At Lady Gaga’s sold-out show last night, the first of two gigs at Boston’s TD Garden and the opener of the U.S. leg of her Monster Ball Tour, the pop superstar paused between songs to deliver a pointed message to her adoring fans: breathing heavily into her mike like a sexed-up Darth Vader, she intoned, “Remember: no other pop singer will ever love you as much as I love you.”
Bold words? Definitely. But the Gaga phenomenon wouldn’t work without the two-way symbiosis that is her unique relationship with her “little monsters.” Thursday night’s show was a people-watching horn of plenty, as male and female attendees dressed to the nines in thrall to their diva master. High-heels ruled the night, as did outrageously skimpy attire and painted faces, both onstage and in the audience.
Gaga started the show off coyly: shadow-dancing to opener “Dance in the Dark” behind a massive gridded scrim, she slowly revealed herself in stages. A few songs later, in the midst of her electro-throb smash “Just Dance,” she tossed her overstuffed blue leather sequined jacket and doffed the oversized sunglasses, and the jumbotrons got a look at her piercing eyes for the first time. The crowd exploded.
“I am here to set you free!” Gaga screamed, arms outstretched, rapturously. The capacity audience took her at her word, convulsing in fits of apoplectic mania at her every gesture. No longer trotting onto a club stage with just a DJ and a dream, Gaga’s stadium supersizing has beefed up her Eurodisco dance grooves with a full band and a posse of backup dancers. The human players know enough not to get in the way of the dance-floor whump of megahit like “Poker Face,” but over-the-top guitar and organ flourishes made a normally plodding tune like “Brown Eyes” sound like the Spiders From Mars covering Mötley Crüe’s “Home Sweet Home.” A mid-set bevy of piano tunes found Gaga in a plaintive mood, even joining her band in a brief foray into a free jazz improv that belied their session dude origins. Although it was hard to imagine who was paying attention to the sidemen when a mustard-blonde superstar was center stage in a g-string pounding out notes with her high-heeled boots.
Gaga has never needed an excuse to amp up her set and wardrobe outrageousness, but this round of Monster Ball gigs — loosely based around a hunt for “the greatest” party of all time — is extra prop and glitter-heavy. Stage pieces included a subway car and a Bethesda Fountain, and a few gallons of fake blood oozed throughout the night. She trotted out in a Ming the Merciless-y robe during “Boys Boys Boys,” an elaborate ice queen get-up for “So Happy I Could Die” and a cylindrical contraption for “Monster.” Allusions to Bowie and Madonna pop up throughout her set with glitter stomp and mega-blonde strip-teasing, but at her most outlandish moments she displays the fashion bravura of Lamb Lies Down On Broadway-era Peter Gabriel, a will to be weird that would seem, to the uninitiated, a hard sell to a nearly 20,000-strong crowd.
But her fans get it, and in a live setting it’s easy to see why. Whether she is shucking through the distorto-stomp of the euphoric “Bad Romance” or tickling the ivories in a stripped down run-through of the brand-new Seventies-Elton-John-ish “You And I,” Gaga uses her natural magnetism to make the weirdness seem intimate.
This mix of the bizarre and the heartfelt was summed up perfectly at the end of set-closer “Paparazzi”: basking in the frenzied screams of her fans, Gaga, in a voice dripping with heartfelt sincerity, raised a hand in the air and said, “I love you all so much!” while her custom outfit spit sparks out of her chest and crotch. “Together,” she continued, “we can do anything!” For a second there, it almost seemed true.
Like most people who listen to music a lot, I get easily fatigued hearing people verbally hand-wring over the future of music, technology, and the various synergy thereof. But that didn’t stop me from snatching up a free pass to this past weekend’s Vice Magazine/Intel blowout, held at the Meatpacking District’s Milk Studios. It seems the idea behind this music-festival-slash-art-gallery-installation-slash-symposium, humbly entitled the Creators Project, was to scour the globe to find the point where human pretentiousness ends and robotic overload begins — and apparently, it all tends to involve neon colors and sweaty people wearing sunglasses indoors. But enough about the audience; making fun of NYC hipsters is a joyless enterprise, and I’d much rather walk you through the joyful parts of this nutty gig.
