The Postal Service Show Report
Edie and I arrived at the Bowery Ballroom a little past our scheduled meeting time of 10:45. The show was originally scheduled for 8:00, but after selling out they added an early show at 5:00 and pushed our show back a few hours. We’d agreed to meet Mike at 10:45, in time for the second opener’s 11:00 set. The Postal Service was scheduled to go on at 12. Needless to say, the trains were slow (stupid F train), we were a bit slow getting to the club (stupid Michael and his mixed up directions), and service at the bar was slow (stupid bartender ignoring me and my twenty).
Once in the club, we had a bit of a hard time finding the room where the bands were playing. When you go in the Bowery Ballroom, you go down a set of stairs which leads to the bar, the coat check, and the bathrooms. You have to go up another set of stairs at the other end of the room to actually get to the bands. We eventually figured this out and found Mike.
New York clubs that I’ve been to are very different from Seattle clubs in a number of important ways. First, most of the clubs in New York have some sort of balcony. If you’re not a slam dancer (like me) or if you’re short
(like Edie), balconies can be a real life saver. We decided to head up to see if we could get a good view of the show. We found a spot just to the left of the soundboard right in front. Score one for New York. The second (which is a new development) is that smoking is no longer allowed in clubs in New York. Before the show we weren’t sure if the law would actually be enforced. Pot smoking, for example, has always been illegal, but it happens all the times at shows. Amazingly, no one smoked inside the club. Even after the lights went out, there was absolutely no smoking. I cannot describe how much more pleasant this made seeing music.
Anyway, we took our spot just as Cex (the second opener) was beginning his set. Cex had a schtick which, to his credit, I haven’t seen before. He was sort of a rapper/singer in the industrial Nine Inch Nails vein. His musical accompaniment consisted of pressing “play” on his powerbook. The unique thing was that he wasn’t on stage. (Okay, so I saw David Yow do this at the Middle East in ‘96. But only for a few songs, not for the whole set.) The house lights were up, and he sang while wandering through the crowd. His music was loud and angsty. He had some songs that really, really didn’t work (“Food is disgusting / It’s what they make shit from / You’re vomiting backwards”), and some that were pretty good (“Thumbs click / Gears shift” and more I can’t remember about bikes). Really Nine Inch Nails was his closest comparison.
I did feel somewhat sorry for Cex, though, because the audience clearly wasn’t what he wanted. Like I said, he was wandering around the crowd instead of being on stage. But the crowd, being the nice indie kids they were, kept making an aisle for him to walk through. He kept telling people to close the aisle in, that it was okay to, you know, touch him, but no one was having any of it. I think he’s used to emo kids from wherever he’s from getting all into the show and, I dunno, laying hands on him. But it wasn’t happening in NYC.
The other problem with Cex is that a lot of his songs involved call and response. In my perfect world, call and response works like this: The band has an awesome song with a call and response chorus. The recording makes this clear, so that when people come to the show they’re so filled with energy and excitement that they sing along no matter what, and the response part just happens naturally. This is what happens with Cex: before every song he’d teach us our part. Then when the part came, he’d move the microphone away from his mouth, look at us expectantly, and mouth the words we were supposed to sing. The problem is very few people actually participated. It was kind of sad. The worst was during a song whose repeating chorus was “Can’t fuck—hurts too much” or something like that. (It was called “Orgasm Headache”. Cex gets migraines.) Cex decided to run downstairs to do something (heckle The Postal Service? I don’t remember). I think half of us were supposed to follow him and the other half were supposed to continue singing the chorus. What happened was that everyone milled about while his powerbook continued to bleep and bloop in that circa-‘94 industrial way. He came back looking mildly disappointed and ended his set.
