They were billed as ANDII and the BANDII for their headlining spot on a bill of local, female-led talent on stage of Anodyne Coffee Roasting Co.’s Walker’s Point location last Friday night.
But they could as appropriately call themselves The BANDII featuring ANDII, so generous a bandleader (bandiileader?) ANDII Heath was in allowing her musician to expand upon the grooves and melodies of her compositions. That may be as it should, however, as she and most of her accompanists in the BANDII are also members of Milwaukee funk group Conscious Congress.
When operating outside of Conscious Congress, the emphasis of the songwriting changes from serving rhythms to often melancholy and yearning singer-songwriter confessions and observations. ANDII sang the four such vignettes comprising her 2019 solo EP, What I'm Good At, and five others, including Conscious Congress’ “No Sense,” in a voice that finds middle ground between Melissa Etheridge and Bonnie Raitt’s bluesy bluster and the gentleness of a Sarah McLachlan or Lauren Daigle.
With the muscular backing of her guitarist, keyboardist, drummer and bassist, ANDII sounded vigorously challenged by more maximal arrangements than the more folk-styled musicality found in her recorded solo work. And she met the challenge handily with fortified vocal oomph and aggressively amiable magnetism.
Their set included one rerun, of a sort, for a song from earlier in the night. ANDII and her guys took on “You Know I’m No Good,” the same Amy Winehouse song performed by Milwaukee’s Fiona Blue. The BANDII played closer to the late singer’s retro-soul original, while Blue took it to a higher vocal stratosphere as she strummed her guitar. That number’s sentiment was a bit anomalous for Blue, whose youthful soprano was more often plied to her originals about romantic travails and relationships.
Opening the show, local artist Shell Bells looped one of her guitars, her hollow-bodied electric model, occasionally to compelling effect. The artist who works as a nanny mines her experience with children, a friend who shares her birthday and other people in her life for a folksy sort of dream-pop. She enhanced her music’s ethereal vibe by having a salt rock lamp lit near her bare feet with which she manipulated her instruments’ effects pedals. Bells stretched her boundaries some by giving "Piece of My Heart" a Janis Joplin-esque iteration and ending her eight-song performance with another of her originals, one that she rightly termed a rocker about flying as a metaphor for getting out of one's (ahem) shell and living life to the uttermost.
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