From Milwaukee, With Love

The Candliers – The Unsettled West
Live at WMSE

I don’t want to get into the politics of Milwaukee’s local music scene, except to say that for a city that brought you both Liberace AND The Violent Femmes –and hosts the world’s largest music festival every summer –we ought to have more of a scene than we do. A punk band here, a cover-y blues rock band there, a few flappity rappers and DJs bearing the great weight of urban revitalization, and you’ve got a lot of city residents feeling a little punchy (”I’m moving to Chicago!”) –or a little sore.

Admittedly, I copped an attitude when I moved here; after all, I’m from Detroit, a savage crater of a city that has nonetheless managed to crank out a significant percentage of the world’s most awesome music. If Detroit can do it, I wanted to shout from the top of Milwaukee’s abandoned breweries, you can too! Stop feeling so sorry for yourself and kick out some jams!

But after a while, that impulse faded. Milwaukee is a tricky city to get to know, and the music that lives here is no exception. A decade of juvenile bullying between club owners and booking agents has pushed a lot of activity under the surface, so while twinkly venues host hot touring acts and indie record shops bring in hot indie rockers, the premium-grade MKE shit is going down in basements, attics, and the back rooms of dark bars.

Okay, I’ve lived here for thirteen months. It takes some babies longer to walk, and it should certainly take me longer to make gross observations. There are bands here; they play shows. There are several brave independent radio stations that do their best to champion local music. There are informal think tanks of musicians every where –bands that generously share their members and their constituencies, like old hats Holy Mary Motor Club (”Pretty much every show we play now is a reunion show,” the guitarist told me recently; for the record, the statement is unfair) and their likely successors The Trusty Knife, a delicious pop rock outfit usually accompanied by a tantalizing bassoon. There are too many really great DJs to mention, getting their hands dirty in piles of old soul 45s at famous Milwaukee record shop Lotus Land to concoct exceedingly crunk “get downs” every Friday and Saturday night worth living through. And then there’s Decibully, an expansive, almost imperial band whose attractive members play many different instruments, tend many different bars, operate art galleries, start solo projects, and seemingly show up to perform at every single street festival in a five-mile radius, sometimes simultaneously. Their success chafes the sensibilities of some lower-profile musicians who fear that Decibully is only loved because they are such big fish in such a very small pond.

But here, in my first post since deep space wintertime, I just want to tell you about the night that I went to a bar on a whispered tip from the young man who delivered my new bed. It was one of the tiniest bars I have ever been to and it made no sense that a seven-piece band –practically an orchestra –could play there. I didn’t see any of the band members and I didn’t know anyone there. A couple of PBRs later, everything came into focus. Friends walked through the door and bought me drinks. Hippies and bike messengers with offensively big bags (probably full of canned goods) filed in and staked out a little jam camp right up front. And eventually I recognized the bed delivery man –a drummer by night, dressed in gypsy drag. He was part of The Candliers, the band I had reluctantly agreed to stay up late for, and one by one they stood out from the crowd –all of the men were dressed in slips, bandanas, shiny jewelry and bloomers; the women wore fedoras, vests, and painted-on mustaches. It was almost unbearably sexy.

If you didn’t know any better, you might write off The Candliers as one of “those bands.” For heaven’s sake, they play with a banjo, an upright bass, a trombone, two singers –a man and a woman –and occasionally an accordion. To dismiss them on the basis of instrumentation would be a grave mistake, but it’s a mistake you might make in a certain circumstance. This band demands to be seen in a crowded, poorly-lit place; on a brutally cold night perhaps, or when you are at your wit’s end, when you are ready to give up hope, give everyone hell, when you are determined to storm fiercely into the night.

At least one misanthrope seemed cured for the evening; repeatedly, he elbowed me with one arm, pointed with his other arm at the brass player and shouted “He’s the soul of the band! That guy is the soul of the band!” (Later he confessed to typically hating horn players in rock bands.) When the lady singer shot her confetti gun, my friend turned to me and said, “Doesn’t it feel like a birthday party?” It did –a birthday party in a dirty port town; in New Orleans; in the old west. After two songs I made up my mind to stay up all night and skip work the next day. That is exactly how it happened.

And these are the sort of revelatory experiences that a music scene like Milwaukee’s affords. Intrigued? The Candliers go on tour next month; catch them in Chicago, Indianapolis, Nashville, Memphis, St. Louis, Kansas City, Minneapolis, Eau Claire or Madison before they return with a hero’s welcome to Brew City.

Full tour dates and locations available at their website.

-Posted by Amy