The Postal Service
But enough about Cex! In between sets we had a nice surprise. This guy was
setting up another Powerbook next to the sound board right by where we were standing. Edie had gone to get a drink, and I mentioned to Mike that I thought that the guy with the computer was the bass player for Death Cab. Mike said I should ask him. I’m always pretty shy about rock star stalking, so I asked him, “Do you play bass?” He said, “Yeah, actually I play bass in Ben’s band. I’m just on tour with him now helping him out.” I tell him yeah, I know that, and that I used to live in Seattle and see him all the time. He was super nice. He shook my hand and asked me my name. I asked about the next Death Cab tour, and he said they have a new album in October and they’ll be touring behind it. He said they were
having a great time on tour, and that he hoped we had fun. He hates it when people act all serious. I said I’d try, and he should poke me if I’m too serious. He said he’d pinch my ass. I said okay.
But enough about my slavish fanboy ways. On to the show. The Postal
Service was Jimmy Tamborello on Powerbook (again! so many Macs on stage), Ben Gibbard on vocals, guitar, keyboard, and drums, and Jenny Lewis (I think) on backing vocals, guitar, and keyboard. (There are two “Jen“s on the record, Jenn Wood and Jenny Lewis. I think Ben called her “Jenny” at one point, but I’m not sure.) Ben introduced them by saying, “We’re a dance band from the west coast.” For a band that’s only a side project with one album under their belt, they were absolutely amazing.
The first cool thing about the show was the video projections. There were no stage lights; all of the light came from a projector that was being run by Nick, the aforementioned Death Cab bassist. (Before the show Mike asked him what he was doing with the Powerbook. Nick said, “When people ask me that question I usually tell them I’m doing the vocals. But it’s just the video”.) Each song had a different video that was somehow thematically suited to the song. The show started with “The District Sleeps Alone Tonight”
which featured a star field with a pink heart. Words and phrases from the song (“complex” “worth leaving” etc.) appeared in the same pink on the screen. Edie made the excellent point that throughout the show the video was cool enough to enhance the song, but not so busy as to be distracting.
Going in, I expected almost all of the music to be played from a computer, especially the drum parts. One of the most surprising parts of the night was during the songs that have a snare/cymbal part in the middle. Ben would go back to a drumset and play the part live while the rest of the music was coming from the computer. I had always assumed that it was a computer playing it on the record, but now I’m not so sure. It really was a nice retort to the people who say that electronic music lacks humanity. The blending of the electronic and the analog was brilliant, and served to remind me that even when the music is entirely electronic, there’s an analog person conceiving and generating it.
The set consisted of the whole album and the b-side from the first single. The energy was high and the playing was spot on. The guitars were much more present in the live show than on the album. They used feedback to great effect, which made me think more about using machines to make music. Feedback is electronic in a way that hitting a drum isn’t, but is non-electronic in a way that using a synthesized sound on a computer isn’t. Eventually I’ll figure out how I feel about electronic music in general, but until then this show gave me a lot to think about.
Ben kept commenting on how much better this show was than the early show. Having seen a Death Cab early/late bill in Seattle, I can’t say I was surprised. Always go to the late show if you have to choose. After they played the whole album, there wasn’t much left to do for an encore. They did come back out and tell us that they had prepared one song “in case of this eventuality”. (I love bands who don’t act like the encore is a foregone conclusion. I really do. I have a Morphine bootleg where Mark Sandman (not to rag on the dead. I love you Mark, I really do.) keeps responding to requests by saying, “We’ll do that one in the encore.” Not
the second set, but the encore. That really bugs me.) Ben announced that it was a cover “from the heart. Not my heart, but the heart of an Englishman”. If you’re going to see the band and want to be surprised, stop reading here. It was a really great rendition of Phil Collins’ “Against All Odds”. The song is perfectly suited for Ben’s voice, and capped the evening wonderfully.
My only complaint is that Ben raised his microphone stand. In the past, he’s kept it just a little too low, which means he has to hunch over it while he plays. I always found it charming, but apparently he’s had enough. He still did all of his trademark moves, including the “sway back and forth with guitar”, which is Edie’s favorite. All in all one of the best shows I’ve been to in a long time. Can’t wait for Death Cab in October.
As always, corrections, criticism, comments welcomed at mpd@mattereaterlad.com.