Malone and Means Play Fun but Uninspired Folk

Folkies Give Flat Performance Last Sunday at 'Sco

Charming Mediocrity: Folk-rocker Michelle Malone showed humor, sass, but very little originality last Sunday at the 'Sco. (photo by Areca Treon)

You can try all you want, but you can't keep the happy lesbians off the dance floor. This was the moral Sunday night during the exuberant close to folk-rocker Michelle Malone's show.

In an evening-salvaging encore, Malone busted out the hilarious quasi-country "Tanya Tucker" (chorus: "Tanya Tucker, please let me be") and the good old three-chord rocker "Brand New Dream." The front rows were lively from the first notes, and the atmosphere in the room turned from somnolent to joyous as she informed the audience, "If there's anything in your life that's making you unhappy, get rid of it."

Which is not to say that Malone's previous set put everyone to sleep. After some issues with barely audible lyrics (didn't your mother ever teach you not to chew gum and sing at the same time?), Malone hit her stride, or as far as her stride would take her, with a three song sequence "In the Weeds/Butter Biscuit/Green" that mixed her staple folk/rock/blues hybrid with a tongue-in-cheek love ode and a punky west-coast wailer.

Malone is a kind of southern lesbian folk-rock ingenue, gleefully informing us that she hadn't changed her hair since she was 11, talking with a down-home lack of self-consciousness. The crowd ate it up, greeting each 'aw shucks' admission with cheers and catcalls. Someone yelled out "Hotlanta!" and Malone replied "It's Warmlanta; at least it's not fuckin' arctic like up here."

There was something very turn-of-the-last-decade about her: the tight jeans with rhinestone belt, the feathered hair. Some of her songs -knowing, aloof, and gently out-of-it - attested to her time with the Indigo Girls. Malone's humor is her best asset, and she delighted the crowd with some timely pauses and dead-on delivery (not to mention blessing us with the "exam angel"). Without that humor, she's just another 'have guitar, will travel' type.

Excepting the encore, her songs weren't particularly memorable. The chord structure to one sounded so familiar that as she approached the mic, I half expected "Polly, want a cracker" to come out of her mouth, but apparently she wasn't covering Nirvana. Some energetic numbers did set toes to tapping, and she tipped her head back and did a good approximation of blues emotion, which is more than I can say for her opening act.

If Michelle Malone is a decidedly pre-Ani figure, then Pamela Means is very much post. All of her songs seem to combine that bass-heavy, finger-picking thing that the Folksinger perfected about five years ago and then got bored with. The overwhelming sense from her set was that she had definitely gotten some since her last visit here in February.

The love songs belied my naive hope that her word usage couldn't get any worse than in her political work. My standard line on Means is 'lyrics my cat could write,' and they haven't improved, besides adding vague sexual overtones that have a lot to do with the moon, the wind, Zodiac signs and all that imagery they told you to stay away from in seventh grade.

"You are the embodiment of my desire," she informs the object of her affection, who cannot be blamed if she fails to fall on the floor in a swoon. Occasionally a decent line will slip by, like "Kingdoms for your lost and found," but it's pretty much an accident. Means' guitar playing has also dropped a notch since I last saw her. She uses the guitar very much like a weapon, beating it as if it were personally responsible for her woes, but loudness does not equal strength of intent. Means uses volume as a substitute for meaning. If there is real passion here, it wasn't coming through, especially since her cold riffs never gave the audience an emotional entry point.

Score one for Means for being a lot less shell-shocked than last time, although she hasn't lost her look of perpetual confusion. Unfortunately, she has neither the music nor the verbal expression to make her any more than that.