Fiery Falcon

The Pope says that anyone who does good can get into heaven

On the one hand, it’s cool that the Catholic Church has caught up to the Enlightenment. On the other hand, do they really want to be reheating the old grace-through-works vs. grace-through-faith debate?

Lake Street Dive right in

One mark of a great song is that it already sounds familiar: the melody is so natural and the lyrics are so catchy that you can’t help but hum along, wondering where you’ve heard it before. Lake Street Dive write these kinds of tunes with impressive frequency. The jazzy soul-pop sound they have cultivated is easy on the ears, but it would all be for nought if they weren’t capable of creating great songs. Thursday night at the Jammin’ Java, Lake Street Dive brought their songs to life with such clarity and joie de vivre that it became difficult to fathom how they aren’t already huge.

In a live setting, it becomes clear that the focal point of Lake Street Dive is the powerhouse voice of Rachael Price. On record, the band is tuneful, yet relatively subdued. Yet when Price’s voice is unleashed on stage, songs like “Elijah” go from playful sing-a-longs to raucous anthems. The jazzier side of their sound is largely set aside in favor of a more straight-ahead pop-rock mode, the arrangements borrowing from AM pop and ’60s girl groups. This shift succeeds because Price, while and undeniably talented and charismatic singer, is backed by three talented musicians. The loose, unadorned playing of drummer Mike Calabrese is the anchor; Mike “McDuck” Olsen wields both guitar and trumpet with unpretentious verve, and with Bridget Kearney, the band subverts the “chick bassist” trope by putting her behind an upright bass. Lake Street Dive deploys vocal harmonies smartly, refusing to use them as a crutch, but inserting them into songs at key moments for maximum impact.

Impressively, songwriting duties seem to be spread amongst all of the band members, with a particular standout being the new “Wear a Wedding Band,” written by Price and Kearney, the latter of whose frenetic bass playing was its own highlight throughout the show. The group is also not shy about acknowledging its influences, performing a lovely cover of the Wings’ “Let Me Roll It” and transforming the immortal “I Want You Back” by the Jackson 5 into the horn-embellished torch song it always wanted to be. It is not often that a band with $12 tickets gets called back for two encores, but after their ace performance, it was obvious that Lake Street Dive was entirely deserving.