Dim the Lights for Prewar Yardsale’s Black and Blue (originally published in Boog City 102)

During the last week of August 2015, residents of Downtown Manhattan began to notice the streetlights in the city were unusually dim.

I noticed this, too. And walking from Park Slope to the East Village over the Brooklyn Bridge that week, the feeling of the city and its inhabitants was alarmingly laid-back and cool, in contrast to the humidity and toxicity in the air we’ve all gotten used to putting up with on late summer days.

When this sort of subtle, often trivial change occurs, we artists are among the first to take note, so this haunting image of mysteriously darkening streetlights might soon be reproduced in songs, films, paintings, and poems, as a metaphor for a fading romance, or a loss of innocence.

But to hear this event documented and preserved in a raw, excruciatingly realistic work of art, without a touch of over-the-top corny symbolism, we’d have to talk to Mike Rechner and Dina Levy.

Husband and wife duo Rechner and Levy have been plugging themselves into the no-fidelity music machine known as Prewar Yardsale since 2000, to transform oddball occurrences like bootleg records being sold on the street, elevated platform stands, and eating ice cream, into tripped-out, punky antifolk tunes, rocking a distorted acoustic guitar and found percussion (normally a bucket).

In their recorded material and live performances, Yardsale is joined by a rotating cast of equally oddball lead guitarists, including Jeffrey Lewis and Kung Fu Crimewave and The Fem Doms’ Luke Kelly.

I don’t think there’s a Prewar Yardsale song about the fluctuating power levels of New York City’s streetlights (yet), but these changes gave the city optimal light conditions for listening to Yardsale’s new EP Black and Blue, three months after its Spring 2015 release.

The solipsistic, infernal landscape of Black and Blue is a few shades darker than the band’s previous output, with gloomy, downtempo songs of heartache and isolation (“Carol” and “Where did you go”), and chaotically uptempo, hostile rock anthems (the title track and “The money’s not right”).

The title track kicks off the EP, with the uniquely powerful sound of Dina Levy rapidly beating a bucket with a drumstick to a fittingly erratic, off-tempo pulse, melting into Mike Rechner’s raging acoustic power chords, soon to be complemented by strange, ghastly vocal harmonies.

The tempo slows down considerably with “Carol,” sending the listener into a melancholy trance, under the hum of Levy’s keyboard and the droning strum of Rechner’s guitar. This song behaves like a frozen frame from a romantic comedy, dipped into an interdimensional hydrogen vat, and brought back into ordinary reality via microwave, in the form of a scene from Un Chien Andalou.

He sings to “Carol, desperately asking “Carol” why he loves her, and she loves “some other guy.”

“Carol” responds, in an uncanny, awkward monotone, telling Rechner about a baker’s dozen lovable qualities about this “other guy,” who, based on the qualities she lists, is more likely to be a church or an S&M dungeon than a human being.

Much like New York’s darkening streetlights, the mysteries of this love triangle are never solved, and we wonder if the bizarre love triangle isn’t just a figment of our imagination, as the streetlights themselves could be.

The lyrics of Black and Blue capture the Orwellian isolation and absurdity of rapidly-gentrifying, post-9/11 New York City in a personal, non-grandiose way, with songs like “Where did you go” detailing the all-too-common experience of planning to meet up with a friend, being mysteriously blown off, and wondering where that friend went.

In typical antifolk fashion, the songs relate to the listener on a human level. There’s no exploitation of trendiness or overblown Hollywood pretension to hook you in.

The songs have an addictive quality to them, but it’s a do-it-yourself kind of addiction, like the thrill of running around an abandoned underground cave.

As with Prewar Yardsale’s other recorded material, the inventive art rock sounds of Black and Blue are exciting and layered from start to finish, without excessive “wall of sound” overdubbing.

Yardsale has a knack for working magic with minimal instrumentation, and this is especially clear on the closing track “Chickfactor Psychosis,” where the only instruments played are the bucket and Mike Rechner’s vocals.

Their minimalist, straight-forward attitude is more in the vein of The Velvet Underground than The White Stripes, with Dina Levy’s bucket drumming and dreary psychedelic flute paralleling Moe Tucker’s stand-up drumming and John Cale’s droning violin. The EP’s recording engineer, Nick Nace, accompanies the band on guitar for some songs, as does Luke Kelly.

Yardsale’s entire catalog is worth a listen, and most of it, including Black and Blue, is available on the band’s BandCamp page.

– Jesse Statman

Read more of Cannonball’s coverage of the NYC music scene from this era:

1. Review of The Grasping Straws’ self-titled debut album
2. Profile of Stu Richards, formerly known as Chicken Leg
3. Review of Thomas Patrick Maguire’s In The Bag
4. Review of The First Law’s She Traveled With Me
5. Review of Little Cobweb’s Indelible Marks
6. Review of Zack Daniel’s Memoirs of a Scared Teenager
7. Review of Prewar Yardsale’s Black and Blue
8. Review of Yeti’s Pill
9. Profile of Horra
10. Profile of Lauren O’Brien
11. Review of Nancy Paraskevopoulos’ Comfort Muffin
12. Blurb for The Icebergs’ Eldorado

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