a semi-prompt concert review
First, a public service announcement: After seven-ish years of intermittently trying, I finally get Arcade Fire — or, at least, The Suburbs. It’s the ultimate idealistic/brooding/overthinking/angst-filled/nostalgic/trapped-in-suburbia twentysomething album. Not that any of that is personally relevant or anything.
Sure, the instrumentation is still overdone and pretentious and all that, but it sure is pretty, too. All of a sudden on my fifth or sixth halfhearted listen of the album, something clicked, and I can’t stop.
But what this post is really about is the Sondre Lerche show I saw in New York on Saturday, in open violation of that concert freeze. (Won’t everyone be glad when talk of that is over?) I hadn’t been to the city since my birthday in February and hadn’t seen Mr. Lerche, who’s a longtime favorite, since last March.
So, off to New York to hang out with my loyal concert buddy and then head over to the Bowery Ballroom. Unfortunately for our ancient selves, it had a 9 pm start time and two openers. Ouch. This was okay when I was in college. It would also be okay these days if I lived in the city rather than 90 minutes away. (There. I admit it. The “New Yorker” thing is a façade.)
We loitered at the downstairs bar for a while during the first opener, Kishi Bashi. From what we could hear, he played a lot of different instruments in a lot of different styles. Wandered upstairs as the second opener, Nightlands, finished. Their keyboards sounded cool (I am a sucker for keyboards), but we agreed that the overall sound was rather generically trendyindie. Nothing really special.
And then Sondre time. The show was two days before his album release date. That kind of timing is always a bit frustrating in a way (I like to hear familiar songs), but it adds something special, too. If I hear the songs for the first time live, then every time I listen to the album, there’s a bit of that live-show memory in there.
First of all, the guy is a finger-blurring maniac on the guitar. This is a known fact, but it still manages to astound in person every time. It’s even more impressive at his solo shows, when he somehow manages to duplicate all the intricate layers of the studio versions of his songs with just two hands, but in the full-band setting (which this was), it was still a sight to behold. I’m glad the teal guitar and silver glittery strap are still in rotation, too.
I wasn’t sure about the new songs at first (and am still warming up to them on the CD), but they’re definitely as lush and complex as his earlier ones — just a little different. Can’t put my finger on it yet. Less hooky? Less traditionally structured? Opener Kishi Bashi joined in to add a big string sound to several of the tunes. Everyone knows how I feel about strings. (Mmm.) The drummer — not sure of his name — was impressive, too.
The older songs were reworked just slightly — often sped up to a borderline-frenetic pace in some cases. It worked and kept things interesting. We had to leave early (train schedules, oy), and at that point, it seemed like the vast majority of the setlist had been new songs. Maybe the old favorites were during the encore. I did get to hear “Heartbeat Radio,” which immediately brought me back to Portland. Sigh.
In between, we were treated to his comedy. I first saw Sondre Lerche back in 2004 at the Paradise Rock Club in Boston, and although his accent is much, much more subtle by now, he still pulls off that intentional “cute wide-eyed foreigner” persona for comedic effect pretty well when he wants to. No more baggy pink dress shirts like in ’04, though.
Now, that’s it for the next 16 days. Seriously.