Wittingly or not, the invite-only event served as a showcase for the solipsism of modern creative culture. Everything at Creators Project seemed to focus on our generation’s relentless need to document ourselves: from the art itself — like the installation piece that allowed you to have your face digitally represented above a Day-Glo pyramid) — to the vast majority of attendees, who were photographing themselves in every possible moment. In a sense, then, the “creative” aspect of the festival had something to do with the way that almost every member of the audience was working on his/her own documenting project at any given time. Was I watching a set, or was I gathering raw footage to be edited later into a representative piece about said set?
As you can probably tell by the previous two paragraphs, I had a good seven hours of navel-gazing before the music started up: standing and spacing out in installations like Mira Calix’s My Secret Heart (an eternal choral loop intertwines with a gigantic 360-degree screen depicting what appears to be human beings slowly transforming into lightning bolts), United Visual Artists’ Triptych (three 2001-ish monoliths emitting light and sound that seem to corrolate with viewers’ physical movements), and especially the trippy-and-overwhelming Muti Randolph piece Deep Screen (is it cliche to point out that being inside this piece is pretty much what it must be like to be inside The Matrix?). It wasn’t until almost sundown that we started hearing the pounding notes of bands like The Rapture and Gang Gang Dance. By this time, the art and the free bar had loosened everyone up enough to the point of incoherence.
It still took a few hours, however, for things to get really nuts. The poorly kept secret of the event was that M.I.A., although not listed on anything official, was going to be the de facto headliner — and anticipation was clearly off the charts. The music line-up was a strange mix of up-and-coming oddities and more dependable modern rock acts that could dependably get people excitable. At no point was this didactic separation more evident than the simultaneous performances of Interpol and Die Antwoord: the former, a straight-laced act performing minimalist anthemic new wave rock, and the latter a spastic and freakish South African rap/rave act who mix the grotesque and the amusing in a confrontational mashup of Afrikaner and English. Neither act was really on the forefront of any kind of technological event horizon — but neither was playing Glastonbury that weekend, and both of them were able to blow the roof off their respective corner of the gallery.
Before I get into Die Antwoord, a word about Sleigh Bells, the band that went on before them. Amid all the high-tech laser shows and talk of creative boundary breaking, it was interesting to see a Sleigh Bells set, because they kind of straddle everything. They are both high-tech and lo-tech, and they are both forward-thinking and just straight-up rocking. Their set-up is borderline-retarded: just a guitar, a vocalist, and an iPod that plays the drums. They have a back-to-basics vibe, but at the same time, it’s hard to deny that vocalist Alexis Krauss is a budding rock diva, with a magnetic and sweaty presence that is both glamorous and unpretentious. Emerging from a haze of strobed-out smoke, guitarist Derek Miller began pounding out the intro to Slayer’s classic “South of Heaven” before the band ripped into their own senses-pounder, “Tell ‘Em.” The way this band mixes up metal, punk, dance, electro, and pop signifiers and sounds is electrifying, especially since they pull it off so effortlessly. Sleigh Bells’ music can fit into so many spaces: they could play the smallest little bar or the largest rock festival, and it probably wouldn’t matter. As they ended their set — drenched in sweat, blasting their final chords over an epilepsy-inducing strobe light — it was clear that a new force in rock has emerged.
I took a sojourn from the second-floor gallery down to the first to check out Salem, a strange three-piece hailing from Traverse City, Michigan. They’re an odd fit for this event, if only because the celebratory nature of the Creators Project is pretty much anathema to the dreary drudge of Salem’s haunting muse. Sounding not unlike Julee Cruise warbling over T-Pain, the band mix crunk beats, gauzy synths, and almost-not-there vocals to a startling effect that’s both disturbing and beautiful. Since this was a Vice-sponsored event, I’ll say here that the band’s look was a quintessential DO: the mismatched clusterfuck of their appearance (you had one guy in a wifebeater and shorts, another wearing a flowing medieval shirt with a plethora of Wiccan-y necklaces, and a woman in high heels and short black dress) was so discordant as to be brilliant, especially when paired with their we-don’t-care attitude. Never saying a word to the audience, they softly pummelled the crowd with gloomy warblings that seemed to come from a dark, indistinct place.
