Artists: The Books, Death Vessel, Jose Gonzalez
Venue: Bowery Ballroom, NYC, NY
Date: March 24, 2006
Holy shit I think that as a whole show, this one might take the cake for ‘best evening of music, ever’. I heard a few tracks by each of the openers online and decided that they were worth checking out–and indeed they were. The first, Death Vessel, completely took me by surprise. After hearing online the track “Deep in the Horchata”, featuring a lovely female lead, I was disappointed to see that for some reason she had not shown up to the live show. And then the male lead starts singing–in a perfect female voice! A WTF moment, that was so bizarre I still can’t really explain it–if I closed my eyes, there was no way I would believe anyone who told me that the current singer was a male, and if I opened my eyes, there was no way anyone could convince me that the lead singer was a female, despite what my ears were trying to tell me. They were quite compentant as a band, and while the rest of their music wasn’t as compelling to me as “Deep in the Horchata” (which unfortunately they didn’t play), it was still quite a performance to behold live.
Jose Gonzalez, the second opener, was arresting in a different way: as a solo acoustic guitarist and singer, his almost uncomfortable shyness endeared him greatly to the audience. And certainly, his stellar playing and lovely (if somewhat uneven) songwriting were greatly loved as well. Being even softer-spoken than Sufjan was at the Katrina benefit I went to back in October 2005, Jose (contrary to what you might think, he’s a Swede) simply performed his music eloquently, with no bombast or showiness. His encore was this song that sounded very familiar to me, but I couldn’t place it until he got to the chorus: it was Massive Attack’s Teardrop! Of all the covers he could have chosen, I don’t think I would ever have guessed that one, but he made it work really well. After having subsequently listened to his album, I can definitely say that his live performance leaves his studio work completely in the dust.
And finally, it was time for The Books. Being somewhat ‘celebreties’ in parts of the indie music world, I was a little surprised to see the two guys setting up their equipment themselves (but then again, perhaps that’s part of the reason they’re celebrities…). They didn’t really have much to setup, however, since it was really only a DVD player, and their instruments (2 guitars, a bass, and a cello). The other surprise (for me at least, the rest of the audience had obviously done their homework) was the large age difference between the two guys (Nick looked to be in his late twenties, and Paul in his late thirties). Since their music is mostly sample and glitch-oriented, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect live. It turns out that most of their samples are taken not from audio recordings, but from various videos that they like to collect (most of which are completely random). Thus, many of the songs they performed were synced to the dvd featuring the original videos the samples came from. The live guitar and cello playing of the two was just lovely, and there was a good balance between that and the electronic backdrop recorded on the dvd.
Perhaps even more fascinating, however, was some of the background that Nick expanded on in-between tracks at the show. How, for example, many of the words (and even the voice at the end) of the track “Smells Like Content” were written by his brother during a long day out in the woods (which his brother apparently has a tendency to do often, and record). That song in particular sticks out because of the excellent video that went along with it. Consisting mostly just of white text on a black background, it was merely the lyrics of the song. However, they were written semi-phonetically so something like “intentions” became “in 10 shuns”. In addition, wherever possible, words were written in a way to graphically illustrate their meaning. Thus, “overbearing” was shown as a big O dominating a smaller “bear ring” below it, and the lyric “…statues are bleeding green” was shown with ‘bleeding’ in red, fading to green. This clever video was accompanied by Nick singing the lyrics (many of which are sung at breakneck pace, and fairly complicated ones at that), and altogether was one of the most loved tracks of the evening (for the whole audience).
Two other highlights of The Books’ performance were interludes that they had on dvd. One was labelled on the DVD’s title menu as “I Amend to It”, and the other was labelled “Fan Hand Mart”. Never in a million years could I have guessed the content of either one: the first was simply an anagram of meditation, and it consisted of a minute-long video where simply different anagrams of the word meditation, including such classics as “I am into Ted” and “ton I am; diet!” (this segment was introduced by Paul as “while we retune our instruments, we invite you to share a moment of meditation”). The second was introduced by Nick as a video that a friend of his surprised him with at his (Nick’s) bachelor party. Mentioning beforehand that it was a “wild night”, we were of course in stitches when it was a national archives video from the 1930s showing a talented man who can play Yankee Doodle Dandy in farting noises he makes with his hands. The short demonstration was followed by an excerpt from an interview where the ‘musician’ describes the discovery of his amazing talent and his rise to fame (somewhat embarrasingly, I must admit that it was not until I saw the Books again in May (see above), that I realized what ‘fan hand mart’ meant–it was simply the first letters of ‘man hand fart’ transposed).
[…] thing in this case). So unreal was it that I had a similar sort of eye-ear disconnect as I had for Death Vessel (although with much more sight-sound attractiveness on both […]
Specious Logic » Blog Archive » Concert Review: Squirrel Nut Zippers & Firecracker Jazz Band
May 11th, 2008