April 20, 2012

And then: jeez. Well. Okay. Kurt Wagner, in a black baseball cap, took the stage with his band, picking up a guitar whose headstock was bristling with uncut strings. It’s the sort of thing you might be ridiculed for, unless you played with the cool micro-dynamics Wagner did, wringing vibrato sometimes from the neck, such that the transparent wire quivered in the spectral light and fog. Lambchop’s set was fraught with these low-threshold perceptions, jazzy gradations of almost similar ideas. At a certain point you remembered the strings, this bizarrely sloppy detail in an otherwise fussed milieu, and wondered: well, why is it normal to trim them?

Lambchop And Yo La Tengo Bring The Quiet To (Le) Poisson Rouge

And then: jeez. Well. Okay. Kurt Wagner, in a black baseball cap, took the stage with his band, picking up a guitar whose headstock was bristling with uncut strings. It’s the sort of thing you might be ridiculed for, unless you played with the cool micro-dynamics Wagner did, wringing vibrato sometimes from the neck, such that the transparent wire quivered in the spectral light and fog. Lambchop’s set was fraught with these low-threshold perceptions, jazzy gradations of almost similar ideas. At a certain point you remembered the strings, this bizarrely sloppy detail in an otherwise fussed milieu, and wondered: well, why is it normal to trim them?