell, and organist Matt Cunitz.

 Brightblack sounds like the woods. The rattle and hiss of percussion like crackling tree branches, crickets, the decaying of leaves on the forest floor; the buzz-hiss of the guitar amp, the wind; Shineywater’s ultra-subdued guitar the flowing of river water over rocks. The sound of entropy. All the while a heavy groove laid down on Hughes’ bass Rhodes, an instrument that sounds as elemental as earth, then Shineywater’s steel slide guitar swells in like sheet lightning, drenched and loud.   After two songs, they own the Great American.
 
Sometimes the groove is southern-inflected, gospel, the Delta blues on heavy liquid acid instead of whisky, cymbals shimmering in like rain. Born in the southern laze, raised in the rolling hills of West Marin, this band can actually make you feel like you’re on acid, like it’s tugging at the back of your teeth. They know how to slow time.
 
Occasionally, Shineywater and Hughes sing, typically together—their voices twinned, in reverbed harmony that emanates, rather than having been enunciated. When the crowd claps at the end of an extended period of this intense ecopsychedelia, it is distracting. Who put all these people in my forest?
 
Yes, Brightblack has a physical presence. Shineywater is long and slender. He leans against a high stool, slunched over his guitar, brown dreads falling over most of his moustachioed face as he coaxes those sounds out of six strings and a rack of delays and mu-trons and such. Hughes bops and moans and smiles big behind the long black Rhodes. A tripod of sun-bleached branches stands between Hughes’ and Shineywater’s keyboards (he plays it, too). The drummers are bearded, the whole band, longhair hippies, their heads bobbing and weaving in synchrony with this groove. It’s not about licks and chops.
 
The songs are named for woods and owls and Native American spiritualities, but the titles seem irrelevant; this earthy groove, almost one single extended song, is the stuff.
 
The crowd is young and hippie, but not in a Deadhead-Phishhead way. These kids are fresher-faced than tourheads, with a vibe of ecopolitics and spirituality, rather than of bong hits in the back of a van. Maybe this is a psychedelia of hope during wartime, more 69 than 67 or 77 or 87. More Anthem of the Sun than American Beauty. More T.C. than Pigpen, more Floyd than Grateful Dead at all.
 
Brightblack was touring with some likeminded and unassuming compatriots.
 
Anacortes, Washington-based guitar loopist Karl Blau opened the show with a set of loosely-rendered, post-Keller Williams experiments built one sample at a time, with effects pedals, two mics, a bass, a guitar, and a little mouth-beatbox. One standout tune was “Deception Pass” (a tune by his band, D+) on which he sang into his mic, looped it, then doubled it in harmony with himself, using guitar fuzz and distortion to sound sweet rather than biting. Blau’s sound was at times reminiscent of the electric gypsy jazz of Gabor Szabo, at times like watching someone play with his guitar toys in his room.
 
Mariee Sioux played folk songs, dark, celtic fingerpicking with icy vocals that recalled early Grace Slick. Her songs felt ancient and oceanic, as she sang of great grandmother, medicine bags full of poison tea, and faces in the rocks. She dedicated one song to her father, Gary, who accompanied her on mandolin.
 
Women and Children, tonight a duo of guitarist Kevin Lasting and singer-organist-violinist June Serwa, played next. Serwa’s singing was more Broadway than Haight Street, Lasting’s quieter, and more in line with the low-key presence of the other acts. Sometimes they channeled a blend of Hot Club and Hot Tuna, with Lasting singing and picking an overdriven acoustic guitar, and Serwa accompanying on violin. Toward the end of the set, Serwa sang and played the organ, behind which she had sat throughout the set, and Lasting switched to bass. Women and Children is an urban, international group (with other members absent), based originally in Paris; maybe that’s why their sound felt a bit out of place on a night of backwoods hippie shamanism.
 
Taken together with the Roky Erickson bill at the Great American on Thursday, it looks like a new wave of psychedelic music is rising to crest. Perhaps it is two waves, one that snaps with the energy of the city, and one that emerges from the soil.

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