I sauntered back upstairs just in time to catch the debut NYC performance of Die Antwoord, who are definitely one of the stranger acts to ever grace an American stage. A lawless and anarchic rap duo (backed by their DJ, Hi-Tek), one toweringly tall (the intimidating Ninja) and one puzzingly short (the pixie-ish Yo-Landi Vi$er), Die Antwoord blew our face off with boundless energy that in a live setting allows you to forget your nagging suspicions that the whole thing is a put-on. Much ink has been spilled attempting to figure out if the group is a joke act, owing not only to their out-of-nowhere media blitz but also to the sheer weirdness of what they do. What comes across as almost gratingly irritating on record is mind-blowingly exciting live, as Ninja and Yo-Landi proceeded to attack this overcrowded room of hipsters with a ferocity that was both unexpected and refreshingly vicious. They bounced around the stage like they’d been electrocuted, almost defying the laws of gravity. Tracks like “Enter the Ninja” and “Wat Pomp” might sound like some kind of 21st-century Dr. Demento fare when you listen to the MP3s — but in person, they are absolutely blistering. I have a suspicion that novelty of Die Antwoord might actually last a bit longer than some might have guesstimated, now that the actual humans are touring America and proving that they are two of the more capable MC’s at work anywhere.
After Die Antwoord left the stage, the mood in the room heightened, as the anticipation of M.I.A.’s rumored appearance hit fever pitch. Would she show? Would she play more than one song? Would she (ulp) be terrible? Everyone got their iPhone cameras ready and aimed as the lights eventually went out, and a red strobe and a lone drummer started rat-a-tat-tatting in unison, signaling the start of recent single “Born Free.” When the song kicked into its frantic riff, M.I.A. emerged, resplendant in an outfit that could have been purchased from a street vendor around the corner for a few bucks: a camo windbreaker with the hood up and cheapo sunglasses with pot leaves over the eyes that had the strange effect of making her look like a rapping Jawa. Oh, and a rainbow wig that she never removed during her hour-long set. But the off-the-cuff zaniness of her appearance was in stark contrast to the tightness of her flow. In the past, M.I.A. has proven a pretty hit-or-miss performer (as anyone who caught her last Mass. appearance at the Worcester Palladium a few years ago can attest). But clearly with the build-up to her new album (Maya, her third, out in mid-July), she’s gotten her proverbial act together, with a live drummer, a tight DJ, and a flanking squadron of backup singers and dancers, all moving in sync to a precision set that moved seamlessly from new material to older tracks from Kala and Arular without missing a beat. The highlight came near the end, when a spirited run-through of “Galang” ended with an extended shout-through of the song’s coda, a wordless melodic chant that had the entire room yelling in unison. M.I.A. dove into the crowd with her mic; and for a few minutes, her inclusive world-beat-mashing made more sense than anything in the world.
After the set, I found my way back to the My Secret Heart exhibit — now somewhat empty, save for the occasional couple making out in the glow of the installation’s rotating display. As I crashed in the corner and attempted to get my head together for the long train ride back to Boston after the 12-hour metaphysical atom-smashing I had just received, the discombobulating sense of wordless grace that Calix’s installation doled out was meditative in the best sense of the word. Perhaps this is how technology and art can work with real-life music culture: to help spastic music fans to chill before and after the sprawling chaos of live music?
A decade ago, a Dresden Dolls fan might have required a sentence or two to describe his or her favorite band. These days, the solo career of head Doll Amanda Palmer needs a multi-page explanation for each new quarterly phase. It’s the mark of an artist who’s constantly looking for arty new kicks on the reg — and a by-product of Palmer’s ability to deliver her musical aspirations in gauzy layers of drama.
Did I say “drama”? Walking through a phalanx of Sox fans on Lansdowne Street into the House of Blues at 7 pm last Saturday was like crossing from Jockland to Drama School Island, as a seated audience politely awaited Evelyn Evelyn’s entrance. Oh, right, the explanation: EE is a Palmer collaboration with multi-instrumentalist Jason Wembley wherein the two put on wigs and a frock and take on the guise of Evelyn Evelyn, conjoined twin sisters who reveal the details of their tragic life through their baleful tunes.
