2009 In Review: Best Concerts (Part II)

Part I of this retrospective can be found here. As with the first part, clicking on the headers will take you to my full review from the show.

The D'Urbervilles / Forest City Lovers

The Theatre Centre (Summerworks Festival Music Series). 2009-08-13 (Thursday)

An extra-long wait out on the sidewalk before getting into the stuffy basement space of The Theatre Centre did nothing to diminish the joy of this unique gig. A short set from Forest City Lovers melded seamlessly into The D'Urbs storming the stage, West Side Story style and playing a few songs before the bands took a break and emerged, seven players wide, in a combined joint force to play a collaborative set. "I wondered to myself whether FCL's more delicate edges might get overwhelmed by the D'Urbs' rollicking energy. As it shook out, the bands'd put enough thought into this to avoid that pitfall, and managed to put the extra hands into more texture rather than more volume. [...] The bands, though dripping in sweat, were clearly having a ball." The sort of thing that you go back and forth on after the fact — it'd be so cool to see that happen again, but as a unique singularity it's all the more precious.

Sometimes, stepping back to find that sweet spot in the venue's sound-field takes a back seat to just, like, being right there up front, so my recordings from the night aren't immaculate, but they get something of it across.

The Dutchess & The Duke

Bicycle Film Festival afterparty, Studio Gallery. 2009-08-22 (Saturday)

Another sweaty night, in a show at a ramshackle semi-venue, had an enjoyable undercard¹, but then I was taken by surprise by the headliners, a band I knew pretty much nothing about: "not long into the set, I realize I'm being completely fucking blown away. R&B in the sense that early Stones or Them or The Animals were R&B, the band had a batch of excellently-written songs, delivered here with off-the-cuff casualness blearily sagging into exhausted raggedness. It really felt like there was zero distance between performer and audience: shakers and tambourines were shared around, we sweated like they sweated, and the drummer's bottle of Johnny Walker Red got passed around so everyone could get a swig. By the end of the set, the walls were dripping with condensation and guitars were well nigh impossible to keep in tune. A singalong of 'I Am Just a Ghost' capped the set — one of the best shows of the year."

Check out recordings from The Dutchess and The Duke, as well as the night's other bands, here.

Wyrd Visions

Bite Your Tongue 1, The Guild 2009-09-06 (Saturday)

This entire show — sending the downtown-bound concert crowd through Scarborough to the beautiful bluffs at the Guild Inn — was a pretty special time, but this transporting set was the most affecting: "Playing on a double-necked guitar, with occasional accents from a looping pedal, his songs were droney folk rambles — folk in the olde Brittania sort of way. Imagine Jandek as a minstrel singing songs of the boggy dew, and you're kinda on the right track. The fact that his set, just over a half-hour, consisted of four songs indicates that his tunes are designed to unspool themselves in their own dreamtime. All of these elements could go so wrong, and could veer to the unlistenable or the precious. But in these circumstances — the near-dark and the first stars winking on in the sky; the fecund descending dampness; crickets chirping in the background — it was perfect, almost sublime."²

If I dare say so myself, I think my recording from Wyrd Visions' set is rather good. My other recordings from the evening are pretty nice, too.

Getatchew Mekuria & The Ex & Guests

SPK Polish Combatants Hall 2009-09-12 (Saturday)

An Ethiopian New Year's special, with a mish-mash crowd merging folks from the Ethiopian community with grizzled old leather-jacket punks and younger Wavelength types, all drinking strong Polish beer and getting funky to a Dutch punk band backing a musical legend. "Most of all, throughout, it was sax heaven. Mekuria, now in his seventies, plays with a rich, groovy tone filled with vital emotion. There is undoubtedly tonnes to be said about the technical side of his craft, his technique, and how he bridges Ethiopian and European styles, but while playing with such vitality it's hard not just to slip into the richness of it. There were no few times where I just wanted the song to keep going, which isn't always (usually?) the way I feel in the midst of a ninety minute set."

I got a decent, not great, recording of that set, but it's still plenty groovy.

