Brass, black and white . . . oh, and a theramin fight.
I kept my expectations low going into the David Byrne & St. Vincent concert on Sept. 30th at the Strathmore in Rockville. I like St. Vincent (aka Annie Clark) a lot and I LOVE David Byrne - they're some of the most charming and challenging popular musicians touring today. But I wondered if their shared love of the cerebral and the abstract would result in an alienating experience. Would their different wavelengths of near-twee be harmonic or dissonant? Would their attraction to the grotesque be sublimated to their capacity for musical joy, or would it be a force multiplier?
Listening to "Love This Giant," the collaboration that spawned this tour, only partially answered these questions. The album is not my favorite Byrne collaboration: that status goes to his most recent work with Brian Eno, "Everything That Happens Will Happen Today." And his recent collaboration with Fatboy Slim, "Here Lies Love," a strangely upbeat concept album about Imelda Marcos (of all things), is arguably more lyrically consistent. But "Giant" is consistent in artistic vision, sonically interesting, and rhythmically enjoyable. Unifying the noise-texture of St. Vincent and the rhythmic abstraction of Byrne, a well-used horn section keeps most tracks accessible and provides some musical narrative.
The same accessibility and narrative grounding came out in their live show. Walking into the auditorium, I was excited to find the unoccupied stage mottled with small spotlights, each illuminating a shiny brass instrument. Byrne and Clark took the stage with a 10-piece band, including trumpets, trombones, saxes, a french horn and a sousaphone. Dressed in black, the band lent visual as well as sonic impact: marching choreography kept them moving about the stage, sometimes snaking along in a slow parade, sometimes circling each other, sometimes pulling Byrne or Clark into their midst. At one point, everyone on stage lay down and played an entire song supine - no small feat for the sousaphone player.
Byrne and Clark themselves were fun and on their game, though they kept the banter to a minimum. Byrne kept his wardrobe simple with black pants and shirt, white suspenders and saddle shoes - all the better to amble about the stage and practice his abstract hand gestures. At age 60, his formerly self-conscious jerky dance moves are starting to soften into endearingly authentic old-man dancing. Clark wore a short iridescent dress, hair radiating out in every direction, bare legs ending in some formidable cage heels. Her primary dance was an exaggerated baby-doll tottering on said heels, which looked less creepy than it may sound. She jumped in on some of the hand gestures too.
The musical differences between Byrne & Clark are still fairly stark. As on the album, it was easy to distinguish the songs that Clark had spearheaded from the songs that were primarily Byrne's babies. She tends toward the ambient, and her songs meander more sonically and lyrically. He looks more to the bottom line: first person narrative, bass, and drums. In the Strathmore, their distinctions were made even more obvious by the differences in volume. Clark's songs swallowed the space, making me wish for earplugs despite sitting literally against the auditorium's back wall. Then, too, they both played a number of songs from individual projects - strains of "I don't wanna be a cheerleader no more" blasted at max volume still echo in my head, as do fond memories of dancing to "Burning Down the House."
Happily, Byrne & Clarke's individual visions gelled well enough in concert to provide a thoroughly cohesive experience. Cerebral and abstract, yes, but joyous and rhythmic too. And deliciously dorky! There was an actual theramin fight, and one song was dedicated to the Higgs Boson particle. You only have to have a very cursory knowlege of both artists' careers to know that such details are far from gimmicks. And you have to have even less to find the whole experience pretty darn enjoyable.
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