Jon Rodgers set up his water-filled wine glasses on a stand and turned on the lights and the microphones around them. The back room of BAR still had a good crowd for its free Wednesday show, and everyone was talking amongst themselves. But if there was any question about whether they were there to hear the music, it was quickly settled.
Rodgers — New Haven native son of Mighty Purple fame, now debuting his latest album, All A Shimmer, under the nom de musique Cindertalk — politely explained that his songs relied heavily on sampled loops of wine glasses, and some of those loops were pretty long. So unless the audience was interested in hearing the noise they made “played over and over for five minutes straight,” it might be a good idea to keep it down.
And with that, Rodgers created the quietest, most intimate show this reporter has yet experienced at BAR. Because almost everyone in the room had come to hear Rodgers. They were there to pay attention, and they complied.
Cindertalk’s All A Shimmer (review coming soon!) has a wide sonic palette, encompassing everything from pianos to percussion, that Rodgers couldn’t possibly replicate on his own. The pleasure of the Cindertalk show thus lies in seeing what Rodgers can do live, armed with a guitar, a case of wine glasses, a loop pedal, a tiny keyboard, and a laptop.
As it turns out, quite a lot, and he didn’t cheat just by using fleshed out backing tracks (which would have been a possibility). Rather, Rodgers often used the first verse of the song to build a part or two; having looped those, he then expanded on those with voice and guitar. Apart from making the self-imposed limitations of being a one-man act into part of the performance, it also offered the sharp-eared a glimpse into how Rodgers’s compositions — and his song really are worthy of the word — were constructed, part by intricate, interlocking part.
Brian Slattery Photo
Jon Rodgers of Cindertalk.
The technique was perhaps most effective on “Everything Is Yours,” which opened the Cindertalk set (and which Rodgers has by now performed many times), and on the closing number, “One of Their Own,” which found Rodgers laying a simple, catchy melody over a number of gorgeously arcing melodic lines reminiscent of Afropop. But the emotional heart of the set turned out to beat in the simpler numbers — in particular the devastating song “I’m Only Dying,” which Rodgers played accompanying himself solely on guitar. It was proof that for all the technological tricks at Rodgers’s disposal, the success of the set lay in the songwriting itself.
The Oakland, California-based Naytronix (along with Young Nudist, both of them at the start of a North American tour) opened for Cindertalk with a lithe collection of nervous, electronica-laced funk. Nate Brenner, the group’s frontman and bassist, also plays bass in the wildly successful indie outfit tUnE-yArDs. Like that band, Naytronix combines shifting, angular musical textures with driving, African-inflected rhythms to create a hypnotic sound, then lets a vocal fly over all of it, almost working at a different speed from the rest of the proceedings. But Brenner’s vocals were gentler and more mannered than tUnE-yArDs’s Merrill Garbus’s tend to be, and at the same time, his band was more prone to rock. It made it easy to understand how Brenner scored the gig of playing bass with Garbus, while showcasing his own distinct musical voice.
Cindertalk will be playing the Ballroom at the Outer Space in Hamden on Friday, March 11, opening for Arms & Voices, which features Jon and Steve Rodgers (also of Mighty Purple) playing together.