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Concert Review: Jeremy Enigk @ The Great American Music Hall

Wednesday 8/30/06

Even under ordinary circumstance, we would hardly need cajoling or exceptional motivation to make it out to see Jeremy Enigk, as eminent an elder alterna-statesmen from the grand old 90s as there is. His recordings with Sunny Day Real Estate, one of the 90's better bands, have matured well with age, sounding better in retrospect with each passing year. And his first solo album, the minstrel-fare Return of the Frog Queen (1996), was deservedly much beloved, if be that love from a rather particular, quiet, waifish little corner of rock fandom.

So when our friend and colleague Josh Meyers somehow developed a collaborative association with Enigk, coproducing his new album and acting as keyboard player on a whirlwind tour that included this San Francisco date (as well as Europe and Lollapalooza), it attracted for Josh a nice personal coterie of fans and admirers to the Great American. Robyn and Matt came, and Jared and Lauren came, and Derek and Lauren too, and Jon and Ali came, and I came, and gosh, some others I didn't know, they all came, etc. And, for their trouble, they got a fine show.

Enigk has one of those voices that's just impossible to believe is real, that's so textured you have to believe it's at least 25% studio buffing and shining, the kind of voice that's actually restrained by studio recording. Nothing is lost in his translation to a live venue, his voice following every quasi-falsetto twist and cranny with impressive clarity. This is the voice of a fully-credentialed rock star, and Enigk fits the part. Not in his on-stage banter, which is awkward in an almost cute way, but in his "eccentric visionary" persona in his lyrics, and certainly in his forceful stage presence.

The fragile songs from Return of the Frog Queen sounded surprisingly apt in a stage rock setting, strengthened rather than crushed by a full five piece band. And to their credit, they knew which songs to highlite; I hate it when bands seem clueless as to which are their own best songs. With the album's first two (and best two) tracks, Abegail Anne and the title track, played prominently together near the beginning of the set, the crowd was buzzing and open to the new material.

The new songs sound good in places, questionable in others. The game Enigk always must play is to keep his hyper-emotive singing style from becoming bloated and overblown. He nailed it on Frog Queen, largely due to the just-right humble quality infused in the songs, in the production, in the ethos of the project. This quality is a flighty hit-or-miss affair in his more recent band recordings (The Fire Theft, late Sunny Day Real Estate), but there is no reason to expect its absence in a solo project...and especially not with the guiding hand of our tasteful friend Josh. Still, it's impossible to predict exactly which direction Enigk will shoot in next.

And for Josh, he got his rock-star night in front of friends and family.

When it came time for Enigk to move to the piano at the side of the stage, Josh was briefly called upon to take up Enigk's guitar. And as the band's only back-up singer, Josh's duties in that regard had to continue wherever they could...so, with an "oh, look, here's a mike" body language, for one shining song Josh took up the center stage position, singing with his eyes closed, playing guitar, to the delight of his friends. During the mid-song "breakdown", the rhythm section dropped out and Josh was left suddenly alone in the mix, matching vocal lines with the great Enigk. And as the song finished, it gradually stripped down until all that was left was Josh's chords, with Enigk looking back from the piano bench, over his shoulder, smiling/laughing at/with Josh. Then he raised his arm and said "Ladies and Gentlemen, Josh Meyers".

Surely Enigk was aware this was a home-town Glorious Return show for our friend, with his parents rumored to be sitting upstairs in the balcony, surely he consciously wanted to give Josh his due on this night. Or perhaps he walks across stage and hugs Josh at the end of every performance, I don't know. In any event, by the end of the evening Josh had got his money's worth, to be sure.

And what a superb end to the evening it was. The encore finished off the show with two stark, halting moments, both just Enigk himself, unaccompanied. Singing over a gently picked acoustic guitar, Enigk gave to the excited crowd the surely anticipated Explain, Frog Queen's most lilting lullaby, a showcase for all of his best songwriting qualities. Then, as show-stopper, a beautiful and riveting piano rendition of the old Sunny Day Real Estate tune, How it Feels to be Something On. With his foot on the pedal nearly the whole song, the chords sustained ad infinitum, adding a wholly successful haunting undertone. It was all so successful, in fact, that one marvelled at how seamless an adaptation it was from the crashing guitars and cymbal swells of the original. Or maybe it shouldn't have been so surprising; at this point, the music didn't matter. Enigk's vocals carried both the last two songs entirely and without difficulty, stepping on the instrumentation as mere platform. Both brought the house down.

