Separate ways

Thalia Zedek and Chris Brokaw leave Come behind

by Brett Milano

Ten of the most intense minutes I've heard from a Boston band this year came at the recent memorial benefit for the late local promoter Trey Helliwell when Come performed "Saint Around My Neck," an existentially anguished epic that builds from spooky calm to screaming peak, twice. The occasion was partly responsible for the impact, but between Chris Brokaw's fearsome guitar leads and Thalia Zedek's throat tearing, the song's always sounded that way. It bore out what I always admired about this band: they could take familiar two-guitar big-chord rock and build something fresh and daring out of it.

As it turns out, that show is likely to be Come's last. After keeping the band on hiatus for most of the past two years, Zedek and Brokaw both said last week that they won't be reconvening (drummer Daniel Coughlin will continue playing with Zedek; recent Come bassist Winston Braman plays in both Fuzzy and the Hilken Mancini/Chris Colbourn band). But the spirit of Come, and a good deal of their sound, endures with new albums by the founders: Zedek makes her solo debut with Been Here and Gone (Matador); and Brokaw releases Viewfinder (on Thrill Jockey), by his acoustic instrumental band Pullman, the first in at least a half-dozen projects that he'll be involved with over the next year.

"We went through a long time of not really knowing what to do next," says Brokaw. "As far as Thalia and I playing together, it's easier not doing it under the auspices of it being Come. I think I would have been happy just letting it hang indefinitely, but I can understand wanting to put some closure on it." Explains Zedek during a separate conversation, "It has nothing to do with the people I was playing with, but Come had a life of its own. And things were in limbo for so long that it started to get uncomfortable. It was time to shit or get off the pot, so I got off."

If Come had stayed together, it would have been a logical move to step away from the full-throttle sound of their last album, Gently Down the Stream, and make a subtler, acoustic-based album. Zedek's Been Here and Gone is that kind of album, and with Brokaw and Coughlin both aboard (along with Victory at Sea keyboardist Mel Lederman and Willard Grant Conspiracy guitarist David Michael Curry), the sound is still fairly Come-like; dark beauty remains Zedek's stock in trade. But it feels like a solo album, thanks to a greater focus on the vocals and a more personal touch in the words: Zedek's new songs are less oblique and more clearly concerned with lost love. She visits cabaret territory on a Leonard Cohen cover, "Dance Me to the End of Love," a song and a style that prove perfect for the mix of whiskey and world-weariness in her voice. If she goes farther in this direction, there's every chance she'll make the album that Marianne Faithfull has been trying to do for the past decade.

There was another batch of love songs that she did in her first non-Come gigs that didn't make it to the studio, among them Bob Dylan's "You're a Big Girl Now" and the Ramones' "Questioningly." "Maybe doing other people's songs made me more comfortable with what I could say on my own," she notes when we sit down at Somerville's Abbey Lounge. "You're not the first person to say that the songs I wrote sound more personal. The mood of the songs . . . well, that was definitely the headspace I was in when I was writing them. So a lot of it is sad, maybe kind of bittersweet. But I still tend to be more creative when my life is stable, otherwise I'm just too upset. When I'm depressed, I spend too much time watching TV."

As someone who's been an underground-rock figure for a good two decades (first with local popsters Dangerous Birds, later with Uzi and Live Skull), Zedek has as much right as anyone to get jaded. But she says that hasn't happened yet. "I've definitely taken a lot of breaks over the years; there are times when you get discouraged and feel empty. But I've been doing it long enough to know that it passes eventually. Then something will happen and you start getting excited again. I still really love rock and roll. I love garage rock, but I don't know if I'd want to do a whole tour playing that kind of stuff."

For her, the beauty of going solo is that she doesn't have to stick with one format. "The songs on this album would have sounded different if Come was playing them, but I realized that one of my favorite things about music is playing with other people. So it's weird, because the solo album isn't even that solo."

As for Chris Brokaw, it's impressive enough to perform with a half-dozen different bands, but the real feat here is the variety of music he's been doing. On Zedek's album, he plays some of the lowdown slide guitar he used to play with Come. With Pullman, he plays in a folkish and lyrical style. He does more-experimental music with Brokeback (whose members also include Tortoise's Douglas McCombs and Yo La Tengo's James McNew; they'll hit the Middle East this Sunday, August 12); and with the New Year (a collaboration with former Bedhead members) he plays drums. Oh and he does big, loud rock as the lead-guitarist on Steve Wynn's recent double CD, Here Come the Miracles (on Blue Rose). More recently, he played some pure pop on a handful of European dates with Evan Dando. And he does a mix of the above on the solo album that he's just wrapped up and is now shopping to labels.

Call him the Richard Lloyd or the Thurston Moore of Boston -- an experimentally minded guitarist who keeps things fresh by seeking out new collaborations. But unlike those two guitarists (who respectively have the occasional Television reunion and Sonic Youth as bases), Brokaw doesn't maintain a single high-profile band at the center. "Right now I'm enjoying playing in a variety of contexts," he tells me at a coffee shop around the corner from where he works, at Other Music in Harvard Square. "Different people have asked me to do things, and that's fun. It was like that for me in high school and college."

The biggest surprise of the lot is likely his collaboration with Dando, which was arranged through Dando's manager (and formerly Come's), Tom Johnston. "It came about very quickly: I had to learn 25 songs in an afternoon. His songs have a folk and country feel, so it was easy to sit around and strum. I wound up playing half acoustic, but on the electric songs I was able to do some of what I usually do." Dando is now forming a full band, but Brokaw isn't sure he'll be involved. "I don't know if I'm the most appropriate guitarist for him, but we'll see how it goes."

So where would he say his style falls? "It falls all over the place. I don't see any great dissonance between doing experimental music and doing more traditional music, so I'm not differentiating that much between the two. At home I listen to noisy stuff and I listen to experimental music, so I still haven't figured out which way I'm going. But it's been pretty exciting."