The concept works better live than on record. Palmer and Wembley inhabit the roles of the reserved and stunted twins, whether they’re bashing through the folk-shock narrative of “The Tragic Events of September” or running through a down-tempo folk-strummed cover of Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart.” And if the act at times came off like a Little Britain out-take — especially given the pair’s petticoat-and-bustle conjoined dress — it was worthwhile not only for the sight of a mock-bashful Palmer pretending to shy from the limelight but also for the sheer talent-show display of Palmer and Wembley pulling these tunes off in unison as they shared duties playing keyboard and guitar, one hand each. It’s possible that EE may eventually register as a minor Palmer project, but on Saturday, the seated audience was drinking in the peculiarity of this headscratchingly arch concept, knowing that in a few months Palmer will be on to something else. Oh, that’s right — Cabaret at the ART. Did I say “drama”?
“You motherfuckers are almost as crazy as I am!” Glenn Danzig is high-fiving fans in the front row, midway through Monday night’s set, and for a second, it is hard for this notoriously reticent performer to hide a huge beaming smile. After a five-year break from playing live, it’s clear that Danzig and Co. are relishing being back face-to-face with their adoring fans.
Let’s get the negatives of the show out of the way first: Danzig is no longer the young bantamweight of the 80’s and 90’s, and he starting to show signs that he is a man in his mid-50’s, what with the emerging paunch and bald spot, cracks in the facade of this hitherto ageless rock icon. And there are some who, I’m sure, are waiting for Danzig to give up the heavy metal, get a crew cut, stop dying his hair, and start doing acoustic tours so his whole schtick will begin to be more age-appropriate. It certainly doesn’t help that, as time marches on, Danzig (the band)’s 80’s based cock rock begins to seem more and more anachronistic, especially in a live setting with guitarist Tommy Victor’s absolutely merciless use of Zakk Wylde-esque string unison pick squeals, an irritating affect that he lays on thick in almost every second of every song.
But you know what? Fuck all that. Danzig’s entire career has been about sticking it to people who have attempted to impose their expectations upon him, and after tonight’s performance it seems clear that the man will probably be headbanging in a skintight mesh shirt until he needs a wheelchair. The set was a fan’s dream list, with hits like “Twist of Cain” and “Her Black Wings” being chucked out early– a drastic contrast to the last time he rolled through town five years ago, only playing then-new material that was largely unfamiliar to the audience. It also helps that this Danzig tour is supporting the new Deth Red Sabaoth, easily the band’s strongest album in a decade.
The same way that Dio invented the devil horn sign and Ozzy invented mindless headbanging, Danzig popularized “whoa” as a choral element in heavy music. And more than the dark imagery and pounding riffs, what fans come for when they see Danzig is to join in those huge “whoa”s with the man himself. Rock history will eventually put the man’s basso profundo voice up there with Hendrix’s guitar and Elvis’ hips, and tonight’s show soared every time Danzig hit each song’s “whoa” moment. Of particular note was the light-and-shade run through of “How The Gods Kill”: a tranquil start saw Danzig sensitively “whoa”ing, only to open the floodgates once the song ripped into full force.
For his fans, it essentially comes down to this: Danzig is not a man who is able to hide his displeasure, which makes the joy he exudes during a great show like tonight’s that much more meaningful and special to an audience. A bad show of his is bad, but a good show is great, as it is a reflection not just of the man’s mood but of his communion with his fans, and that communion is broadcast via wordless chants that transcend genre and ultimately celebrate music in a relatively pure form.
As the first encore ended with a run-through of “Mother”, an overly excitable fan found his way on stage and, inexplicably, planted a kiss on Danzig’s cheek right at the end of the tune. And while at the moment, Danzig’s irritation at this violation of his personal space was evident, I’m sure deep down he understands that when your music connects with fans on such a primal level, such random outbursts of adulation are a necessary consequence. For a man who, just a short while before, had run through a song called “Tired of Being Alive”, it was marvelous to see Danzig perform as someone who was anything but.
