Next week, the Brain-Cave Music & Art festival returns for a second year, featuring 25 of the best of up-and-coming Brooklyn-based artists and musicians on April 5th & 7th at The Bellhouse. And, for the first time, Feast of Music will be a co-pressenter!

Thursday the 5th will feature many of NYC's best female-centric bands including She Keeps Bees, Natureboy, Shilpa Ray, Family Band and Firehorse, while Saturday the 7th is spread across two stages featuring Snowmine, Conveyor, Spanish Prisoners, Team Genius, Monogold, Aye Aye Rabbit, and Greg Saunier (Deerhoof).  

Tickets are $12 per day, or $20 for a two-day pass, available now online. Full lineup and other details below.

By Caleb Easterly

Your 33 Black Angels

Your 33 Black Angels played a wild, energetic show at Union Pool last Friday, blowing away the crowd with songs from their powerful new album, Moon and Morning Star. The show was a release party for the album, despite the physical album having been released more than a month ago.

The band is nearly a supergroup: at their fullest, they crammed five guitarists, a keytarist, and two drummers onto the tiny stage at the Pool. This lineup entwined melodies, vocal harmonies, and layer upon layer of guitar to create a complex, unique sound that blew away all the opening acts, both in sheer power and in originality.

The opening groups—Gringo Star, Organs, and The Above—all sounded more or less like combinations of The Kinks, The Who, and the Rolling Stones in their prime. They were musically capable and projected a compelling stage presence (and, in the case of Gringo Star, a frenzied energy), but this vein of hard rock rarely has anything new to say.

Union Pool is an undeniably cool venue; an open-air garden in the back features a built-in taco truck that was getting plenty of business from hungry hipsters. Unfortunately, this coolness extended to the audience, which mostly stood stock-still, with a few nodding heads here and there. When Y33BA really got going near the end of their set, their jamming would have created a mosh pit anywhere else, or at least some energetic dancing (props to the one guy who shamelessly gyrated in the front, though).

The band’s terrific set belied their new album, which definitely doesn’t sound like the work of eight musicians. However, Moon and Morning Star is a great listen, and is a refreshing work of straight-up hard rock that is a rarity to hear these days. 

by Angela Sutton

Greenwich Village Orchestra concertmaster Robert Hayden was out of his chair and center stage on Sunday afternoon, turning in a yeoman-like performance of Aram Khachaturian's Violin Concerto, under the baton of guest conductor Farkhad Khudyev. It's a big score with a particularly sprawling first movement, but Mr. Hayden and the orchestra kept up with all of its rhythmical intricacies. Unfortunately, Washington Irving Auditorium, although spatially captivating (I would have been much happier about going to assemblies if MY high school auditorium looked like this), was less than acoustically ideal, flattening out the soloist's dynamics and inappropriately highlighting some of the supporting woodwinds. Nonetheless, the essential character of the work, half movie music and half Armenian festival, came across well.

The first half began with another Khachaturian piece, the famous Sabre Dance. Mr. Khudyev appeared to be directing the orchestra in this piece primarily by bouncing on his heels—in fact, I hardly saw him lift the baton. Whatever he was doing, however, yielded results, and the orchestra hit all of their marks in this challenging musical sketch.

The concert's second half was owned by Brahms' Third Symphony. Although the shortest of Brahms' four symphonies, the work, like all of the composer's orchestral scores, requires a high degree of virtuousity. The GVO played it with warmth and clarity—most notably in the warm brass sounds throughout and the third movement's horn solo. Brahms, like many Romantics, tucked away a musical motif (F-A-F, "frei aber froh," or "free but happy") into the symphony. Here, the F-A-F theme, which is initially stated as a boldly dramatic descent, sneaks back in the strings near the end of the last movement, this time as a hushed interior voice that slyly closes the motivic cycle. Mr. Khudyev took care to make this relationship clear, convincingly finishing a very satisfying Sunday afternoon in the Village.

This year's GVO season ends on May 20 with an all-Russian program of Shotakovich and Tchaikovsky.