MV & EE, Expo ’70, Bronze, Inner Beauty
September 28th at Café Du Nord, San Francisco

This past Monday night at Café Du Nord, curated by FolkYeah, showcased worthy fringe psychedelia both local and touring. While lightly attended, it was a well-constructed bill that hit the spot for Krautrocker, drone, and hippie attendees alike. After a searing set of solo guitar by Berkeley-based guitarist Matt Baldwin (who was performing as Inner Beauty), the SF-based Bronze was up next, in which band member Joe Oberjat turned knobs on a hand-held sampler that looked like a heavily modified guitar pedal, letting fly the range of dark synth sounds that drummer Brian D. Hock nailed down with his incredible drumming. Expo ’70, the main recording project of guitarist Justin Wright from Kansas City, followed in a duo configuration with a short set of tunes, striking an otherworldly balance between droning doom metal guitars and the dreamy guitar leads of Neu!’s Michael Rother.

MV & EE, the Vermont-based duo who have variously recorded with other musicians as MV & EE and the Golden Road, MV & EE Medicine Show, and several other names, are Matt Valentine and Erika Elder, who headlined as a duo at this show. Right around midnight, they got their microphones all properly hooked up, and kicked off their set with “The Hungry Stones”, a Neil Young-reminiscent and contemplative psych-folk tune from their most recent full-length, Drone Trailer. The audience got comfortable, most people sitting on Du Nord’s floor and everyone present attentive to the mellow jams at hand—Elder’s pedal steel and backing vocals play a very natural counterpart to Valentine’s high whine, harmonica, and guitar playing, adding up to an oft meandering but all-in-all hypnotic effect. Valentine mentioned that they were trying to come up with a name for a Bruce Springsteen-covering-Suicide band, like “Frankie Nebraska”—one audience member humbly suggested “Born in the Rocket USA”, which they seemed to enjoy despite Valentine’s joke that it sounded like something off the “jam band circuit.”

They wrapped up with “Feelin’ Fine”, a loose, pedal steel-laden folk song off their forthcoming album, Barn Nova, which they followed up with a request that they happily filled: “Twitchin’”, a harmonica-heavy song from Drone Trailer more mournful than the set’s originally intended closer, which managed to conjure up Neil Young once more, this time in the vein of “Out on the Weekend.” MV & EE channel the past quite strikingly, but their creations are entrancing and wholly convincing in their own right.

Listen: MV & EE, Various Tracks [at myspace.com]

Tags: MV and EE, Expo 70, Bronze, Matt Baldwin, live review