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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/1MUvcfJ:
So I saw the Mountain Goats last night, in Buffalo, at the venue called I think Babeville, but which my friends and I have always jokingly called “The Church Of Ani The Redeemer”– it’s a historic Methodist church downtown in Buffalo that had fallen on hard times and was at risk of being demolished, and she bought it and fixed it and made a performance venue out of it like, a decade or more ago (I think it was still in progress when I moved here in ‘05 but I could be wrong; at least, people were still sort of skeptical about it then, but now it’s really well-established as A Cool Thing regardless of how else you feel about Ms. DiFranco). It is a gorgeous space, and I had previously attended a really beautiful wedding there. There’s a gallery, and other stuff, but the main performance space is exactly like you’d expect, the nave of a church with a stage at one end and a U-shaped balcony all throughout.
TMG’s current tour is not in support of a particular album, it’s a sort of freeform, intimate little show, impromptu by nature and wide-ranging. It was born during the tour to support Beat The Champ, where they played a little mini-set in a basement before a bigger show, and Darnielle just enjoyed the energy of it so much that they went ahead and just did a whole tour like that. And it was very intimate; I don’t know the capacity of the space, but it was filled with chairs and people were sitting for almost the whole show. My friends and I arrived well into the set, due to numerous things, so I’m not sure how long they’d been playing. They did a single Ani DiFranco cover as a tribute to the space, and he explained afterward that the band was very generous to have performed it, because he’d said during soundcheck “oh we should do this!” and none of them had ever heard the song before. “But you had just enough pathos/ To keep me hypnotized.”
Not too long after we arrived, they did Werewolf Gimmick and, like, shredded the room– it’s an intense song. (”Nameless bodies in unremembered rooms/ Run howling through the carnage when the wolfbane blooms”) But then for a while the other band members went off stage, and Darnielle played alone, a series of quiet and reflective songs, very introspective and beautiful.
I was struck by how incredibly faithful to the recorded versions most of the songs were. Darnielle has one of those voices that’s just, well, it’s piercing and unpolished, and I had sort of, I don’t know, expected he’d sound different in person, but he doesn’t. Which isn’t surprising, given the lack of, say, sound engineering on a lot of the early stuff and demos he puts out and so on; clearly, he hasn’t done anything in post to his voice when the whole song is screeching with tape hiss. So I don’t know why I was surprised, but it was really astonishing how clear and sure his performance was, and it shouldn’t have astonished me at all. Except, perhaps, that such a thing as his performance is astonishing by its nature. I don’t know how to describe it.
It was mostly a lowkey-ish set, but at the end after a standing ovation they came back out and played basically The Sunset Tree, to my delight, as that’s the album I first loved. The audience never sat down again, and during No Children Darnielle came down off the stage and climbed over the vacated chairs to howl along with the audience, every one of whom knew every word. (Not me, I had no idea that was The Song Everyone Knows, because I only know TMG from sitting alone listening to their albums!) He gave a beautiful intro to No Children, comparing the couple in it to the Grateful Dead bootleg tape of 7/9/77(?) from Buffalo compared to its better-recorded but possibly-inferior sister recording of 7/8/77 from Cornell– it was a really great monologue and well-delivered.
The audience stood and bellowed along with all of the rest of the songs, including a surprising amount of coherent harmonizing on “This Year”. I may have been moved to tears somewhere in here; “Up The Wolves” was really spectacular, especially when he paused in the middle and said “I can’t remember the next verse” and people shouted and he was like “that’s the last verse, I need the middle one,” and finally someone got it and he pointed at them in what was a much more triumphant moment than it possibly should have been. “We’re gonna commandeer the local airwaves!”
They gave a final encore and closed out with Spent Gladiator #2 and then the lights came up. My friend wanted to steal a setlist but was surprised to discover that there, in fact, was none. I wasn’t surprised.
I haven’t attended a live music show in longer than I can remember, so I thought I should probably commemorate it with a review. Normally I’d bring a camera to something like that but I figured it wouldn’t be allowed. And there was a ban on flash photography, but I don’t use a flash, I have a really good low-light rig I put together for sports and I’ve done some concerts with it. So, I could’ve gotten some great shots, but I wouldn’t have enjoyed the concert as much, so instead you get this text-only review.