The night’s entertainment was, as they say, high concept: on the eve of their 30th anniversary, Aussie new wave lifers The Church played 23 songs, one from each of their albums, in reverse chronological order, beginning with last year’s Untitled #23 and ending with 1980′s self-titled debut (in the U.S., it was eventually released as Of Skins and Heart). At a certain point, singer/bassist Steve Kilbey seemed to almost snap: as he introduced a song, mentioning the title and the album that it came from, the applause he elicited gave him pause: “Well, I guess I don’t really need to play the song– we’ll just announce the song and you guys can clap and then I’ll announce the next one, and we’ll all get out of here a lot quicker!”
Thankfully for us, Kilbey didn’t follow through on his sarcastic threat, and we were treated down a winding and wobbly trek down the band’s storied history. They cheated a little though, as early hits “Reptile” and the utterly gorgeous “The Unguarded Moment” were dispatched with early in the set (ostensibly because versions of those songs appeared on a pair of late 00′s acoustic albums)– but it really was astounding the way that the song selection displayed the band’s amazing diversity of material, from the avant-gard quivering of “Louisiana” (from 1999′s Hologram of Baal) to the soft crooning of a tune like “Appalatia” (from 2004′ Forget Yourself).
The sense you got, watching the band unfurl gorgeous acoustic versions of tune after tune, was almost fatigue: most bands of their stature, 30 years on, have been milking the same ten to fifteen tracks for the last several decades. The Church never went that route, instead churning out new material that constantly required a nearly annual re-assessment of exactly what kind of band this is. The result has probably hurt the band, financially and in terms of popularity, as they have gone from the heights of a worldwide hit single like 1988′s “Under The Milky Way” (which the band somewhat begrudgingly ran through tonight) to a steady stream of challenging albums put out on a series of uber-indie labels. But really, who cares, when their struggle is our reward, with a bounty of incredible tunes to lose yourself in.
In revisiting older material, much of the between-song banter involved near-bitterness of their alleged lack of success: whether it was the admission that one label of theirs in the early 80′s had the choice to promote either their new album or Loverboy’s (one can only guess which band won out in that A&R battle of the headbands) or the rueful introduction of “Tear It All Away”, from their 1980 debut, as “a song from our debut album that never got released here”. The truth, though, is it’s hard to feel sorry for them when they are still able to play such a solidly packed set in such a gorgeous setting to an ecstatically grateful stateside audience. As guitarist Marty Willson-Piper brought the final song to an absolutely thrilling finish, all one could do was clap and hope that they’ll continue to plug away at it– although you know that these guys will keep making music until they no longer have fingers to strum guitars or voices to sing with.
Ok, let’s get it out of the way first: the merch was lacking. Lacking! When I go to see High On Fire, I expect to see, I dunno, hoodies with blue dragon-demons perched on snowy ledges and shit — but even the stepped-up attention the band is getting due to their absolutely smoking new platter Snakes for the Divine (E1) isn’t translating into an uptick in stoner fantasy merch. Bummer!
Oh, the music? Obviously, the band slayed. High On Fire strode onto the Mid East stage like phantom warlords, picking up their axes and instantly bludgeoning us with “Frost Hammer.” In the low-ceilinged confines of the Mid East down, the mix was muddy and claustrophobic: it was probably one of the worst-sounding shows I’ve seen since … uh, the last time I saw High On Fire at the Mid East down. But fuck it: Matt Pike’s guitar sound is going to come across as sludgy and incoherent even if he had scientists re-calibrating the attenuation of the entire room and rebuilding the sound system out of crystal lasers. After a few songs, he cranked the knobs on his Soldano stack, and it was as if our ears were being coated with green slime.
On record, HoF can come across as relentless and one-dimensional, with everything running at full blast at all times. Live, they are no different, but there is something about being in the presence of such a bonecrushing steamroller that makes the unstopping carnage so appealing. Normally, this would be the part of the review where I would point out things like “The band’s set leaned heavily on their new album” or something to that effect, but please: after being liquified by four or five of their epic tracks in a row, it was hard for my mind to get around to remembering things like song titles and what album is this from and that sort of thing. After 30 minutes or so of focused headbanging, you just kind of become zombified.
