BrightestYoungThings: PHOTOS: Alice, When She's 10 Feet Tall

You've probably had one of those reverse eureka moments, where an idea you couldn't be more sure of turns out to way not be so. I had three such shocks in my life after assuming and taking for granted a singer's race. The third and most recent time is a durrr, given the subject of this post. The first time was Bob Seger. In my 7-year-old mind's eye, whenever I heard the "I remember ... LAWD I remembah! LAWD I remembah!" chorus in Night Moves I saw a taller and much lighter skinned Scatman Cothers on bended knee, bleedin' tears etc, talking about it into an old-timey microphone in black and white. I damn near got concussed when I finally saw Seger's face on the cover of the Night Moves album when I was 9 or 10.

Sometime around 12 or 13, it was Alison Moyet whom I was imagining completely off target. This time it was a middle-aged Martha Wash-like english diva hollering "it scares me but it wooon't be long" in Yaz(oo)'s Situation. I argued for almost a week with the kid who first played me that track that there was no way she could be white, no way. Well.

Forward to a comatose tuesday night only a couple of years ago (thirty something!) at Eighteenth Street Lounge when DJ Moose dropped Nostalgia 77's cover of The White Stripes' 7 Nation Army. Gears got to crankin: very short, big cheeks, very dark skin, medium height afro with a bow in it. And how I generated and sold myself on this roided out myth including how, of course she's named Alice because she's a second-generation Jamaican ...

Alice Russell is not a tiny Jamaican woman. Nor does she Janis Joplin around barefoot in that miserable low-rider style of jeanswear and floppy peasant shit like Joss Stone and her revivalist shtick or do neo-soul. She is a for real for real contemporary soul singer with no hype or flash to the fact. She and her band's stage show is equally low on flashy, except for the synchronized running man and Rock Lobster style dowwwwwn dowwwwn dowwwwn maneuver they did two thursdays ago at LIV nightclub. The club's unique stage layout — half performance space, half lounge seating — rounded out the band's touches of motown revue with a little VH1 Storytellers ambiance. The band followed the same pattern as last time at Bohemian Caverns, delivering a hot, all out, nearly two hour (!!!) show to an enthused crowd of heads that was with them from start to end, an encore, then sticking around for drinks, chats and snapshots with whomever. At last year's show there wasn't even a stage so the band was practically surrounded, and by almost as much off stage activity as there was on. Photographers clicked, popped flashes and scooted to different shooting positions, while the rest of the audience was all up on the performance, giving loud applause and hollering [paraphrasing]"sing it, girl" type calls of approval at Russell. There was one vibration in the room that everyone was riding. That most of the club was chair-dancing didn't stop a good ten to twenty people from standing up, getting took over and expressing themselves wherever they found space. Even with the bit of separation that the stage at LIV gave Russell's group this time, it was just as intense and intimate a show as the one downstairs at Caverns. I watched the band get steady feedback in 3D from that lounge area to the left and a little behind them from a grip of spirited queens. Russell's voice was major. Did I mention this lasted for nearly two hours, plus encore? She must love us here in DC.