Jeff Mangum has justifiably been getting the lion's share of the attention surrounding the I'll Be Your Mirror festival; when a reclusive indie god comes out of hiding, it's a big deal. But the weekend also marked a long-awaited return for the festival's curators and headliners. Last night, Portishead stepped onstage in the Convention Hall to play their first East Coast show since 1998. Just before they took the stage, their simple P logo appeared on the screen in back of them, and the crowd collectively lost it, and then continued to lose it for the next hour and a half. This was a special night.
by Tom Breihan I wonder if it's weird to be Beth Gibbons, to look out at a teeming auditorium, and to realize that everyone in the room has probably had sex to your music at some point or another. To kids who came of age in the '90s -- or at least the kids who weren't listening to Jodeci -- Gibbons is basically our Isaac Hayes, our Teddy Pendergrass. And though Portishead is a studio band through and through (Geoff Barrow has said in interviews that they've generally not enjoyed playing live), they did an amazing job at bringing the dusky, cracking feel of their records to life onstage while at the same time playing around with their songs' compositions.
Geoff Barrow, the group's production mastermind, switched between percussion, guitar, bass, and turntables. He was impressive on all those instruments, but his scratch-solos were serious highlights. Like, say, Slash's guitar solos, Barrow's big moments didn't exactly flaunt their technical mastery, but they always made perfect musical sense for their moments. Guitarist Adrian Utley ripped though delirious '70s-soul solos or bottom-heavy Duane Eddy fuzzbombs whenever he had to. The group's live drummer proved to be great at recreating Barrow's dusty breakbeats without so much as a single extraneous fill. This is a group of people very good at what it does.
Gibbons, who barely spoke a word to the audience all night, seemed small and wraithlike onstage, her face usually hidden under hair and shadow. But at the end of the set, when she smiled huge and pulled off the world's least likely stage-dive, it suddenly became obvious that she'd been having fun all along. Her voice was warm and tremulous, with occasional hints of Billie Holiday or Dusty Springfield, and it sounded absolutely incredible throughout the night, sinking into Barrow's tracks with the same seamless fluidity that it does on the band's albums.
The setlist included nearly all of 3rd, the band's excellent 2008 comeback album, but it also found room for all the best tracks from their '90s world-conquering days. And they found ways to toy with those songs, too, turning "Wandering Star" into a minimal duet between Gibbons's voice and Barrow's bass, or letting the built-up climax of "Glory Box" erupt out of nowhere, louder than anything around it. And every time the opening notes of another track rang out, the crowd would immediately whoop. Last night's show was the band's first on short, rare North American show, and if you can make it to any of the other shows, do not hesitate to do so. The group might not have released any new music too recently, but they are in a serious zone onstage.
Here's a picture of the setlist, which wasn't perfectly in sequence. (I'm pretty sure they flipped the order on "Sour Times" and "Glory Box.")
At this year's ATP, most of the bill is dominated by '80s and '90s veterans, and very few of the bands are still on any sort of upward trajectory. So it was a bit jarring to see buzzy Brits the Horrors, all of whom would get carded attempting to buy cigarettes, take the stage. Even after losing the poodle haircuts that they had early on, the Horrors still look like an anime director's idea of a youthful rock band, not a group who should be sharing a bill with Shellac and Swans, the band's Portishead connections notwithstanding. But with their towering synth-rock anthems, the band absolutely proved that they belong. Even though they looked a bit nervous onstage, their songs, especially the ones from new album Skying, were more than confident enough to cover them.I have nothing but respect and admiration to the myriad brave, insane souls who made it through Swans' set in the ornate Paramount Theatre without the help of earplugs. The two-hour set from the grizzled postpunk veterans was feel-it-in-your-stomach loud, and frontman M. Gira wasn't shy about demanding that the crowd come closer to the stage and its ear-destroying speakers. (He actually said, "Stop being such pussies.") All that loudness helped the band's songs achieve an elemental force, as a few of the band's newest pieces stretched out to a half-hour or longer. Gira was a grizzled, demonic force onstage, slapping himself in the face and tearing at his hear while showing off one of rock's most booming, authoritative voices. And the band behind him looked like wizened gunslingers (except drummer Thor Harris, who looks more like a simian barbarian). It all added up to a furious full-immersion experience, the sort of show where you feel like an entirely new person when you walk out.To be completely honest, I found Tyondai Braxton’s involvement in Battles to be distracting save for one major aspect; the band’s live performance was indebted to his presence. Without Braxton -- whose vocals were re-recorded and cued up on samplers, which served as a sort of weird jab to Braxton – the current trio isn’t much to watch, though the verve of Battles’ music might be stronger and more enticing than ever. Geoff Barrow’s other outfit, Beak>, scores with its krautrock groove and thick, enveloping basslines. Beak>, who also played last year’s ATP pretty shortly after they became a band, is in a sense the epitome of an ATP outfit; a band deeply entrenched into its own sound and protective of their music in a live setting. Colin Stetson's eerie, experimental music left the audience at the Paramount just about as breathless as the performer himself. Stetson played into the crowd's adulation; as he wove into "A Dream Of Water," Stetson said, "Unfortunately Laurie Anderson isn't here to do her part. But I've become accustomed to doing it myself."Ultramagnetic MCs are one of the only hip hop groups at the festival, and certainly its work is less revered than Public Enemy’s (Public Enemy play Sunday). However, even dealing with some muddy sound the trio of rappers led by Kool Keith sounded sharp and exuded chemistry -- even a clumsy freestyle held the attention of the crowd. Outside the Asbury Lanes bowling alley immediately after Portishead's set finished, the line to get in and see the London trio Factory Floor stretched around the block. Plenty of the people in that line never made it in, but those who did got to hear a very serious combination of reverbed-out goth vocals and thumping '80s-style Detroit techno. That's a powerful combination, and it sounded pretty great in the bowling alley, even if the group didn't project much in the way of presence onstage. Foot VillageMarc Ribot's Ceramic DogPeanut Butter WolfSilver-QlusterThe Pop GroupPortishead