A fine show from an old favorite, with fabulous musical moments, and with a special personal flavor mixed in. What more? We await Josh's (by god!) forthcoming album with deep interest.


post-script
Afterward, Enigk aknowledged the crowd, saying he was "blown away" by the response, with an hilarious implied sentiment of "Really? You all actually love Return of the Frog Queen that much? Really?". That's what I love most about seeing these mid-sized venue shows in San Francisco. There are enough kids here with quirky, esoteric taste in creative media content to fill (or at least swell) almost any show with genuine, dedicated fans. Many a band I've seen blow through town takes special pause to mention and praise this fact, showering us with much flattery. And then they berate us for not dancing.

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A Farewell to Pluto


Last Friday the International Astronomical Union, assembled in Prague, finally settled an ongoing dispute that had dragged on entirely too long. Pluto, always the odd duck in the solar system, was officially shown the scientific door and demoted to the somewhat embarrassing status of "dwarf planet". We once again live in a solar system with 8 planets, the first time since 1930. And what can I say, I don't feel a whit different.

Surprisingly, planets can come and go. In 1801 the asteroid Ceres was spotted between Jupiter and Mars and was considered a full fledged planet until the discovery of enough similar objects pushed it down to a lesser rank. And who complained back then, eh? Ceres obviously could never have enjoyed as dedicated a mob of devotees as fair Pluto does today!

What shrieking! What wailing! Quelle Horreur! I've never understood all the hubbub. It's a small, frozen rock, way out in the nether regions of the firmament, spinning around out there with all the other small, frozen rocks being discovered every day; even"dwarf planet" may be a bit flattering. Let's face it: Pluto's not a "planet" (whatever the hell that means), it never was, it obviously belongs to a different set of astronomical objects. What's the big deal? How people formed these emotional bonds, in some sort of "galactic underdog" context, is beyond me. Can we just move on?

So, to Pluto, I bid a warm adieu and a hearty thanks for 75 rock-solid years. Now get out.

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Album Review: Sufjan Stevens The Avalanche

In any creative enterprise, it's a delicate balance between a personally themed style and rote repetition. Too much variance and you risk losing focus and identity; not enough and you risk monotony. The answers you provide to your creative problems must each contribute to a larger pattern without losing their overall coherence. Sufjan Stevens has arrived at all his answers, he's used them to posit a style, and with a headlong determination he's duly spun through the same creative solutions to each compositional dilemma he's posed himself with each successive recording.

2003's Michigan set out a legible agenda with its particular combination of acoustic intrumentation, art-math rhythmic elements, and indie-folk aesthetic, an agenda 2005's Illinois took and expanded upon considerably. Indeed, with the hindsight of Illinois, it becomes impossible not to hear Michigan as a collection of half-hatched ideas not quite fleshed out to completion. Almost spacious sounding by comparison, one can easily imagine an extra supporting piano part here...or an entire bank of horns there. The mid/up tempo tracks feel stuck in a lower gear. Where Illinois zips dizzyingly back and forth with ferocious clarity, Michigan mulls over each step too carefully. These albums, though, unmistakably share the same DNA, separated by a matter of degree, not of kind.

In fact, so much surface similarity exists between the opening of Michigan and Illinois that it required several listenings before they became distinct in my memory. Both albums begin with quiet piano accompanied only by vocals and minor supporting parts, followed by an up-tempo track jumpstarted by a signature piano riff in what can only be referred to as "the sufjan rhythm". They are full of the same instrumentation, the same structural devices, the same moods.