The Vic Chesnutt Band

Lee's Palace. 2009-11-07 (Saturday)

Damn damn damn. This show should have been memorable for different reasons. For pairing a gifted and unique songwriter with a powerful band, including members of the Silver Mt. Zion & Tra-La-La Band and guitar hero Guy Picciotto, adding depth and widescreen sweep to his songs for an intense ninety minutes. Or for the laconic, deadpan wit that Vic Chesnutt exhibited on stage. But now, all I mostly think about is "Flirted With You All My Life", when he sang, "O Death, clearly I'm not ready yet." And then, not so many weeks later, changed his mind about that.

R.I.P. Vic Chesnutt, 1964-2009. His music will be remembered; my recording is here.

The Hidden Cameras

The Opera House. 2009-12-05 (Saturday)

In my older, crankier years, I'm becoming increasingly resistant to large-venue shows, so that this show at the not-well-loved Opera House was one of my favourites speaks to the band's talent for scaling their spectacle to the size of the room and showing all challengers how to attain collective glee. Let's see: choir, dancers, banners, audience participation, the band in the crowd and the crowd on the stage. Add to that a delicious opening set from Gentleman Reg³, who'd be one of the many extras on hand for the main act, and this was an excellent night out, that made me feel, upon leaving the venue, optimistic somehow.

This was a treat for more than just the ears, but you can check out a track here.

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¹ Including fine sets from The Bitters and now-already-defunct local shoegazers Heaven, as well as Austin spazz-punks Mutating Meltdown, the band that I was actually sorta there to see.

² An honourable mention should be made here to this concert's sequel, Bite Your Tongue 2, held in November at circus training school Centre of Gravity, which was also an excellent time. Especially memorable was Corpusse's maximally-committed electro-metal. Note to the folks at Bite Yr Tongue: more, please.

³ Gentleman Reg's live work as a whole throughout the year merits him a special citation on this list as well — I can't pick one set, but his many local shows throughout the year, with his band building up steam from month to month, were a definite highlight.

Recording: The Vic Chesnutt Band

Artist: The Vic Chesnutt Band

Song: Chinaberry Tree

Recorded at Lee's Palace, November 7, 2009.

The Vic Chesnutt Band - Chinaberry Tree

My notes for this set can be found here.

Gig: The Vic Chesnutt Band

The Vic Chesnutt Band (Clare & The Reasons)

Lee's Palace. Saturday, November 7, 2009.

Despite a fairly longstanding (if somewhat wayward) appreciation of Vic Chesnutt, I had never actually seen him playing live.¹ I had even missed him touring 2007's Everything I Say, his first collaboration with the Constellation Records crew — including members of the powerful Silver Mt. Zion & Tra-La-La Band — an album whose sweep had impressed me. So when I saw that he was coming through town with that crew (and guitar hero Guy Picciotto as well) I was sure not to miss it.

So, after making my way up from College St. and my earlier gig, found myself in good time at a still-fairly quiet Lee's Palace. As is frequently the case, the seats around the floor were filled with early arrivals, but there weren't too many folks standing around as the openers took the stage.

Making for something of a contrast with the headliner was the bright folk-pop of Clare & the Reasons. The four-piece, under the leadership and silky voice of Clare Muldaur, was lined up standing across the front of the stage, microphones decorated with small trees. The band shifted instruments frequently and with great skill, often switching between two or three during the course of a song. Wearing hand-crafted arrows on their clothing (in celebration of new album Arrow) the band played intricately arranged tunes — it's rather telling that her previosu album'd contained appearances by Sufjan Stevens and Van Dyke Parks. Especially in tracks like the quiet loveliness of "Wake Up (You Sleepy Head)" they brought to mind a more straight-up version of our own beloved Snowblink.

Despite getting a little goofy on the last night of their tour — especially Olivier Manchon, who started the evening insisting that all stage banter be presented in both English and French, and would later veer off into some riffing on Top Gun — the music was pretty and inordinately well-crafted. For all that, though, while I enjoyed the songs and their presentation, I was sort of left with a feeling of, "Well, it's all nice, but..." — which mostly indicates that this isn't the sort of thing I'm likely to rush home to listen to. But nothing to complain about when hearing it presented live so compellingly, and even less so when the band isn't fighting against crowd chatter.

