Beach House + Papercuts + Nat Baldwin - Middle East Upstairs (Cambridge, MA; Mar. 31, 2008)

I’m more than a little tempted to write this entire review in the passive voice. After all, the audience was treated to music that was played by three groups who were very laid back, and, in the kindest sense of the words, were sleep-inducing.

But that’s just poor writing. So, thematically, we’ll talk in gerunds, even if they do seem overly active for this particular show at the Middle East Up on that rainy Monday just a few nights ago. Gerunds, for those who slept through their seventh-grade grammar lessons in, well, grammar school, are verbs to whose endings are fused “ing,” thus producing a noun. Like “writing.” Or “listening.” Or “blathering, hemming, hawing, and pontificating.”

As discussed with and agreed to by others at melophobe, Beach House’s performance made me desperate for a hammock, a mint julep, and the gloaming (not a gerund, though it is a noun). We expected some kind of gentle, wash-over-me performance, given the consistency of such a gentle, bathing sound on Beach House’s excellent album Devotion, released earlier in 2008. Because of this, the gerund you should focus on while considering the review is, depending on your comfort with the words, either “floating” or “swimming.” But swimming is too active, and I only mean “floating” if it’s in air, or in bath-tub-warm water. With a mint julep in hand.

Beach House’s performance was one long, slow arrow-pull. By the end of the nearly hour-long set, I realized that I was holding great tension in my back and neck, and I’m pretty sure that the cause was the constant piling of angst born out of a performance utterly without arrivals. Songs began and ended, and I guess that they resolved, music-theoretically. But I never felt a release, a completion of any thought or experience related by Alex Scally’s guitar, or Victoria Legrand’s long, lugubrious, gorpy vocal lines (nor, for that fact, did The Papercuts’ Jason Robert Quever’s half-hearted ramblings on the after-thought of a live percussion line help to drive the music in any kind of direction but downer).

There were certainly satisfying experiences to be had in Beach House’s set, though. Legrand has magic fingers, and an ability to split her musicality between the long lines of her vocals and the darting, never-resting flutter on her keys. Whether playing running arpeggios, repeated chordal figures, or tremolo-melodic tickles, Legrand’s hands were an absolute trip to behold. I’m not saying that I’d support such a thing, but if one were to wake, bake, and then go watch Legrand play, I’d count it as a peak experience.

Scally’s guitar work was similarly entrancing, though in a far more subdued fashion. Producing more melodic, line-containing sounds than Legrand’s pianistic underpinnings, Scally whibbled and wavered his slide-penetrated finger all over his guitar’s business, wagging his finger at his dials far less menacingly than your average school librarian.

Scally’s voice provides beautiful, calming backup vocals that perfectly enmesh with Legrand’s. This was particularly cool, as Legrand’s voice has a touch more intensity in this live setting, a skosh more edge, and a drop more bite. So to have her hopped-up vocals tinged with Scally’s low-tone warbling was a lovely second contrast to match Legrand’s voice vs. fingers.

And this might just be a former theatre geek talking, but I was particularly pleased to see Beach House employ scatter boxes for lighting. You’ve probably seen them: plywood boxes within which lies a gel-changing light shining horizontally on a motor-driven disco ball. It’s a nice effect, and though they really only work when there’s very low ambient light, I would have preferred more light from above, at least for Josh’s sake on the camera.

Opening for Beach House was San Francisco-based Papercuts, consisting of singer/guitarist Jason Robert Quever, enormous bassist Trevor Montgomery, drummer Kelly Nyland, and Beach House’s Scally on keys. Now, I’ve driven many, many miles: Boston to Portland, OR to LA, up and down that damn-gorgeous coast to the redwoods, to a little ranch town in NorCal, to Seattle, and all the way back East. There’s that soul-killing, lonesome day-long slog through Nebraska. And I can think of no better compliment than to call something “driving” music. Papercuts is coming with me next time I drive somewhere for more than two hours. They are the teeniest, tiniest, thinnest bit more rock’n’roll than Beach House, but that made all the difference. The music is at a pleasant, andante/walking tempo, and it’s upbeat but not naive-seeming. Though, to be honest, I was too busy enjoying watching Quever rock back and forth, happy but still seemingly uncomfortable in before the audience, to listen to the lyrics. So, as far as I know, they could well have been singing about drowning kittens. But that seems unlikely. Catch them on the tour if you can. And check them out.

And though I normally enjoy classical string instruments used in non-traditional fashions, opener Nat Baldwin’s double-bassing was a bridge (ahem) too far. The actual songs played (give a listen; I especially like “Lake Erie") were lovely, inventive, even magical at times, the constant sawing of Baldwin’s bow—artfully, if intentionally, be-tassled with broken horse hair—contrasted perfectly with Baldwin’s Jeff Buckley-ish (though not -esque) crooning. But, let me say THIS to those reviewers who are spraying their shorts over the little interludes and postludes that happen in live performance, where the beat and key disappear, the sounds get weird and outer-spacey, and the fingers start tripping and vomiting all over the fingerboard: sul pont isn’t interesting after the first THREE FUCKING MINUTES. It’s not interesting, it’s not clever, and it’s not inventive. And thus, though I was going to append Baldwin with a pleasant “playing” or an innocent “experimenting,” and since he seemed too genuine to be playing some kind of “I-wonder-how-long-I-can-putrefy-the-air-with-this-nonsense-before-they-throw-fruit” game, he gets slapped across the face, or at least on the forehead, with a ponderous, pendulous “masturbating.” I’m so happy I got to see that. It was just like being on the subway. 

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