Wednesday Concert

After going to see Natalie MacMaster last month, Frank and I became season members to the Whistling Swan Concert Series. This Wednesday we saw Chris Whitley and Jeff Lang in the Marston Theatre.

Suprisingly, the Marston Theatre is in the Loussac Public Library. It's a beautiful, round, some would say "archi-cool" building with nice little touches like mountain ash that extends through two stories of patio. The theatre is on the bottom floor.

Our MC for the night was a exuberant Red Sox fan with a heavy Boston accent. He was very excited about the game and also with being the MC, which I guess is good for a concert. At the same time, this really creepy-looking skinny guy in a white tank top kept fiddling with the instruments on stage -- I thought he was a stagehand at first. That was Chris Whitley, the first act.

Just so everyone knows, I totally realize that appearances are not everything -- Chris Whitley cannot really help being really skinny and a little creepy looking. I'm just observing that it might have been helpful for him to have at least dressed up a bit -- it was 30 degrees outside.

Chris Whitley plays these metal acoustic guitars -- Frank says they were probably vintage. They were very difficult to keep in tune, and Chris had to fiddle with them quite a bit -- sometimes in the middle of a song. But the sounds coming out of them were interesting and nicely paired with his voice. Whitley's played around the world apparently, and kept telling us where the songs were written but not what they meant ("I wrote this song in Belgium" and it was a song about prison?).

Dave Matthews says that he is more passionate about Chris Whitley's music than he is his own, and you can tell that Dave has been influenced greatly by Whitley's vocal stylings. Many of the songs were abstract, and when paired with the vocals, it was difficult to keep track sometimes. I could, though, see that if you pulled Whitley into a studio with a band, you could have a very good and interesting album. I especially liked "Local Girl" and "Assassin Song" -- both were a bit more simplistic than the others, and not as dour (a lot of the songs were kind of depressing).

Jeff Lang is a guy from Australia, and was a little more dressed up. He had three guitars, one was a guitar that you play on your lap. Jeff's songs, also depressing, were a little more straightforward and his mastery of the guitar was just incredible. I thought he did a great job, although sometimes he would go into the "impressive but irrelevant guitar playing zone" where many great guitarists go. He was very fond of completely deconstructing the song into incomprehensible (but impressive) screeches and funny sounds, then going back into the structure of the song. I like that once or twice, but too many times loses effect in my opinion. One of these moments also included a fingerpick being launched into the first row, so the deconstructing thing is also dangerous!

All in all, I really did enjoy the concert, and thought both artists did a good job. If you ever get the chance to see either of these guys, it's certainly worth your time to go see them!