Yet these albums are anything but bogged down in repetition. Instead, layer after layer of instrument and vocal voicings offer wide and simultaneous variations; sameness is diffused through the brute force of numbers. If too often you roll your eyes at yet another trumpet line as feel change, that sufjan fatigue is quickly forgotten as the song adds new lines to distract. Here there's always another line, just around the corner.

What all those layers add up to is an army of possible subjects to focus on, and to remember. The albums with staying power, that do enough to inspire repeated listenings, they all enjoy that initial blissful period where each listening still brings surprise, before you've memorized each song in order; every good album has a "honeymoon". Sufjan Steven's songs are elaborate, byzantine, rife with digressions and curious addendums that may hold to an established form a bit too often, but that nontheless maintain their impact over many listenings. All Sufjan Stevens' albums have long honeymoons.

The Avalanche is no exception to any of this. Flutes are everywhere fluttering, Banjos are everywhere plucking, and late trumpet lines in verse-chorus-verse songs eagerly substitute for genuine part changes. Even though this is an "in-between" collection of B-sides and outtakes, there are superior tracks. Adlai Stevenson is Stevens at his Ren-Fair best, active and concise, with melodies approaching hook status. No Man's Land hops meticuously to and fro across its logically derived lines. And the three different versions of Illinois' dance hit Chicago offer surprisingly satisfying (even preferable) alternatives. As a compilation and not a proper album, there are naturally different standards to apply. Taken at face value, The Avalanche delivers every bit as much as asked.

Still, Stevens now approaches a tipping point. Influential bands arc through three phases: first, they reveal a style; second, they establish that style; third, they maximize that style and are then faced with the crisis of artistic obsolescence. At that point some risk reinventing themselves, never easy, more often yielding dissapointment (Smashing Pumpkins' Adore) than relative sucess (U2's Achtung Baby). Some choose an Al Gore-esque "journey through the desert" retreat followed by sporadic returns (Neil Young). Some just shrug their shoulders and never look back (The Rolling Stones).

With Illinois and The Avalanche, Stevens has sailed through and beyond the "establishment" period and now has one further release to stretch and hone his frantic flutes and math-folk rhythms to their breaking point. Then, as elegant a pop-musical proof as he has offered, his answers may finally have begun to lose their logic.

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Coffee Considerations

There's no such thing as too much or too fast. Keeping safely short of obviously self-destructive behavior, moderation is relative. There are no empirical limits, only personal choices and preferences weighted against the accepted set of society's choices and preferences. What are sense and sensibility but vapid reflections of a given time and place? They call sense "common" for a reason. Propriety is colloquial, even jingoist. Excess is a state of mind.

And so with coffee. I've now grown tired of too often, from too many different people, being met with surprise at the speed with which I finish my cup. It's ludicrous; people, it's coffee. Here are four reasons coffee must be consumed quickly:

1) It's hot, mmmkay? You drink it hot. And like other hot substances, with the passage of time it will inescapably become less and less so. Some people like cold, stale coffee. I'm not one of them.

2) It's, what, 12 ounces of liquid? How long does it take to drink a can of soda?

3) This isn't 1885, we aren't in Vienna. We're not taking a leisurely drink and strudel while absently picking through Der Spiegel, glowering through an anguished, put-upon look. Coffee is fast food. Places like Starbucks and Peets are built around the premise of speed. This isn't a food for savoring; coffee is about taking care of business and getting it done.

4) And anyway, I don't drink coffee, almost never do. I get mochas or cappuccinos, which are a little bit of foam and a little bit of espresso added to a cup of hot milk. How long does, or should, it take to drink a glass of milk?


Likewise, how many is too many, who's to say? It's fair to say I drink at least one a day. Most days it's two, and the days with three are becoming more common. But what of it, what if I had six coffees today, eh? What are you going to do about it? What would the objection be based on?

Can it be objected to on financial grounds, as an ostentatious and indulgent luxury too far, a waste of money? But that makes it okay for the rich, then?

What, over-caffeination as a medical issue? So that makes it okay for the fit? As a moral issue? Do we then excuse the pious?


Leave me to guzzle my eighteen daily coffees in peace, I will hear no more of these things.