In this sense, HoF are almost more of a Ministry-esque industrial band: Pike’s riffs are massive, but indistinct, like a constantly chugging metal-tipped scythe being dragged along the ground. Drummer Des Kensel plays like a one-man drum circle, with a thundering power that takes your breath away at certain moments. He never divides the tune up into segments of different beats and fills, the way most metal drummers do, and he also avoids the double bass drum trap that makes most metal into a rush to the finish. Instead, he just steadily plows each song into your skull with the determined pace of a man who just doesn’t give a fuck. At this point, Kensel and Pike have been doing this together for almost 15 years, and the rhythmic interplay and telepathic ratcheting of tension and power the two execute is astounding.
Your typical HoF track eventually gets to a point where Kensel (and since 2006, ex-Zeke bassist Jeff Matz) have made a frothy mess of your ear-thingies and then Pike hits some pedals and holy fucking shit just throws the whole song off a cliff for a few minutes with his eternal yawning lead work. If he were a lesser guitarist and this were a lesser band, the consistent way that Pike leads every tune into a prolongued solo section would seem indulgent and lame; but he isn’t and they aren’t and basically when you go see HoF you are waiting for these moments to mow down your mind with laserbeams of awesomeness.
It also helps that Pike is a true metal warrior of the type you don’t see that much anymore: amidst a clustered field of pasty dudes in black T-shirts of other bands composed of pasty dudes in black T-shirts of other bands, Pike is a true rock star. Six feet and change, long hair, sideburns, tattooed and shirtless, with crooked teeth and what people could politely refer to as a face that looks “lived-in,” his stage presence alone lends an authenticity to his molten tales of roaming sludge-lords. In recent years he has added a few tricks to his stage moves arsenal, playing nutty hammer-ons with one hand while using the other to exhort the crowd to an even greater frenzy. Tonight at the Middle East, his energy was infectious, even to the typically arms-folded Cantabrigian contingent. It doesn’t hurt too that his grizzled rock starpower and shirtless heroics guarantees that there might actually be the occasional female fan amidst the dudes with XXL hoodies and backwards Dean guitar baseball hats holding in their long curly locks.
There was something about the way Jay-Z hyped the crowd up at the start of show opener “Run This Town” that was not only emblematic of his performance style, but of his general appeal as a performer – a key to his likability. As Rihanna’s sampled voice echoed throughout the rafters of the way-sold-out TD Garden, Jigga Man, having emerged from a lighted hole in the stage (Darth Vader-style), gave each segment of the audience a clear throated “Whussup!”
First the left side, then the right side, then the middle. The frenzied response he got showed just how much a “Whussup!” from Jay-Z is worth to people as cultural currency– and how the man can walk into a room full of 15,000-plus people and get them screaming with nothing more than a casual greeting.
Jay-Z’s popularity really is staggering, and in many ways it boils down to a kind of everyman charisma that transcends talent and effort. Sure, he has pegged himself as the best rapper alive, but so has every rapper who ever lived. What is unique about Jay-Z is his effortless ability to squeeze his wordplay talents into bite-sized gems that manage to be both memorable and hard-hitting. Seeing him live, with his hits strung end-to-end over a more-than-two-hour running time, you begin to comprehend the sheer longevity of his particular brand of hustle.
“No I’m not a Jonas/ Brother I’m a grown-up” he rat-a-tat’s off early in the set in the midst of Blueprint 3 highlight “On To The Next One,” and for a no-longer-boyish-looking 40 year old, he isn’t kidding. All his career, he’s maintained an authoritative voice of experience beyond his years; now that he actually has those years behind him, he not only seems more authentically authoritative, but almost, dare I say it, statesmanlike. Which might have something to do with his Obama connection, which figured heavily into the iconography of the evening.
After months of months of being bombarded with media reports of how unpopular our 44th prez is, it was kind of awesome to be in a stadium full of people cheering the man’s very mention. At one point, the giganto-screens displayed a 2008-election press conference where Obama, discussing the barrage of criticism he puts up with on a daily basis, gave a visual demonstration of his need to occasionally…you guessed it, brush his shoulders off, leading us into an absolutely electrifying run-through of the Black Album track of the same name. The set was heavy with Blueprint 3 material, meaning that it was littered, lyrically, with allusions of Jay-Z’s seeming chumminess with the leader of the free world. Whether he does indeed have “Obama on the text” (again from “On To The Next One”), it seems so surreal after years of rap’s anti-authoritarian posturing to have a hip-hop icon so clearly enamored with our chief executive.
