By 10:30, I'd grown irritable and discouraged. The ballroom, it seems, was milking the audience for drinks by pushing back the bands' starting times.
Opener Oakley Hall didn't help. I wanted to like them; they just wouldn't let me. The band honestly had too many people on stage. For their straightforward brand of alt.country, they had no need for three guitarists; the one who played arpeggios over their basic strumming, as my friend noted, had to go.
he ballroom wasn't quite half filled, nowhere near the stacking of people that occurred at the sold-out Cat Power show, my friend Marje said. 10:30 hit, and I was ready to roll, fight or do anything but sit staring at an empty stage.
Then Calexico took the stage, and from the first piercing wail of mariachi horn, all was forgiven.
They tore into a few tracks from earlier albums that I knew well from a 2003 Toronto bootleg, then launched into "Cruel," the driving yet melancholy opener to their latest long-player. At no point did the intensity let up, even when the group diverged for some of the slower songs.
Equal parts indie rock and Ennio Morricone soundtrack, Calexico pulled off the sound easily live; in fact, it sounded better than on the albums. No, they hurt nothing by mixing the arrangements up a little. The various guitars played by frontman Joey Burns, horns, pedal steel and upright bass mingled well, and never stumbled into each other.
The drive back to Cleveland forced me to miss the encore (arriving home any later than I did would have killed any chance of the nine-hour work day I somehow managed).
But I still had ears ringing from the noisy conclusion of "All Systems Red" and the tremendous, thick Latin beat of "Crystal Frontier." Just come to Columbus next time, Calexico; my body is getting too old for solo trips to Cleveland for a little music, even if it was the Album of My Summer.
No comments:
Post a Comment