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Although I’ve been a fan of THE NEW PORNOGRAPHERS since I first heard Mass Romantic back in 2002 and though I’d seen them play many times before, I’d never seen their primary singer/songwriter A.C. NEWMAN play a solo set before, so I didn’t quite know what to expect
My wife, who saw Newman play back in 2004 while he was supporting his first solo album The Slow Wonder, said that it was a pretty stripped down show. In contrast, this show (supporting the excellent new Get Guilty) was a full band extravaganza despite being ostensibly billed as a “solo” show. Newman was joined by (among others) drummer JON WURSTER (who looked like a cross between MCA circa Licensed to Ill and Booger from Revenge of the Nerds with his stubble and leather jacket) and a violinist/multi-instrumentalist (at times she played a whistle, for instance) who really made the songs really take on another dimension from their studio versions.
Given how ornate some of the arrangements on Get Guilty are, it’s no surprise that Newman needed 5 other musicians to pull it off live, but pull it off they did. Riffing on everything from the reason why some people of Irish and Scottish origin have red hair to Celtic funk based in Canada, Newman and his ace band proceeded to play most of the songs from both of his solo albums. The highlights were many, including “Secretarial”, a rousing version of “Drink to Me Babe, Then” and “On the Table” from The Slow Wonder and “There are Maybe Ten or Twelve,” “Changeling (Get Guilty),” “Like a Hitman, Like a Dancer” and others from Get Guilty.
In a unique and honest move, they eschewed an encore but told the crowd that they would ordinarily have left the stage a few songs before they actually finished. I honestly wish most artists would take this approach. The mystery just isn’t there with most encores and this cuts out the pretense. In any case, even though they didn’t play their fabulous cover of THE GO-BETWEENS’ “Love Goes On” (despite our best attempts to coerce Newman into playing it), we did get “The Town Halo”, arguably the finest song in Newman’s solo catalog, for the closer and everyone went home satisfied.
Openers THE BROKEN WEST occupy the territory somewhere between WILCO’s debut A.M. and ‘00s indie and though the description sounds like what a thousand other bands are doing in clubs all over the U.S., they pulled it off really well. We even got a cover of TEGAN AND SARA’s “Back in Your Head”. I liked their most recent album Now or Heaven and will have to investigate further.
