Wednesday, January 31st, 2007
How do you leave one of the most innovative rock bands at the peak of its career to pursue a solo project? Fortuitously, perhaps; or with the deepest of conviction. This is the conundrum I contemplate, for better or for worse, as I make my way down into the musty squalor of a basement known as the Cake Shop to see The Curtains play on a stage the size of a floor rug lit only with Christmas lights. Well, it isn’t the Hollywood Bowl, opening for Radiohead, etc., but The Curtains look proud and heroic in their clean-cut, California short-sleeve accouterments. And, to be fair, The Curtains was never meant to be a Deerhoof side project. Thankfully, the songs they are about to perform never even have to pose this argument. For now, they are doing a quick sound check, giving auspicious looks to the monitors, adjusting mike stands and amplifiers with the seriousness of car mechanics. When they are ready to begin, band-leader and master-mind Chris Cohen gives a courteous nod to his resourceful cohorts (talented Nedelle Torrisi and Annie Lewandowski), and they step into the kind of music that makes you feel good about the world around you. Well, it’s been a long time for many of us, the feeling good about the world, I mean. The crowd here is a modest, eager, enthusiastic bunch; but they evoke in their cheers and whistles the kind of satisfaction of seeing something that is both spontaneous and carefully crafted, like coming upon a surprise party with a look of stupefaction even though you knew all along it was planned
Onstage, the Curtains have two guitars, an auto-harp, a floor tom, miscellaneous percussion, a Nord Electro, but not much else. What I appreciate in this set is the absolute clarity of sound. Every note, every harmony, every change of key, every shifting of the tempo feel necessary. Nothing is wasted. For those of us who have swooned through Deerhoof shows in the past, marveling at the adept theme-and-variation acrobatics in Chris Cohen’s guitar work, it is a rare treat to see him now, at half the pace, shuffling over the neck of his guitar, lumbering, taking his time, like a careful square dancer, letting the music speak for itself, letting things resonant. Even when he puts down the guitar and thumps the floor tom for a few songs, he does so in a way that suggests unusual talent. Some of the creative decisions may be self-conscious, or just incidental: the absence of effects pedals and a drum kit, for instance. But I appreciate the change of scenery, even if I can’t help but constantly make comparisons to his former band.
Deerhoof, in literary terms, has always been an exercise of provocations, cryptic codes and catch phrases stretched out into extraordinary epic adventures ending in a series of exclamation points. The Curtains, however, are more like carefully edited found-poems, taking familiar, ordinary, everyday expressions that, when re-adjusted just the right way, begin to suggest profound explications about the universe. The songs do not clamor about their wisdom with a series of expository fits; instead, they end with a row of meandering ellipses, trailing off, pointing out other possible explanations. The analogy is awkward. But I can’t help but feel enthralled by music that takes language and grammar seriously. Chris Cohen is a true linguist, not even so much in how he shapes his lyrics, but in how he shapes melody, counter-balancing each phrase with muted guitar lines and pillowy chord changes that feel less like musical stunts and more like necessary punctuation. His voice is unaffectedly human; in speaking, it is the voice of a helpful bank teller–but in song it extrapolates extraordinary melodies like a French horn with magic powers. Why is it that great singers often write such ordinary melodies while ordinary singers find themselves mountain climbing great heights of melody? Perhaps every Curtains song could be explained by this paradigm: the Clark Kent/Superman archetype. But that would be pushing it into the world of cartoons, where it doesn’t belong. And by the end of a brief but generous set, I get the feeling that Chris does not need magic powers, x-ray vision, or a flashy monogram on his chest. His songs are human, humane, rooted in the world, in everyday life of city streets and swimming pools and front porches, where Superman is no longer needed.
[The Curtains at Asthmatic Kitty]
[The Curtains homepage]
[The Curtains' tourdates]
[Deerhoof homepage]
[Review of Clavia Nord Electro at Sound On Sound]
[The Cake Shop homepage]
MP3s from The Curtains
"World’s Most Dangerous Woman"
"Invisible String"
"Fletcher’s Favorite"
"Go Lucky"
