Rubble Rockers

If there’s any reason to bring up the Cure it’s this: This too is music that shelters you from the darkness it illustrates; this isn’t merely rain but rain safely drizzled across your windowpane. Calla is a low sound like something in the cellar — it could be something terrible — but for now, only available, only beautiful.

Perhaps in Calla’s favor, perhaps not, the show seems like a fashion show; something is definitely being modeled, and certainly with the attitude of starved abandon. There’s a runway the band slouches across. There isn’t a philosophy of need emanating from this music, but there is one of weakness — something effete and moppish; listening makes you feel like you fucked up and now you need to make up. But what do you offer a band offering dirges like boys offer flowers? Spaceland’s crowd seemed an offering themselves, doing their best to look like storm clouds — movement scarce, but movement rife with portent. Reading the crowd like reading tea leaves — everyone listening to the music like it’s their cruel and perhaps indelible fate. Calla is a roll of the dice — pale and full of as much meaning as you can allow yourself. Can I say one more thing? Snake eyes. (Russel Swensen)

NEKO CASE at the Derby, May 20

It wasn’t the recent will-she-or-won’t-she-pose-for-Playboy rumors that made people press like carnival rubes against the stage, gawking at the attractive enough Neko Case. Besides, beauty’s a curse, as she warned on “Pretty Girls” (“around curves so comely and sinister, they blame it on you, pretty girl”). “I love her voice,” folks kept saying mantralike, almost apologetically, as if to explain why they’d been dragged out of bed or away from other things. You could bask in a voice that big and radiant, and it was especially suited to the room, arcing unbroken along the curving wooden spine of the Derby’s inside-the-whale ceiling.

Between songs, Case came off as pleasantly self-deprecating, apologizing for sounding “like one of those husbandless trolls in their 30s,” after a series of sharp asides about friends having babies. She lauded upright bassist Tom V. Ray’s ZZ-length beard, and wrestled throughout the set with her stubborn tenor guitar’s tuning. “These guitars are mad at me,” she explained. “They’ve been in the closet a while, and they’re having their way.” The voice justified all minor distractions, though, coiling up languidly in the arms of the Sylvia & Wood standard “Look for Me (I’ll Be Around)” and trailing off celestially desolate among Jon Rauhouse’s pedal-steel shivers on Hank Williams’ “Alone and Forsaken.” While Case imbued these and other writers’ tunes — including a contrastingly ebullient version of Bob Dylan’s “Bucket of Rain” — with a modern kind of Patsy Cline/Dusty Springfield charisma, the former punk rocker was most affecting on fervently delivered, multilayered original ballads like “Blacklisted” and “Deep Red Bells.” Even with a voice that can fill canyons, it was the somber way she delivered those chilling, more personal words that later carved trails in the memory. (Falling James)