Kate With Matt and Ben

Last Sunday night, at Banjo Jim's in alphabet city, I heard an hour-long set played by “Kate with Matt and Ben”. Their name for that night, and that night only, was “Whistle Britches”. They use a different band name at every show and give their CDs out for free. (I would like to see all those fame hating famous rock bands do something like this). As I have been many times before I was blown away by their music.

As a band, they are what bands are supposed to be. They love their music, have fun playing it – they play full sets even in bars with no one but the bartender – and they never mention the tip jar or ask people to buy their CDs. The only time they mention the word tip is in saying ‘Tip your bartender well’. There is no introducing of each other while strumming the guitar, no “I wrote this about my father” or “This is about a beautiful pain that is love” kind of crap. And if the music by itself is not good enough, there is the live drawing that Sarah Valeri does while they play.

Sarah, a painter and an art therapist, has a studio on Brooklyn. When performing with the band she tapes a few sheets of drawing paper on the ground and uses pastels to draw on them as the band plays. Depending on the length of the set, she finishes one or two sheets of beautiful pastel drawings. Each painting is unique and has a part of the venue in it. In one of the painting done at the Baggot’s Inn’s wooden floors you could see the wood marking beneath the colors. The drawings are up for sale after the show. Her name is included in the band member introduction (“Sarah Valeri on colors).

Kate Doblick, a native of small town Pennsylvania and a New Yorker for more than 3 years, has resisted ceding to any stereotype of a girl with a guitar. She doesn’t try to channel Janis Jomplin – even though she has the voice, words and attitude to do that – or give in to whispering guitars and mellow singing and try to be Laura Weir. Her music is both of these and more.

She writes and sings the songs. She is accompanied by Matt Logan, a Peabody trained musician and song writer, on Cello and Ben Deibert on Guitar. Their music goes from ballads ( Soft Core Moan, OK ) to plaintive introspection (Detrevortni) to forceful darker songs (mainline, exhaust pipe). Every now and then there are lines that stick in your mind like “sin and focus make up the most of the day”. Their music matches Kate’s pen, always.

As Ben Deibert gently strums up the, the leading notes of the songs, with an expression of ease that stays on his face, Kate becomes her song and moves with it; her voice going from soothingly mellow to passionately raspy. She slaps on her guitar body as if she were tearing it’s heart out and in a room with good acoustics her songs sound like just that.

Matt Logan doesn’t allow his cello to become the melancholy drone that it has come to be in popular music. Sad cello, or violin for that matter, has been so overused in new folk/rock scene ; they either end up becoming the instrumental version of the singer’s voice (like Damien Rice) or a part of lush string section to carry the song from one point to another. Matt’s cello is different. It moves from sounding like gentle breeze in Soft Core Moan to a guttural growl in Mainline. Years of classical training, makes his cello such natural part of the songs that it hardly ever sticks out.

When he plays the cello with Kate, he is laconic and hardly moves his shoulders. He looks like a grounding point of the band with the oldest and heaviest instrument. When he performs solo it is a different story. He sings with a guitar, for his older songs, and with the cello accompanied by pre-recorded and self-mixed backing track, for newer ones, at times with Peabody classmate Ryan Messmore on keyboards. When he sings with his cello, he holds it close to his body like a voodoo priestess would hold a boa and taps his feat on the ground while moving with every beat. His movements remind you of old Howlin’ Wolf recording videos. His song writing is abstract, literate but never too wordy.

In a city chockfull of the bands, dreamers and dingy bars with nightly live music, they maybe just a “cool band I once saw in lower east side”, but they are every thing that live music is supposed to be. And, then some. If you are in New York and they are playing somewhere, you don’t want to miss it.