When I arrived and saw the “empty” stage, I didn’t know where the members of Shearwater would fit, since it was already jam-packed with instruments. But somehow the 5 members squeezed onstage, and throughout their set, no fewer than 15 different instruments were played. Every member played at least three different instruments, with one playing four, and another playing five! Banjo, guitar, drums, bass, bass, bass (upright), shaker, tambourine, keyboard, synthesizer, clarinet, vibraphone, vibraphone, trumpet, and hammered fucking dulcimer. That almost sounds silly, but somehow they pulled it off in such a way that all the instrumentation was there purely in service to the songs and their atmospheres, and never just for the sake of playing a lot of different instruments. But despite all those visual distractions, my focus was still always drawn back to the excellent voice of Jonathan Meiburg. From a gentle soothing falsetto to dynamic bursts of raging screams, he sounded almost exactly like he does on record; he has such a specific and identifiable tone that really anchors their entire sound. I’ll even forgive the fact that he looks like Kenneth from “30 Rock”. They played a nice mix of stuff from ‘Palo Santo’ and presumably the new one. Excellent performance.

I stuck around for Clinic, who I’d never heard of before. A quirky English group playing some kind of post-punk indie pop or something. Their gimmick is to wear surgical masks when performing, and apparently Hawaiian shirts. They didn’t seem like terribly charismatic performers to begin with, so then when you cover their faces, it gets even worse. Some of their songs were pretty good (they played their whole new album to start the set, and I recognized every song after only listening to 30-second clips of them earlier in the day), but something about their melodies just didn’t fit with my melody receptors in the right way. I actually left halfway through the second set, which is rare for me to do, but it was also getting pretty late (it was a 10pm show, after they had already done a 7pm show).

This entry was posted on Monday, May 12th, 2008 at 9:10 am and is filed under concert. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.