dissent is patriotic :: blog

Joanna Newsom
Admiralspalast, Berlin
Monday 17th May, 2010
Dissent Rating: 10/10

UPDATE: footage of the version of "Peach, Plum, Pear" from last night is here.

It's a shame that Joanna Newsom isn't an olympic athlete on top of being an absolute prophet of a singer, because in the space of the two hours that is the limit of any normal human's on-stage stamina, she can only play a handful of her songs. Luckily, the woman's talent extends to the composition of tight, energetic set lists. Concert dramaturgy.

At the start of the show, only the harp is lit, and as she comes out to the frenetic applause of a thousand Berliners, she simply smiles, waves, sits down, and without breathing a word, launches straight into "'81". The effect is absolutely electric: she is, for all the vastness of her other work, still at her best alone with the harp, and it is impossible not to be pulled in immediately.

The arrangements of the larger pieces: "Good Intentions Paving Company", "In California", are different from the album and perfect for the setting. She has brought a drummer, a guitarist, two violins, and a trombone player (he was quite the highlight of the band). From the selection of songs, some conclusions emerge: first, that Have One On Me is a collection of genuine performance pieces. They are great songs, and a pleasure to hear live. But they do not and cannot compare to her magnum opus, and the fact that she only played one song from Ys, "Monkey and Bear", made the contrast all the more apparent. Ys is an anthology of six epic works, varied and vast in ways that words only do injustice to.

She began the silly encore ritual by announcing a fake last song, but not naming it, and as Ryan Francesconi began to pluck something slow and elegiac on the mandolin, it was not at all clear what the song was going to be. Not, that is, until, slow as a glacier, she began to sing the opening lines of "Peach, Plum, Pear". There is great value, and great satisfaction, in having the courage to maniplulate your own work. The payoff was immense.

And lest there be any doubt that this woman is still capable of moments as fresh, forceful, and chilling as those at the peak of Ys ("And I will recognize / all of the lines in your face / in the face of the daughter of the daughter of my daughter"), watch her come back out after the obligatory sustained applause, again without stopping to frame or excuse, and play "Baby Birch":

Well I wish we could take every path
I could spend a hundred years adoring you
Yes, I wish we could take every path
Because I hated to close the door on you

Only a monster could leave without tears in his eyes.

As predicted, the new album, "High Violet", is excellent.

The National
at Huxleys Neue Welt, Berlin
Dissent Rating: 4/10

Dear Matt Berninger,

You make really good albums. I mean it. Without a lot of variety or originality or even, in many cases, particularly good lyrics ("It's a terrible love and I'm walking with spiders"? An aria from Naxxramas, The Musical?), you manage to make terrific songs out of simple tools. There's a moment in "Apartment Story", for instance, at about 1min 18sec in, where you combine gibberish lyrics and conventional harmony into truly great pop music. The crispness and clarity of the instruments of late-period National, even as the layers build up, is one of the reasons I like your band so much and one of reasons I can forgive the fact that so many of your songs aren't songs, they're underdeveloped first movements of things begging to be much larger. (Where are the remaining 20 minutes of the piece of music that "Fake Empire" begins?)

So when Zalmoxis Michael warned me that you're meant to suck live, I consoled myself with the fact that the show was cheap and the venue was right down the street from me. The New York Times also mentioned in an article that your shows had gotten better since you had gotten into the habit of drinking an entire bottle of wine on stage. That sounds like something I would do, so it gave me hope.

Well, Berninger, your show was not cheap enough (20€) nor close enough (I had to walk all the way down the stairs and around the corner), and you've switched back to water. I can't hold you responsible for your opening band, an unholy amalgam of Battles and Tegan and Sara that would've been laughed off the small stage at Rocketown—not entirely, anyway—and for the fact that they reminded the audience that they were from Brooklyn between every song. I can't hold it against you that the entire audience appeared to be from Brooklyn, too, and that I had to stand next to some half-Screech half-Napoleon midget Américain as he regaled a pair of polite German girls in his high-pitched northeastern honk with the ins and outs of his internship at the United Nations in Geneva. But I can tell you right now that I was not in a charitable mood when you sauntered out, water glass in hand.

You see this big metal tub with wooden handles on the back that I've just rolled in? It's called a wheelbarrow, and I'd like you to see if you can carry a tune in it. Ope, looks like you can't. Alright, we're going to use a crane to lower in this note. It's as big as the broad side of a barn, and I'd like you to hit it. Ope, you whiffed. Matt Berninger, how hard can this be? You only sing five notes on your albums! Surely practice can give what lack of natural-born ability hath taken away?

Alright, let's try something else. How about you just get rid of the totally superfluous horn section? Because Guinness called, and they don't actually do "World's Largest Number of Plaid-Shirt-and-Beard Hipsters On One Stage", so we might as well call off the attempt. They aren't adding anything except, well, melody. And quite frankly, I'd get that man to put down his trombone and start playing pitch pipe, if I were you. If you're going to play "Slow Show", which is a song that well and truly depends on its piano solo, ask your sound man to fiddle with some knobs so we can hear the keyboards. You made your reputation on "All The Wine", and I'll wager you've played it hundreds of times live by now. So you should know not to come in at the wrong time, halfway through a measure, so that the entire song is two beats off-sync until the insistent clapping of the audience finally corrects you. I'm just saying.

If there's a bright spot in all this, it's that you saved "Mr. November" for the encore, by which time you had apparently gone backstage, taken a shot, towelled off, and re-familiarized yourself with the music theory surrounding the concept of "key". And that although I don't have it yet, I can tell by your rough renditions of them that the songs from your new album are going to be terrific. On the album. You know, it's like your live shows, except with a mixer and run through the latest version of Auto-Tune.

I'll continue to wear your t-shirt and listen to your very good albums, Matt Berninger. But I'm taking my next 20€ and going to see Broken Social Scene.



Love,