PHOTO: NINA ROBERTS | And then there were two. When a band finds its sound through a unit you could seat at a restaurant’s smallest table, there’s always that rousing surprise when they launch into their first song live and—if it’s the bands I’m thinking of, including this one, NINETEEN THIRTEEN—a large, rich soundscape unfolds, or a wonderful rock and roll thunder.
Thunder-wise, you have the White Stripes, of course. The Black Keys. Back in the late eighties I caught the Flat Duo Jets—a Jack White favorite, featuring psychobilly guitarist Dexter Romweber and cudgel-drumming Crow—down in North Carolina, followed quickly by the Richmond, VA, band House of Freaks, fronted by singer-guitarist Bryan Harvey and drummer Johnny Hott, and both bands were so scorching, blast waves of stage dynamism, percussive slams meeting electric crunch, that I think a part of my listening soul might still happily adhere to the ceiling of Carrboro’s Cat’s Cradle music club.
Even that master of noise himself, Big Black and Shellac guitarist Steve Albini, when asked in 2005 about his preference for trios, said the sonic triangle itself could overcomplicate things: “I think two people is plenty. Three people is sometimes excessive!”
Milwaukee chamber rock duo NINETEEN THIRTEEN, comprising legendary drummer Victor DeLorenzo, founding member of the Violent Femmes, and classically trained cellist Janet Schiff, create a gorgeous, mesmerizing sound whose essence emerges from the stick and steel-brush strikes—crisp, swirling, jazzy, witty, martial, trippy—of DeLorenzo, and the deep emotion—the voice—of Schiff’s cello, crafted in Romania in, yes, 1913.
