As the title says, last night Lady Lamb performed at Aisle 5 in Atlanta. It was a great show from the top of the bill to the bottom - both the performers and the audience were primed - and it deserves a detailed breakdown.
The opener was Wisconsin's Alex Schaaf, who fronted a band called Yellow Ostrich from 2009 to 2014. We really liked Yellow Ostrich and saw them a couple of times in 2011, once opening for The Antlers at the godforsaken old Masquerade and once opening for Ra Ra Riot at the ever-dependable Earl.
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| Alex Schaaf with Yellow Ostrich at The Earl, October 2011 |
Yellow Ostrich consisted of Schaaf, a drummer, and a bassist-slash-brass player. Their music involved intricate and complex over-layering of live samples of their performance, such that Schaaf could create an entire choir out of his own voice, and his bassist a full horn section by layering short samples of his trumpet, flugelhorn, and baritone sax.
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| Yellow Ostrich stage setup at The Masquerade, September 2011 |
After Yellow Ostrich disbanded, Schaaf toured as a backup player for both Tei Shi and The Tallest Man On Earth. But in late 2016, after a particularly painful breakup, he moved from Brooklyn back home to Minneapolis to form the band Human Heat. We had looked forward to hearing Human Heat but they never came through Atlanta - at least as far as we know. They released one album, again AFAWK, which included the songs Your Flaws and I Need My Space, both of which Schaaf performed last night.
Last August, he released an album Waves under his own name, and most of his short opening set last night consisted of songs from that album, as well as his recent single Drive On.
So that was cool. Schaaf sounded great, and performed all his songs alone on stage, accompanied only by his own guitar.
The middle set was provided by Katie Von Schleicher, who was accompanied by a full band (drums, bass and guitar).
We don't really know much about Von Schleicher, and after her set, we only know a little bit more than we did before. We liked her, we know that much. She plays highly enjoyable indie rock and has album titles like Bleaksploitation and Shitty Hits, so that's cool. Also, she's apparently the tour manager or something for Lady Lamb. We wish we had more to say about Von Schleicher, but she remains something of an enigma to us. We heard a full set, and yet she retains her mystery.
Headliner Lady Lamb (formerly Lady Lamb The Beekeeper) is Aly Spaltro, who first began writing music in 2007 while working at a video rental store in her hometown of Brunswick, Maine. While the name evokes images of too-precious folk music and 90s Lilith Fair performers, she's a rocker (her Twitter handle is @ladylambjams). Here's probably her most widely known song, Billions of Eyes, which closed out her encore, and is about racing to make the train only to discover that all of the passengers were rooting for her to succeed all along.
Her set last night was excellent. The sound was perfect and expertly balanced, allowing her great voice to be clearly heard over the music. Her backup band included Alex Schaaf on guitars, keys and vocals, but she also performed a few songs solo, once in the middle of the audience.
So her set pretty much covered rock, pop, folk, and even, toward the middle of her set, punk with the snarling last minute of the song Bird Balloons ("I'm a ghost, and you all know it, I'm singing songs and I ain't stopping, My hair grew long so I fucking cut it and when you looked away, I snuck those trimmings in your locket. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!").
Here's her set list for those who care about such things:
And here's a morning-after, post-show photo she posted to social media for some reason of her eating a poptart in her Atlanta hotel:
Best of all, none of the performers mentioned or made us feel bad about Georgia's abysmal forced-pregnancy law or held us responsible in any way for the reprehensible politics of this state.
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