Ben Kweller + Watson Twins + Jones Street Station - TLA (Philadelphia, PA; Feb. 27, 2009)

I step into the TLA thinking I was early. Music plays from beyond the second set of doors, but I’m focused on the staff member groping over my pockets and patting me carefully down, while avoiding eye contact with me. I want to say, “Relax, man. I don’t think you’re getting kicks out of this,” but I just look away. The Theater of the Living Arts is a bit of a canker on South Street, always bleeding fuzzy teenagers out onto the street, but the venue occasionally finds redemption in the musicians it hosts beyond the two sets of doors, the sour event staff, and the feely security guy. Friday, Jones Street Station, The Watson Twins, and Ben Kweller redeemed the scab of South Street.

Past those red doors, I prepped to confront a mulling crowd, but Jones Street Station had started about 20 minutes early. What shit luck, but it made for a pleasantly disorienting first impression — Danny Erker elbow deep in a frantic mandolin solo, his forearm taught under the tremolo strain. Once the bar ended, John Hull filled in the space immediately with harmonica tones, heavy and wheezing through the air like a slow freight train. Sam Rockwell’s brushes thumped and scratched alternately on cymbals and skins while Jonathan Benedict textured the blues rock mix with sad Rhodes piano and what looked to be a Moog, but who really knows; the keys caulked up the seams and only occasionally rang out to the forefront mostly on the Rhodes. Walt Wells, dressed like Paul from the cover of Abbey Road (con shoes), manned the area next to Rockwell’s drums, taking small strolls along the frets of the 5-string. 

Though they claim Brooklyn as headquarters, my first impression was Tennessee or Alabama, hanging their hats on the hitching post instead of the coat rack. Their appeal, despite any degree of city-fication, lies in the deep roots of southern rock and roll, blues, and blue grass. I wouldn’t expect the Stars and Bars, but Skynyrd playing on the iPod wouldn’t surprise me. (What may surprise them, however, is the gay bar in Sioux City, Iowa, by the same moniker, claiming to have Sioux City’s most fabulous queens, huge dance floors, and smoking throughout, though no apparent drink specials.)

Their playing all blended wonderfully, like rows of wheat passing outside a car window. Hull’s harmonica picks up right where Erker’s vocals leave off, and the bass catches the song when everyone else drops off. The Station does not waste any time, and if anything, they overstuff their songs, trading phrases from guitar to Rhodes to bass to harmonica, which was a bit overpowering at times.

It took me a few minutes, but I realized that all five of them sing: and wonderfully. They can pass vocals around the stage like a joint. They can back each other up in two and three part harmonies, and Friday night every single one of them was on. I can’t remember the last time I saw every busy musician on stage singing well. 

Some songs hopped like creek-crawling ditties while others drifted through Pink Floyd-like progressions like “Desdemona,” resolving on introspective notes and providing a nice contrast to the knee slapping of “Flyover State.” But despite the World War II bandolier Hull kept loaded with harmonicas, and despite what was probably the most tasteful drum solo in the last 30 years, the crowd shuffled about anxiously in twos and threes and talked over three part harmonies. 

It was not until the set’s closer that the crowd shut up and payed attention. Erker unplugged his acoustic, and the band stood in a row at the front of the stage, looking like a sweating and hip, fashionably mismatched barbershop quintet. Vocals alternated on “Tall Buildings,” moving from single voices to huge, room-filling harmonies about working life in NYC. At this point I could feel when the harmonica will enter, and it did, and it was satisfying. A crowd of some hundred and fifty people, with the exception of a few cackling Kweller fans at the bar, shut their mouths to take in something touching, sharp, and unique. The Station thanked the crowd mic-less, and finally, the crowd responded with due enthusiasm. 

Known primarily from their work with Jenny Lewis, The Watson Twins occupied the TLA’s large stage next. The pair entered with guitar and shaker after their backup band had riffed on a slinky spy groove for a few minutes. For the most part, there is little to say about the twin’s performance. Not that I found this particularly surprising, but the voices sounded the same, and the effect is one vocalist backing herself up. It seemed like the band did most of the legwork, while one or the other Watson would lightly brush guitar strings. 

But, this is not to say that their music and voices were not pretty, more that the arrangements were a little predictable and overdone, heavy on the piano in that Adult Contemporary sort of way. This may not bother some people, but the songs that play at the midpoint of romance/comedies don’t strike me as interesting live (though I believe the Watson’s soundtrack potential is yet untapped). Their sound may have been too mature for the crowd, myself included. The majority of the audience was teenagers who mostly faced away from the stage, huddled in small circles drinking Coca-Cola from wax paper cups and playing with cell phones or cameras or both. The personal addresses to the crowd and ineffective calls to dance fell on the ears of a crowd who wanted shouting, who wanted to be addressed as a crowd, not as intimates. 

One song the pair pitched stronger than the others, saying it was on a new album they had for sale at the merch table (a location they referenced between nearly every song). After much ado and flirting, they broke into a cover of “Just Like Heaven.” Only a few older faces showed the slightest signs of knowing The Cure. The song developed into a lazy rendition with overly anticipated changes, but harmonica in the middle toned the song down interestingly. I think it sits too much at the same table as Fiona Apple’s ”Across the Universe,” which Fiona did ten years ago. But in an era when even covers can be too much in kind to be originally interpreted, who the hell knows. The bottom line here is that covers should bring something new to the song, and all the Watson’s brought to “Just Like Heaven” was a harmonica.

The crowd began to clap over their outros and twitch at the ankles and knees and necks. I couldn’t blame them; I’d been a bit bored three songs in. They had the of-agers cordoned off from the minors, so most of us had already been sitting, but once the twins left the stage, the teenage crowd sat down in big clusters, some against the walls and supports. When were young knees ever so weak? Probably when Ben Kweller was about to take the evening over. 

