Music

The Oddball Savant

Fields of Gaffney Stokes Old Sebadoh Fires

Fields of Gaffney
w/U.S. Maple, Some by Sea

Thurs May 20, Graceland, 9:30 pm, $10.

As co-founder of seminal indie rockers Sebadoh, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Eric Gaffney was always the yin to Lou Barlow's yang. Or, to pin the metaphor around the 1986 cult classic River's Edge (which hit theaters the same year Sebadoh was formed), the Crispin Glover to Barlow's Keanu Reeves: the lo-fi hellion whose twitchy, hardcore-dissonant freakouts acted as a foil to his partner's more empathetic, melodious compositions.

And like that bizarro thespian, Gaffney seemed to behave erratically, vacating and re-inhabiting the drum stool numerous times toward the end of his Sebadoh tenure before ultimately disappearing in the face of a commercial breakthrough. Reportedly fed up with Barlow's domineering ways, Gaffney departed Sebadoh for good after 1993's Bubble and Scrape, which was, as one writer put it, "about five seconds before they became huge."

For the next several years, Gaffney performed solo around his native Massachusetts and recorded prolifically on his four-track. A bunch of those songs wound up on the mail-order-only cassette Lights Up and Spins Around (just 100 were distributed); in 1999, the tape evolved into his debut CD, Brilliant Concert Numbers, which placed expected punk blasts next to numbers reminiscent of Galaxie 500.

Deciding to jump back into the "band thing," he assembled Fields of Gaffney around the same time, retooling the lineup after moving to San Francisco in 2000. Singing and playing guitar while backed by bassist-vocalist Jessica Cowley and drummer Richard Marshall, Gaffney's latest material (as found on 2003's excellent Nature Walk) is more tuneful than some of his old Sebadoh stuff, yet plenty abraded by shambolic fuzz and psychedelic weirdness. A welcome comeback for an oddball savant.

editor@thestranger.com

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