So I saw the Mountain Goats last night, in Buffalo, at the venue called I think Babeville, but which my friends and I have always jokingly called “The Church Of Ani The Redeemer”– it’s a historic Methodist church downtown in Buffalo that had fallen on hard times and was at risk of being demolished, and she bought it and fixed it and made a performance venue out of it like, a decade or more ago (I think it was still in progress when I moved here in ‘05 but I could be wrong; at least, people were still sort of skeptical about it then, but now it’s really well-established as A Cool Thing regardless of how else you feel about Ms. DiFranco). It is a gorgeous space, and I had previously attended a really beautiful wedding there. There’s a gallery, and other stuff, but the main performance space is exactly like you’d expect, the nave of a church with a stage at one end and a U-shaped balcony all throughout.
TMG’s current tour is not in support of a particular album, it’s a sort of freeform, intimate little show, impromptu by nature and wide-ranging. It was born during the tour to support Beat The Champ, where they played a little mini-set in a basement before a bigger show, and Darnielle just enjoyed the energy of it so much that they went ahead and just did a whole tour like that. And it was very intimate; I don’t know the capacity of the space, but it was filled with chairs and people were sitting for almost the whole show. My friends and I arrived well into the set, due to numerous things, so I’m not sure how long they’d been playing. They did a single Ani DiFranco cover as a tribute to the space, and he explained afterward that the band was very generous to have performed it, because he’d said during soundcheck “oh we should do this!” and none of them had ever heard the song before. “But you had just enough pathos/ To keep me hypnotized.”
Not too long after we arrived, they did Werewolf Gimmick and, like, shredded the room– it’s an intense song. (”Nameless bodies in unremembered rooms/ Run howling through the carnage when the wolfbane blooms”) But then for a while the other band members went off stage, and Darnielle played alone, a series of quiet and reflective songs, very introspective and beautiful.
I was struck by how incredibly faithful to the recorded versions most of the songs were. Darnielle has one of those voices that’s just, well, it’s piercing and unpolished, and I had sort of, I don’t know, expected he’d sound different in person, but he doesn’t. Which isn’t surprising, given the lack of, say, sound engineering on a lot of the early stuff and demos he puts out and so on; clearly, he hasn’t done anything in post to his voice when the whole song is screeching with tape hiss. So I don’t know why I was surprised, but it was really astonishing how clear and sure his performance was, and it shouldn’t have astonished me at all. Except, perhaps, that such a thing as his performance is astonishing by its nature. I don’t know how to describe it.
It was mostly a lowkey-ish set, but at the end after a standing ovation they came back out and played basically The Sunset Tree, to my delight, as that’s the album I first loved. The audience never sat down again, and during No Children Darnielle came down off the stage and climbed over the vacated chairs to howl along with the audience, every one of whom knew every word. (Not me, I had no idea that was The Song Everyone Knows, because I only know TMG from sitting alone listening to their albums!) He gave a beautiful intro to No Children, comparing the couple in it to the Grateful Dead bootleg tape of 7/9/77(?) from Buffalo compared to its better-recorded but possibly-inferior sister recording of 7/8/77 from Cornell– it was a really great monologue and well-delivered.
The audience stood and bellowed along with all of the rest of the songs, including a surprising amount of coherent harmonizing on “This Year”. I may have been moved to tears somewhere in here; “Up The Wolves” was really spectacular, especially when he paused in the middle and said “I can’t remember the next verse” and people shouted and he was like “that’s the last verse, I need the middle one,” and finally someone got it and he pointed at them in what was a much more triumphant moment than it possibly should have been. “We’re gonna commandeer the local airwaves!”
They gave a final encore and closed out with Spent Gladiator #2 and then the lights came up. My friend wanted to steal a setlist but was surprised to discover that there, in fact, was none. I wasn’t surprised.
I haven’t attended a live music show in longer than I can remember, so I thought I should probably commemorate it with a review. Normally I’d bring a camera to something like that but I figured it wouldn’t be allowed. And there was a ban on flash photography, but I don’t use a flash, I have a really good low-light rig I put together for sports and I’ve done some concerts with it. So, I could’ve gotten some great shots, but I wouldn’t have enjoyed the concert as much, so instead you get this text-only review.
