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Published at 3:07pm
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Even if foot surgery earlier this month hadn’t left him on crutches, Chris Cunningham might have played seated at Banjo Jim’s. Now residing in Minneapolis, the former Contortions, Lounge Lizards and Golden Palominos guitarist prizes instrumental precision above all else—invention excepted. On Neverwas, released in May on the fledgling Firm label, he turns exception into rule.
Granted, a few tracks—opener “Friday Cane” for one—hew to the tried-and-true singin’, strummin’ and sentimentalizin’ tactics exploited by everyone from James Taylor to Vetiver. But they’re just setups for the likes of “Iceberg.” Delivered wistfully and unironically over lambent fingerpicking, in a warm baritone that suggests a woodsy Scott Walker, the chorus’s wistful “Just cop some Pakistani brown / In the shadows / Of the railway station / In Freiburg” stands out like a pachyderm in a Jacuzzi.
This week’s engagement finds Cunningham mingling his cosmopolitan campfire songs with compositions by like-minded journeymen and frequent collaborators Jason Crigler and Timothy Hill. While it’s unlikely that Hill will bust many of the Tibetan singing moves he honed during 30 years in David Hykes’s Harmonic Choir, Cunningham’s presence is pretty much guaranteed to endow Hill’s relaxed-fit jams with otherness aplenty. Ditto for Crigler, a vet of Marshall Crenshaw’s and Teddy Thompson’s bands who’s now miraculously gigging again nearly three years after a cluster of burst cerebral blood vessels almost delivered him to the Reaper. Michelle Kinney, a monster of cello adept at everything from drones to jazz, might open, if she doesn’t get stuck hauling hubby Cunningham’s guitars.
