[Dixielandjazz] No, it ain't OKOM . . . BUT

[Stephen G Barbone]

Couldn't resist posting this review of an  avant garde jazz infused  
punk rock trio, Seabrook Power Plant,  lead by a Banjo Player  
described as the "World's Least Rustic Banjo Player".

Ginny L,  Bruce McN and other banjo players may get a kick out of it,  
as might John Petters, other drummers and upright bass players, given  
the descriptive first paragraph.

If I were a little closer to NYC, I'd go see them. How could one  
resist  "The Waltz of the Nuke Workers" or "Ho Chi Minh Trail"  or "I  
Don't Feel So Good". <grin>

Cheers,
Steve Barbone
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband

NY TIMES - JULY 9, 2009 - By Nate Chinen


Power Banjo, Extreme Jazz and a Bit of Twitchy Punk


Seabrook Power Plant began and ended its set on Tuesday night at  
Zebulon, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with a grimly combative clamor.  
Jared Seabrook, the band’s drummer, bashed a manhole-cover-size ride  
cymbal and viciously pummeled his snare; Tom Blancarte clawed at his  
upright bass with something like frenzied desperation. In the  
foreground Brandon Seabrook, Jared’s brother, was a man apparently  
hellbent on earning the title of World’s Least Rustic Banjo Player.

It was all hyper-declarative and a little juvenile, but not without  
reason. The music of Seabrook Power Plant — the name is a riff on a  
nuclear station in Seabrook, N.H. — descends both from the extreme  
wing of avant-garde jazz and the twitchier strains of hardcore punk.  
Some songs on the band’s self-titled debut, just out on Loyal Label,  
also reveal a fruitful affinity with the lumbering churn of stoner  
metal.

One such tune, “I Don’t Feel So Good,” was a highlight of Tuesday’s  
set. Brandon Seabrook, playing electric guitar, paired off at first  
with Mr. Blancarte to play a sludgy riff. This went on for a while,  
drums crashing on the downbeat, before abruptly stopping for a guitar  
solo. Mr. Seabrook set it high on his fret board, in scurrying- 
centipede mode.

Among the other guitar-centered tunes were “Base Load Plant Theme,” an  
overdriven full-group freak-out, and “Waltz of the Nuke Workers,” a  
blast of deceptive punk primitivism. Mr. Seabrook’s solos were studies  
in gangly aggression: even with the softening effects of a delay pedal  
his tone conveyed a kind of blowtorch immediacy. His style wasn’t far  
removed from that of Marc Ribot, a veteran of equally wily constitution.

On banjo Mr. Seabrook placed more emphasis on his physical contact  
with the instrument. For one stretch of “Occupation 1977” he strummed  
hard and fast enough to produce a whirring cry, against which his  
partners’ unevenly spaced exclamation points suggested a dispatch in  
Morse code. Next came a section of gnarly fingerpicking, with brisk  
arpeggios that delved into atonality. Similar passages occurred  
throughout a tricky multisection piece called “Ho Chi Minh Trail,”  
which flirted with Eastern modal scales, and briefly had Mr. Seabrook  
running a horsehair bow across the banjo’s strings.

It wasn’t clear what the band meant by dedicating its set to the  
former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, who died this week,  
and who oversaw bombings of the Ho Chi Minh Trail during the Vietnam  
War. Perhaps one answer can be found in a song that closes the new  
album but wasn’t in the show: “Doomsday Shroud.” Fatalistic and  
foreboding, it revels in its own extremity, with a slight but  
perceptible smirk.