Drakkar Sauna

w/ The Ginger Envelope

Thursday, March 29 @ Flicker Theatre & Bar

originally published March 28, 2007

Drakkar Sauna

Drakkar Sauna’s music certainly delivers upon its name’s fragrant promise: these boys emanate harmonies that waver and shift and curve and stab but stay closer than the direst stink lines. It’s humane music, which explains all the musk; imagine two perpetually-touring buddies with nothing to do on the road all day but steam-up their sedan-bubble with singing so radiant and beaming it sends shudders through the plains-grasses spreading around their travels, and you get an idea of how natural it feels when they open their mouths to sing. They can fill a room gloriously with song, til the windowpanes are stressed with it and the gaps above the doorjambs are leaking it.

Jeff Stoltz and Wallace Cochran live now in Lawrence, KS, which makes a fair amount of sense: the warmth and ease so redolent in their music evokes those sun-fired Kansan wheat fields; underneath it all, however, is a dense dark loam - they both passed plenty of time toiling in Rust Belt gray-zones like Detroit and Pittsburgh, and that city-shocked realism has put a layer of consternation beneath the harmonically optimistic atmosphere. This ain’t parlor-music.

Think of the young Everlys skipping the sock-hop to read a bunch of Freud and catch a Pablo Neruda reading, and you’ve got a start. Now throw in the coffin-wheeze of Nico’s harmonium - via Jeff’s one-handed Harmophone! - and the indispensable tribal boom-whap of a guitarist playing percussion with just his feet and you’re getting a fuller picture. Add next those molecular-airborne things, like the ecstasy of instantaneous musical invention and the joy of witnessing up-close a musical brotherhood - inherently packed with the truth and the beauty and all that - play itself out, and now you start to understand how truly great it is to see Drakkar Sauna play live. Show starts at 8:30 p.m.

Jim McHugh