Of course, Jay-Z himself has never had a problem, really, with authority — as long as it is understood that he himself is at least affiliated with said authority; that said, he also never comes across as vain. For a self-proclaimed Rap Jehova, he is still down-to-earth enough to make multiple shout-outs during the evening to the kids in audience from Make A Wish Foundation; he could also be seen multiple times actually noticing people in the audience that seemed especially into the music by giving them continuous mid-song exhortations.
For my money, the defining moment of the show came during his runthrough of oldie “Excuse Me Miss”, where he got all of the Garden to join him in doing a simple two-step; after showing everyone how it was done, he literally singled out on at least three occasions people in the audience who were “doing it wrong”, and coached the, uh, more pigment-challenged members of the audience into learning how to actually move their feet in time with the beat of the music.
“Similarly, here’s another song about miserable death,” Stephen Merritt drolly informed us between songs. Merritt and his Magnetic Fields, as you may know, are famous for three things: 1) Merritt’s prolific songwriting nature, revealing itself in high-concept projects like 1999’s 69 Love Songs, 2) his lugubriously low voice, which with tonight’s acoustic (and non-electronic) accompaniment often made the band sound like, oh, say, Simon & Garfunkel fronted by Peter Steele from Type O Negative, and 3) Merritt’s predilection for witty, acerbic, and ironic lyrical observations of the down sides of existence. On record, these jaunty tunes about dying, depression, and not getting what one wants can lift one’s spirits with their friction between sound and meaning — but live, it’s a trickier situation.
This is because Merritt is a sly dog, and it is oh-so-hard to tell whether, with a song, a lyric (or really, with anything), if he really “means it.” So often we see performers belt out the most inane lyrics as if their life truly depended on it, attempting to convince us that their heart really will go on, or something to that effect. Merritt (with vocal accompaniment from longtime Field and manager Claudia Gonson, as well as the country-tinged Shirley Simms) manages to hide everything behind a certain artifice, be it smirking irony (as on one of his catalog’s smuttier tunes, like the lascivious “Nun’s Litany”) or the deadpan croon he gives to laments and love songs alike. The effect can be boggling: do we laugh? Do we get choked up? Merritt never shows his hand.
The bulk of the material tonight was pulled from their most recent, Nonesuch disc, Realism (although the band also lavished us with a glut of numbers from the 1994 oddity The Charm of the Highway Strip). It was awesome when they lilted through biting tracks like “From a Sinking Boat” and “You Must Be Out of Your Mind,” but not so much when they dragged us kicking and screaming through genre exercises like the über-twee “The Dolls’ Tea Party” and the nonsensical hoedown of “We Are Having a Hootenanny.”
Of course, most of the evening’s drama came not from the songs, but from the tense humor between Merritt and Gonson. Merritt, ever attempting to sustain an icy distance between the his songs and his own person, was continually interrupted by Gonson’s giddy verbal spasms, often delaying the start of a song until a particular anecdote could be completed — one particularly prickly (and extended) back-and-forth occurring during the encore when Gonson pontificated on what she didn’t like about the Who’s Super Bowl performance. Revealingly, Gonson remarked that they were playing a much larger gig in Brooklyn in a few nights, and that they’d be much more serious for that show — and thank goodness we got to catch them in such giddy moods. If we were a little lost as to how seriously to take all of this, it was reassuring to follow their lead.
photos by Tanya Paglia: click HERE to see the full photo gallery
Anyone in show business will tell you that it’s hard work putting on a show, and the psychic toll it takes on one over a prolonged career is usually palpable. For Kevin Barnes and his troupe of merrymakers, 15 years in the trenches of psychedelic indie rock has clearly been a journey of liberation and exploration; but in their path to becoming the airtight jesters of the evening that strolled through The Paradise on Wednesday night, it was clear that there has always been a building sadness beneath the funtime hijinks. The show began with a prank, as stagehands took to the stage in animal masks and played several minutes of assaultive noise before being ejected by the “real” band, at which point we got to see the 2010 Kevin Barnes: bearded and eyeshadowed with a headwrap that, combined with his trademark Britwarble, made him come across like Brett Anderson of The London Suede auditioning for Johnny Depp’s role in Pirates of the Caribbean.
