New releases run gamut of sounds, emotions

EMPTY bottles, full hearts: There’s a range of emotions and sounds in this latest roundup of recommended new Las Vegas music releases.

Jeff Mix & The

Songhearts, “Lost Vegas Hiway”

For fans of: Rootsy narratives that feel as real as documentary footage.

The lowdown: A companion piece to a movie of the same name (check it on Amazon Prime), “Hiway” is about being down, but never truly out, in Las

Vegas. Set in some of the city’s seedier stretches, this lived-in set of songs gives stirring voice to the search for salvation in a landscape of lonely bars, late-night streets and questionable lodgings. The tracklist here is evocative of a jukebox in one of said dives, ranging from moving Americana to full-throated rock and roll to foot-stompin’ honky-tonk. Best played in a motel with a weekly rate.

Track you need to hear: “Fremont Street.” The violin here aches like the heart of the song’s lovelorn protagonist.

Leather Bound Crooks, “Four Corners”

For fans of: Radio-friendly alt-rock that doesn’t suck.

The lowdown: “The idea is to just make sense of this life,” singer-guitarist Jawaun Barton explains on “Roll With the Punches,” announcing big ambitions in a voice that’s bigger still. Barton’s lithe, impassioned vocals are front and center here, buttressed by guitars that bubble and explode. These searching, soulful jams seem tailored for the airwaves and, impressively, don’t suffer for it.

Track you need to hear: “We Get Up & Go.” A climatic chorus ensures that this one lives up to its title.

Mike Xavier, “Resilience” For fans of: Go-for-broke hip-hop.

The lowdown: The life and (hard) times of a workingclass MC is what Xavier chronicles on his latest EP, where he envisions success while battling bill collectors. “Ain’t no doubtin’ that I’ll

SOUNDING

records.

She has performed in cabaret and theater shows around the world, including “Absinthe” in New York, and her career almost intersected with Las Vegas in 2013 when she was offered a late-night cabaret hosting gig here.

“I thought, ‘This is my dream, this is brilliant,’ ” she says. “And the gig fell through.”

She went to Australia and created the low-budget prototype of what would become “The Miss Behave Gameshow” and finally made it back to Las Vegas in December with a limited run of “The Miss Behave Gameshow” at Paris Las Vegas. A few weeks ago, the show moved to the intimate Back Room (formerly the nightclub Liaison) at Bally’s for what Saunders hopes will be a longterm run.

While “The Miss Behave Gameshow” is built upon audience interaction, it’s safe for guests of more wallflowerish persuasions. Yet Saunders has been surprised by how much people will do when nobody is forcing them to do it.

“It’s a tricky thing for me, because a lot of people describe the show as interactive and immersive and loaded with audience participation,” she says. “Yes, people jump around and do all manner of things, but only because they don’t have to.”

At the start of a show last week, audience members seemed unsure about what they were supposed, or even allowed, to do. Ten minutes in, they were standing and screaming. A half-hour in, having fully embraced the jovial anarchy that is in the show’s DNA, they were walking onstage to do stunts and interacting easily with Saunders.

Many of the games involve the use of a cellphone, and the competing teams are made up of iphone users and “others.” In contrast to that hightech tack, the set design is deliberately bargain-basement, consisting mostly of cardboard signs bearing aphorisms written in Sharpie.

Some games are easy to understand — for example, “Shout Loudest” and “Shout Quietest” — and others are witty, requiring a total lack of self-consciousness and a bit of out-of-the-box thinking. A “Candy Crush” game saw Saunders seductively dropping a bag of candy to the floor of the stage. It took a member of the iphone team just a few seconds to run onstage and crush it with her phone.

“Woman nailed it,” a laughing Saunders responds.

A name-the-song game saw audience members not only identifying such ’80s standards as “I Will Survive” and “You Give Love a Bad Name” for points, but joining in on a mass a cappella karaoke session even after Saunders turned off the audio tracks.

It all sounds silly, and it is, but it’s also fun enough to turn an entire room of people into the willing accomplices of Saunders and her assistant, “Tiffany” (Bret Pfister) who also holds down one of the show’s variety spots (singer Maren Wade, who performs in the Indigo lounge at Bally’s, held the other last week).

Las Vegans Cory Hook and Peggy Cheung didn’t know what to expect but loved the show. “The venue was small. It was completely interactive. It was fun,” Hook says. “It was a little bit racy and got the audience interacting.”

Shane and Edie Eaton of Chino Hills, California, also liked the interactive nature of the show. “Nobody was not participating,” Shane Eaton said, even if he agreed that the premise did take a bit of getting used to.

“You’ve got to kind of wrap your head around it a little bit, and then it’s good,” he said.

Saunders says the show draws a broad demographic. That, in turn, allows her the latitude to incorporate into the show a broad range of games.

“So, on one hand, we can have clever word games,” she says. “On the other hand, we can dance to ABBA, because ABBA is great.”

Contact John Przybys at reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0280. Follow @Jjprzybys on Twitter.