After what seemed like absurdist-theater microphone and level checks and double checks and sound board huddles and final checks, Kweller dashed onto the stage, long hair flowing. Though he doesn’t appear to have aged, he does appear to have sobered from the last time I saw him, which was at Stubb’s years before — I was genuinely afraid he’d fall off the stage. Sobriety aside, what is undeniable is that Ben Kweller commands an audience. He is as comfortable on the wooden strips of a stage as he is (presumably) in desert scrub and dusty West Texas parking lots.

He opened up with a track from Sha Sha, sounding fresh with the pedal steel thrown in. During “Run,” couples two-stepped in the wings or slow danced at the crowd’s outer edges. The front few rows shook fists and sang along, and by “Family Tree,” I understood completely that his voice would sound as dead-on all night just like if it were spinning off an LP. 

Kweller had probably anticipated the Tweedy stylings and general slide toward Wilco on “Family Tree,” so piggybacking “Things I Like to Do” was a good set list decision. This song housed the proper introduction to the pedal steel player, Kitt Kitterman, who made that weird guitar babble in between verses like a toddler — a sure hand and a fine addition to the line up: Kit Kitterman playing the screaming baby.

A simple fact became clear to me when my attention wandered away from the stage and onto the huge speakers dangling above it. Kweller’s new album is not good; it is overproduced, under thought, and inconsistent. It sounds surgically clean in some awful way, but it contains the scaffolding from which he constructs an incredible performance. Played live, his new songs are real and rough and emotive. The new country aesthetic somehow makes sense when you can look at it and hear it together. 

I mistook the next song for “Ashes of American Flags,” thinking to myself, shit, it’s too soon to cover that, Ben, but it became “Old Hat.” If the songs were compared, Kweller is personal, intimate, and genuine in all the places where Tweedy employs vagueness and abstraction. At the end of the song, there’s a sunburst of chorus, powerful vocals hitting the sweet spot along the larynx, which is exactly the kind of thing I expect from Kweller, and he may have delivered it best here. During “Gypsy Rose,” the back-up moved out of the lights to leave Ben Kweller standing like an island in red light singing alone. Again his voice maxed at that sweet spot, and I wondered if he could keep doing that, reaching what sounded like the extremities of its use, but he toned the throttle back to a falsetto, dwindling the song out like an old jazz standard. Control exhibited at its finest.

Kitterman, along with bassist Chris Morrissey and drummer Mark Stepro, actually left the stage, and Kweller moved to the piano, where he played the next three or four songs. Notable moment from piano songs: During “Thirteen,” he dropped to just the bass hand pumping chords and picked up a harmonica, putting most of his focus into bending notes through harmonica wails. 

Until the rest of the band came back, it was easy to forget they were on stage with Kweller; he demands so much attention that the band nearly disappears. With their flawless musicianship, there’s so little to attend to because everything just smooths over you. And Kweller keeps asking for more vocals in the monitors, more vocals, more. 

A pack of teenagers in the center of the crowd had the gall to light a joint, and from a distance, I applauded them. It takes real grit to pull off that sort of thing in a closed building, violating both national drug laws and city smoking ordinances. The resolve of youth! The fog machine produced the only similar substance, and suddenly Kweller and Morrissey are having some strange ad-lib about Bob Barker, arguing over whether or not he’s dead. Is he dead? I’m not sure anymore. 

The Watson Twins joined Kweller on stage to perform “Hurtin’ You,” which was by far the most generic song of the set. I believe it lacked scope and imagination, a tragedy to add the Watson’s voices to such a bland song, but Kweller launched back into the standup comedy act afterward, joking and flirting, talking about the sweepstakes winners who won the privilege of buying him dinner — generally demonstrating that control over the crowd and replacing those mediocre moments with the crowd’s laughter. The jokes broke to “Lizzy,” a disorienting and heart wrenching transition, then “The Rules,” equally strange and devoid of the love and hopefulness. Then to lighten things, he made a crack about the Liberty Bell: “It’s cool for a two-year old to see such a big fucking bell.”

They ended with “Falling,” assuring the crowd they’d be back for an encore, but I couldn’t do it. He’d already played for nearly two hours, and I was sure he’d play for at least another twenty minutes, and my attention had spanned too much. I left in the lull while the band was off stage and the crowd muttered and simmered. I assume the encore had at least these three songs: “Wasted and Ready,” “Fight,” and something from his S/T, but I couldn’t bare to hear “On Her Own,” a truly terrible composition, and I couldn’t bare to fight through the mass of sweating, hormonal teenagers or through the bar-crowd of snarling twenty-somethings rueing the days that Kweller was as drunk onstage as they were off. I didn’t need the evening soured by these vibrations, so I skipped the songs the radio killed and skitted back out past those unhappy TLA employees, packed to the rafters with enough southern sounds to make me not miss Texas for a few weeks.

DOWNLOAD: Ben Kweller - Ballad of Wendy Baker (MP3) or Follow us for more Ben Kweller MP3s (Twitter)

Ben Kweller review to your liking? You'll sweat:

Weezer + Angels and Airwaves - Tsongas Arena (Lowell, MA; Sept. 23, 2008)

Ryan Adam & The Cardinals - “Cardinology” - Buy It

Adam Green - Town Hall (New York, NY; May 10, 2008)

Ween - Orpheum Theatre (Boston, MA; Nov. 28, 2007)

0 comments thus far ...

Concerts We Recommend

melophobe sponsors

Connect To melophobe

1. melophobe
2. concert reviews
3. fifty-word reviews
4. articles
5. links
6.