I recently had some technical hitches that prevented me from being able to update this site. In the meantime I attended a couple of noteworthy gigs without passing comment. Here's a back-dated update.First up, Sufjan Stevens and the Illinoisemakers. He now seems to be shifting CDs by the barrow-load, and deservedly so, but I sort of stumbled on him by accident through emusic . You've probably heard the soundbite - recording a concept album about every state in the US in turn, which is a conceit that will either make you joyfully bound towards it with a willing embrace at the ready, or cower on reflex, and make some kind of wrinkly cynical sour-face and double up. Myself, I'm firmly in category one - but given that I still secretly think that Peter Gabriel-era Genesis is some kind of pinnacle of western rock music, that's not really very surprising.

So it's prog-folk-whimsy-art-rock. With Christian overtones, and very heavy on the banjo. Somehow this assembles to something dramatically better than the sum of it's parts. Musically dense, complicated, honest yet cryptic, genre-spanning, awe-inspiring stuff. To me, anyway. Enough to make me throw silly-money at tickets when I discovered he was playing a single UK show; already long sold out by the time I met with the bandwagon.

Luckily, given the expense, and the struggles getting there, it was a great show. Largely seated, which I hadn't realised ahead of committing, I was quite relieved to find out that both my tickets were for the rear stalls, fenced off to form a raised standing-only section, at the rear of the venue. As the front stalls were correspondingly lowered and seated, we were able to lean against the bar staring through to a clear uninterrupted view of the stage framed below the optics. A novel vantage point, and one that I'd be happy to repeat.

The act was framed in terms of a cheerleading routine, with the band dressed up in orange and blue uniforms, engaging in call-and-response and coreographed routines to introduce many of the songs. They also formed a human pyramid, twice. The majority of the set was taken from the 'Illinoise' album, which forms the second installment of the scheme, the predecessor covered Michigan . There would seem to be a theme song for the 50 states project as well, which the band use to introduce the set. They emerge performing it, somewhat in the style of a marching school band.

Musically, they never failed to disappoint the material, which is possibly a challenge considering the musical depth, especially the vocal complexity, of the perfomance they are combining with theatrics. While the showbiz elements never really climbed higher than the sort of thing you might expect from an endearingly ramshackle school-play, the music was performed and presented to a quite flawlessly high standard, still managing to be raw enough to be obviously a live band at work. It was an excellent and inspirational evening's entertainment, I'm really glad that I managed to catch them before they went gigantically global. 

posted by cms on 2005-12-12 20:52:03