From San Francisco, a feel-good blast on Callowhill
"Thank you for going on this enormous date with us," Thao Nguyen of San Francisco's Thao & The Get Down Stay Down told the crowd at Underground Arts on Saturday night. The show - in a basement venue at 1200 Callowhill St. - did feel like an intimate, almost illicit affair, as Nguyen and openers Sallie Ford & The Sound Outside delivered blistering sets bubbling over with energy, sexuality, and empowerment.
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"Thank you for going on this enormous date with us," Thao Nguyen of San Francisco's Thao & The Get Down Stay Down told the crowd at Underground Arts on Saturday night. The show - in a basement venue at 1200 Callowhill St. - did feel like an intimate, almost illicit affair, as Nguyen and openers Sallie Ford & The Sound Outside delivered blistering sets bubbling over with energy, sexuality, and empowerment.
"Yes, we get naked but not naked enough," Nguyen said on "Every Body" from We the Common, the band's new album, full of bold pronouncements set to hip-shaking folk-rock underpinned with elements of hip-hop and world beat.
"Oh, I got to get devoted," she exclaimed on "Human Heart," and "To be free! To be free!" on "Move."
Switching between acoustic and slide guitars and banjo and mandolin, Nguyen was a romper-clad dynamo as she led the Get Down Stay Down through songs that snapped from quiet to loud, slow to freak-out.
On the shambling "Squareneck," from 2011's Thao & Mirah with Philadelphia native Mirah, Nguyen set up an impromptu lap steel while her backing band (bass, guitar, keyboard, drums) all played percussion instruments.
On the delicate duet "Kindness Be Conceived," keyboardist/vocalist Johanna Kunin filled in admirably on a part performed on disc by the singular Joanna Newsom. For the set-closing "We the Common (For Valerie Bolden)," Nguyen enlisted the crowd to bolster the "ooh, wah, oohs" of the cathartic chorus.
Openers Sallie Ford & The Sound Outside, from Portland, Ore., played a complementary set, drawing on the reverb-drenched rockabilly vocabulary of their new Untamed Beast.
Ford - the shadows cast by her horn-rimmed glasses suggesting an arch librarian - led her band through raunchy, libidinous rockers, proclaiming "I can cuss, I can scream" ("Bad Boys") and "I like it sweet and kinda sour" ("Do Me Right").
When Nguyen called Ford and her band to the stage for the encore, it was fitting that they launched into a cover of the Ronettes' "Be My Baby," putting a new spin on a rock classic.