Listen to a track from this set here.

By this time, there was a good-sized crowd on hand, but it was a relaxed, older crowd, comfortable to sit if possible, or hang back otherwise, leaving the floor in front of the stage relatively open and with plenty elbow room for us down front. But sitting down and hanging back certainly don't indicate a lack of intensity, as the band would go on to show. They took the stage eight deep behind Vic Chesnutt, with double bass, violin, keybs and no less than four guitarists — all able to play with great restraint and a powerful feel for dynamics. Even if that seems like a lot of players, there was never any more parts than any given song required — as necessary, instruments would be put down, and players would leave the stage, always leaving the right amount of noise swirling around the cracked voice and guitar up front.

A singular songwriter with a talent for spotting small, evocative details, Chesnutt fits well as a contemporary inheritor of the Southern Gothic tradition. On this night, he opened playing solo, reaching back to '93's Drunk for "Supernatural" — a song that shows his gifts for grounding the fantastical ("out of body experience / I flew around the little room once / on intravenous Demerol / it weren't supernatural") before the band joined in on "Everything I Say" from North Star Deserter — the night's first epic, clocking in at over ten minutes. Suddenly, all of the virtues of this collaboration were in sharp focus, where even the thinnest of melodic frames could be woven into a menacing thrum, surging in several waves of swelling orchestral noise. Then back again to West of Rome for "Sponge", this one getting the full-on widescreen arrangement before arriving at the new album, starting with "Concord Country Jubilee", perhaps the most optimistic track. Though some artists might tend to build up to that, Chesnutt is fine with starting with optimism and getting increasingly harrowing as the night goes on. Continuing with the new material, "Chinaberry Tree" and "Chain" were particularly fantastic, leading up to "You Are Never Alone", another epic, featuring Vic's self-aware meta-commentary in the song's middle ("okay, now how am I going to get out of this solo? There might be an amazing segueway... any second now... nope — I'm going to have to punt, Canadian football-style.")

In fact, Chesnutt — in a rumpled old suit and grey toque, his guitar slung over his shoulder by a tattered length of twine — exhibited an amusing stage presence throughout the night, whether struggling to open a water bottle or pointing out how palace, where he comes from, evidently has a different meaning than hereabouts. The ninety-minute main set ended with "Flirted with You All My Life", a rebuff to Death's unchivalrous advances, presented with jaunty tapped hi-hat rhythm and e-bow grandeur. Chesnutt stayed on for a solo run through "Where Were You" before the band rejoined him to close things out with "Warm". Generally an excellent show throughout, with the idiosyncratic songwriting complemented by a fine balance between measured textures and justified bombast.

Listen to a track from this set here.

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¹ Although, in point of fact, this wasn't the first time I had a ticket to see him. True story. Back a lifetime ago, on a Saturday night in April '99, I was as eager as hell to see Wilco for the first time. Touring a newly-released Summerteeth, they were arguably at the peak of their powers, and were almost certainly my fave band just then. And, as an added bonus, the opener was Vic Chesnutt, getting his quick moment of major-label exposure. I was going to the show with an acquaintance of mine, whom I happened to have a large, undisclosed crush on. She'd invited me over to her place for a couple beers before the show, so I went over and hung out a spell, downing a few Mooseheads. Under the circumstances, I was having a groovy time, and though I was eager to get to the show, I was also fine with prolonging the deliciously angsty and slightly tipsy moment. Eventually, we got on the streetcar and headed down to the show — which was at the Guvernment, of all places — and I figured I'd probably missed the opener by now, but such is the price of a cool time. When we eventually got there, we were surprised to see a crush of people streaming out of the venue. Stopping someone to inquire, we were told that Wilco had just finished — we had managed to miss the entire gig. Disappointing at the time, but looking back after I realize that I ended up seeing several Wilco shows, but never another afternoon with my friend, who I fell out of touch with, and never pressed anything.

If this relates at all to the show at hand, it might be inasmuch as going in, I was vaguely hopeful that Chesnutt might play "Kick My Ass", which'd probably make me think bemusedly of 1999. But he didn't.