Sunday, February 27, 2011

Dancing In The Dark

Pretty great show tonight at Backspace.  Forbidden Friends opened up, their first show ever.  It's sorta a Thermals side project, if they all just stood up one day and moved one instrument to their left (except that Maggie Vail sits in, too).  Not surprisingly, very much like The Thermals, but slightly lower key, sometimes a little poppier, and with a little less vitriol.  I liked it.  They played four songs.  

Ted Leo (solo, no Pharmacists) headlined this show.  One of the Lovely Boyfriend's favorite bands.  I started thinking a lot about how I integrate bands into my favorites, and why I have such a hard time embracing other people's favorite bands.  Because this is clearly something I should love.  Typically, when I come at a band on my own, I hear a song or two.  And I like that song or two, sometimes right away and sometimes after many listenings.  Then I buy a CD.  I listen to it in order.  It has a flow, and one song cues the next in my mind.  Then I buy another CD, and I integrate that into my mind and my music life.  Then another.  Sometimes this is at the pace of the artist's creation, like Menomena.  I learn their music catalog in their order, at their pace, starting at the beginning.  Sometimes it's in my own order, at my pace.  I'll reluctantly admit that I came to Spoon really late to the party.  I knew a bunch of songs, but didn't realize what they were, and then one day, I just took a leap and bought...oh, where did I start?  Gimme Fiction, or Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, whichever came first.  And then the other one.  Then another, and another, until I had integrated it all.  When someone else loves a band, the music comes at me all disorganized.  It's like what I hate about poorly-done college radio. You don't know what it is, you don't hear it very often, and you may never hear it again.

All this is a long, meandering way of saying that I think I really like Ted Leo.  As often as the punk moniker gets attached to him (as often by himself as by anyone else, from what I can tell), my impression all along was that it wasn't the right primary descriptor.  The solo show made it confirmed for me this impression I've never been able to fully articulate...he's a singer-songwriter at heart (but not in a bad way!), but with a higher average BPM. Charming lyrics of moderate-to-high complexity, filled with clever turns of phrase, mostly major key...heck, my mom would have loved this stuff.  The closest punk comparison is mid- to late Replacements without so many ballads (no Here Comes A Regular), but he's way smarter.  He fires off lyrics like Elvis Costello, so many words fit into a line that there's no reason to put the rhyming words on the downbeats.  Oh...and he was really nice about bumping into me and almost, but not quite, making me spill my beer.  A couple of fun covers, The Waterboys' Fisherman's Blues and Springsteen's Dancing In The Dark, and references all over the place.  I heard The Jam, Neil Young, the aforementioned Elvis Costello, and things probably too obscure to call a reference but made sense in my head, like John Vanderslice.  It was a pretty good show.