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Oh, as the song says, what a night. There are like a million things going on tonight that I not only can't go to, I can't even regret not going to them because I'm going to see Kristin Hersh instead! She is the best musician ever. Tonight's show at the Middle East has a very odd format. Andrew Bird comes on first and performs a few of his songs solo. He is, as it were, an odd Bird. His main instrument is violin, and a typical song of his will start with him recording a strange, percussive plucked sequence and setting it looping, then bowing something rich and strange over it and setting that looping as well, then singing and playing over all of that. And sometimes he whistles, which he does phenomenally well. His lyrics are discursive and surreal, piling up rhymes until they're funny and occasionally wandering seamlessly in and out of spoken word. It's all very weird and very good.
After just a few songs, he goes off and Howe Gelb comes on. He puts a CD on and some violin stuff plays while he gets his guitars and keyboard ready. His first song is great stuff: witty and (yes) weird, with a good melody, sung in a fabulous Tom Waits growl, with spare-but-rockin' keyboards. If only it could stay this good. When he switches to guitar, I am less pleased. Part of it seems to be that he's got the most beat-to-shit acoustic I've ever seen, and it's got a really grating tone. But also, I think I don't like his guitar playing that much--it's rootsy, but not all that accomplished--and he spends too much time fucking around with his CD player.
After a few from him, he goes off and Kristin Hersh comes on. The audience is pretty enthusiastic at this point. I love the way she starts: her tuning blends pretty smoothly into the beginning of "Sno-Cat," so that I only realize she's started when the tuning starts to sound really familiar. This song has a fairly light and delicate vocal, and her voice is relatively smooth (for Kristin). As the set continues, consisting entirely of songs from her last four solo albums, she starts to pick it up more, visiting the more ragged and occasionally scary (but in a good way!) parts of her territory. "Your Dirty Answer," in particular, kicks my ass, as it usually does. Finally, she breaks out one much older one, and does an amazingly powerful and focused "Delicate Cutters." There comes a point (right after the ending of the second ending--the one full of innocent children) when I'm just suddenly overwhelmed by the realization that something in her brain decided that it should sound that way. If you hear the song, you'll know what I mean.
After that, Andrew comes back on and they play together on "Deep Wilson," a song from her most recent album that he played on. It's really gorgeous; they have an amazing musical chemistry together. Then Howe (who also plays on the album) joins them and they all play together, switching off Kristin, Andrew, and Howe songs. I have to admit, I want less Howe. He seems more interested in entertaining himself than in entertaining us, and he plays almost no keyboard, which he seems really good at. Instead he plays guitar, which mostly drowns Kristin's guitar out, and when he starts a CD during one of Andrew's songs, drawing alarmed looks from Andrew, I want him to stop. Andrew is really the star of the playing-on-the-others'-songs part of the show. He's got an amazing ability to just hear really cool, not at all obvious violin lines for apparently any song.
They finish up quite early, like before 11:30, so we rush to make one of the shows we thought we had to miss. We really, really wanted to see The Charms open for Loveless at the Lizard Lounge, part of Angelle Wood's Rising Tide series. (The same series that introduced us to the amazing Starr Faithfull, when Fritter played it at the Paradise Lounge.) We miss The Charms, but arrive just as Loveless are about to play. The room's fairly crowded, I'm glad to see, so we are stuck near the entrance, watching the show from the side. This turns out to be a bonus, as I spend the entire set in Jen-space; sandwiched between her amp and her monitor, I hear her way high in the mix. I've seen these songs performed kind of a lot now, so it's good to hear them with a completely different mix this way. Tom, the drummer, has some heinous equipment issues early on, but he works around them pretty skillfully and it sounds great. My one and only complaint is that they should write more songs. And rehearse them, which they apparently don't have time to do; when Angelle insists on an encore, they have nothing prepared, so Dave does a solo cover of a Morissey song! You wouldn't have expected it of him, but he does a beautiful job with it.
