Flashes of Panic

I think our best New Year’s Eves have been spent at concerts in Northampton. (I first saw Erin McKeown playing “Blackbirds” at a First Night Northampton show in the Academy of Music, with Dave Hower and Dave Chalfant for the backing band.) So when we took our First Night Boston pins on the Red Line, I figured our best bet was to get off at Park Street and walk over to the Orpheum, where The River (which appears to be different from “The River” in Northampton) was sponsoring local heroes The Gentlemen and Duncan Sheik.

I’d never been to the Orpheum before. It has the same old seats as the Academy and the Somerville Theatre, but quite close together; we saw The Gentlemen’s set from the first row behind the orchestra section so we wouldn’t have our knees jammed into the back of someone else’s seat. The Gentlemen play tight, loud, straight-ahead rock, about what I’d expect of Boston now that I think of it. The FN site compared them to Elvis Costello, but I’d say only on Elvis’s loudest, most raucous moments. With their guitars nearly to their knees, it was more like Elvis channeling the Clash. I was glad that this time I’d remembered to bring earplugs.

Each act was to take turns for two sets each, four total, with each running about 45 minutes plus a 15 minute intermission. During the first intermission, we took the opportunity to hop up to the balcony, where there were opera boxes with empty seats. The view was nice; I took a few cell-phone-camera shots, but the quality is so low they’re not worth posting.

Duncan Sheik is perhaps best known for his 1996 hit “Barely Breathing,” which was so overplayed in the years right after I graduated from college that I gained a strong aversion to it. It seems like Sheik did too; in the last year or so he visited Northampton, opening for someone at the Calvin perhaps, and the review in the Gazette noted that most of the crowd didn’t know who he was, and he did nothing to enlighten them—that is to say, he pretty much pretends that “Barely Breathing” doesn’t exist. Well, not really: on his website, he says,

…the “upbeat” music [a critic] seems to want to hear generally fails to move me in any way. In fact, the further I move away from “likable” pop music, the happier I am with what I’m doing. … I really don’t feel like I’m ever going to be that kind of artist. And if I ever was, it was an accident of bad marketing and my own lack of good judgement.

That made me a bit more open-minded about this set, and it turned out to be pretty good. He has a good band and they work the dynamics pretty well, playing up and down the emotions of the songs.

Sheik has a new CD due in a few weeks, and he played a few songs from it and a few from his last disc. Then he introduced one as, “This is a Radiohead song.” I thought he’d said “radio hit song” and that he was uncharacteristically going to play “Barely Breathing,” but instead it was “Fake Plastic Trees,” which the band did quite well with. Sheik isn’t quite Thom Yorke, though. I was actually thinking that the voice he most reminded me of was Glen Phillips (ex of Toad the Wet Sprocket,) and in fact they could’ve dropped in “Stories I Tell” without jarring the tone at all.

We considered staying for the second round, but in the end we decided that another set of Sheik probably wasn’t worth sitting through another round of The Gentlemen, so we headed home by a roundabout route.