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The t-shirts at the merch table read TRASH CAN SINATRAS LEGENDARY SCOTTISH BAND, a bold statement of fact disguised as self-deprecating irony, and an indication of the way this band thinks about themselves. Sometimes it takes a band as quintessentially Scottish as the Trash Can Sinatras to help me recognize the same quality in the music of some of their countrymen: Idlewild may be the transplanted R.E.M., but their guitars channel Scottish verdancy, not Georgian pungency; Teenage Fanclub may be the transplanted Big Star, but no American band has ever beheld the sweet world with so little psychic pain. And those things hold true for the Trash Can Sinatras, my mirror during their show at the Cedar last weekend.
The show was advertised as plugged-in acoustic, and kept that promise with one exception, and a pretty novel one: I suppose it was inevitable that I would someday soon witness the iPad keyboard app used live in concert, and now I have, the Trash Can Sinatras being the unlikely conjurers of the winds of change. But it was no great technological intrusion, just a nice undercurrent of low tones to complement Francis Reader’s coos and strums and sprays of high notes like celestial vapor, and those of his boys.
But I don’t want the “all-acoustic” designation to signify “stripped-down.” This is a tough band when they want to be (see the heavy ebb and breezy flow of 1993’s ever-magnificent I’ve Seen Everything), but for this campfire jaunt through America, they’re forsaking that album’s bruisers, songs like “Killing The Cabinet” and “Bloodrush” that put them firmly in the company of The Stone Roses and The House of Love, in favor of its gentle lulls, songs like “I’m Immortal” and the title track. Even more enchanting is shoulda-crossed-over inbetweener “Hayfever,” which on record is a giddy and dour minor-key concoction of rolling piano and soaring refrains. For its live interpretation, the piano melody is translated for Paul Livingston’s guitar, and where it formerly carried the song away into the sadly unattainable world that exists beyond an unwelcome fadeout, in concert the song must instead decay into an atonal swirl of muted strumming. A spooky, abrupt ending for an unsettled song.
And, of course, Stephen Douglas’s hand-drumming steady amidst the murmur. I wonder if this has been a very satisfying tour for Douglas, but then I’ve never understood who would want to play hand drums in a world where drum sets exist. And yet, Douglas has a fine array of chains and triangles and the prized iPad to keep him occupied, and he keeps and passes the time admirably. His three guitar-playing bandmates sit nearby to his left, on the most peaceable of stages, strewn with Christmas lights and lacking only a bonfire at its center. Teenage Fanclub must be the only other band so contentedly together after so many years, and the Trash Can Sinatras, I assure you, will still be together as old men, because music was never just something reckless to do in their twenties.
One song, introduced by the gray-haired guitar-playing youth John Douglas, our fourth and final member, told the story, if only figuratively, of a young Robert Burns yet to attain the confidence of his poetry. It was a good image for this band to evoke, as they wear their former youths so evidently on their faces and often seem quietly amazed at the wisdom they’ve found and the pleasures they’ve been allowed to share. “We get to fall in love like other people,” Reader sang during encore-ending “People,” from last year’s In The Music, as if remembering a time when he had yet to attain that vision and assumed he never would. But this was a night of seeming completion, permanently renewable.
Francis Reader
Paul Livingston
Stephen Douglas
John Douglas