As the band rammed through it’s cavalcade of jaunty poppers, with two gigantic projection screens behind them displaying intentionally trippy visual accompaniment, the cartoon vibe of the band’s attack was palpable. Of Montreal’s music is truly schizophrenic– or maybe it’s more of a dissociative identity disorder, as a thousand different bands crowd the mirror trying to get equal time in the setlist. That said, I think the band can in some ways be summed up as being, musically, truly Bowie-esque: in the sense that they roughly cover all of the musical genres of Bowie’s career, whether it’s the arch 70′s glam rock of the Ziggy era, the hippy folk of his 60′s “Space Oddity” period, “Young Americans” Philly soul/disco, the Krautrock of the 70′s Eno era, all the way through the Never Let Me Down synthy 80′s and the spiky guitar weirdness of Tin Machine. But despite all the complications, as Barnes giddily bounced up and down in time with the effervescent cuddlerock attack perpetrated by his band, one couldn’t help but appreciate the sheer exuberance that this band is capable of. With nary a moment between tunes, the band pushed ever onward with an airless campaign of nonstop capital-F fun that was really a sight to behold. The mirror eventually broke, however, with the one-two punch of ”Spike The Senses” (from 2004′s Satanic Panic in the Attic) and newer number “Plastis Wafers”:; Barnes put his guitar down and began vamping like a vogueing diva, culminating in “Wafers”s glam meltdown: “You know you’re a fucking star, you know you are,” he pleaded, showing his own fragility through the pomp and glitter of the band’s psych artifice. It was as genuine a public moment as a man in hot pink skinny jeans can have.
“I could have been singing this at the Grammys — but I’m here with you tonight,” declared Elly Jackson, the public face of La Roux, with a detectable dash of annoyance folded into several dollops of playful sarcasm. On a night when so many are plopped down on their couch to celebrate a year that saw so many female superstars rise to the top of Pop Mountain, this sold-out crowd at the Paradise was ecstatic to see the Boston debut of the playfully idiosyncratic Jackson (especially after a postponement from last October). And even though tonight’s show lacked the pyro and star-power wattage of whatever was going down at the Staples Center on the West Coast, it more than made up for it with the giddy enthusiasm of a young star living out her dream, one sold out club at a time.
Unlike here, Elly and La Roux are superstars with a string of #1 hits in their native Old Blighty — which is maybe why her performance tonight finds Jackson and Co. in particularly feisty form. From the first notes of “Tigerlily,” as a buzzing digital cascade serenades a happy-feet Jackson out onto the stage-cum-dancefloor, the group (Jackson and three dour-looking young people who stand relatively unmoved throughout behind synths and digipads) are all business, playing every song with high-energy and visible determination. La Roux’s music is hard to describe, and especially difficult to compare to anything else out there right now: her songs sit themselves right down in the pop corner, but also contain contradictory elements of blustery soul and chilly techno that all combine to form an organically gothic blue-eyed electro-pop. Jackson’s stage presence is as unusual: her trademark red mane dippity-do’d in a swirl that wouldn’t look out of place on a Bob’s Big Boy statue; her shadow-dancing a perfect mixture of both Molly Ringwald and Anthony Michael Hall in Sixteen Candles.
But all attempts to place Elly’s signature steez in a box seem lame when she’s turning an entire club out simply by dancing around and belting out her hits, one after the next. On record, Jackson’s limited range can start to wear, but live, her songs take on new life. “In for the Kill” was a peak moment, as was the one-two punch of “Colourless Colour” (during which a crazed Roux fan crashed the stage for an extended dance solo).
“We need some security here — these club shows, man!” hollered Jackson. The loose-yet-intense vibe she brought to the Paradise tonight was likely a result of being face-to-face with her fans in a way that her massive fame overseas rarely allows her. As she lost herself in the final beat blast of “Bulletproof,” it was heartening to see a typically reserved pop chanteuse starting to come into her own. You don’t get this kind of thing at the Grammys.
