Free Up Your Schedule
Charlie Wadhams takes on Tangier
Charlie Wadhams is maybe eight feet tall and 15 years old, and he makes beautiful music to sway to. It’s sort of lo-fi and low-lighted lounge, a mix perhaps of Jonathan Richman and Tommy Larkins troubadouring through There’s Something About Mary with the Circle Jerks’s atonal scat-singing stint in Repo Man.
When I saw him a year or so back opening for Inara George’s the Bird and the Bee in a Costa Mesa strip mall, the audience would stand rapt for part of a song and then l ose the thread, turning to chat loudly amongst themselves. Rooted to the ground and accompanied only by a laconic guy beating slowly on a snare drum (I think?), Charlie Wadhams wasn’t putting on a high-energy kind of gig.
But the music itself was a celebration of love songs – pragmatic love songs without even the littlest bit of maudlin to them, but rather fun adventures with a best friend and forgetting about failures (that time in your life is now over).
Wadhams’s latest, In a Goldmine, is a slight departure from his first (which played endlessly in my car, soothing aloe on the sunburn of a nasty commute); it’s maybe got a bit more fuzz to it, and the song structures feel more classic ’30s (including croony boy backup singers) with a dash of rockabilly (Wadhams wrote Walk Hard’s “Guilty as Charged”) than Seals & Crofts ’70s. Oh, did we not mention the Seals & Crofts? Well, we didn’t want to intimidate you with the awesomeness. We leave that for the show. And then maybe, post-intimidation, you’ll turn and talk amongst yourselves.
Charlie Wadhams and special guests play this Sunday and next, 8 p.m., at Tangier, 2138 Hillhurst Ave., Los Feliz, (323) 660-1033. Through Nov. 23.
Published: 11/13/2008
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