Boy, the man can whistle.
Fortune befell Albuquerque when Chicago's Andrew Bird, the violinist rock star, performed at El Rey on Friday night with three backup musicians.
The band Loney, Dear opened with an atmospheric cross between shoegaze and head-in-the-clouds music, some Andrew Bird-lite to whet our appetites before the main show, but nothing that moved me to rapture. Maybe opening-band etiquette is like wedding etiquette - you're not supposed to wear white to a wedding lest you outshine the bride on her big day.
I appreciated Loney, Dear more when the singer announced the members hailed from Sweden, which made them more of a novelty and made my ears perk up. During the second-to-last song, the band members played very quietly. The audience was supposed to get silent with them and listen intently. But instead, they gabbed away like campers in a mess hall.
Something else super-annoying: The lead singer kept saying, "We'd like to play another song, if that's OK with you." I understand being coy and flirting with the audience, but what the hell? Like, yeah, fine, whatever - just play the song and quit acting like a bunch of meek Southern belles. It's bad form to act like you're bothering your audience, asking them permission to continue.
Anyway, I'm nitpicking. They were fine.
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The switch-over to Bird's set took only a few minutes. He had dressed the stage with two giant submarine-like gramophone speakers on either side, so he looked like a miniature man in Big World from "Mario 3." He also had vintage amps, a glockenspiel, drums, loop and effects pedals all over the floor, and a two-headed spinnable gramophone speaker in the back, propped up high. Bird's symphonic swells of whistling, voices and instruments interwove, overlapped and flowed up and down and around each other like a mixture of cold water, oil and lava. He can make anything sound good. I experienced a similar sensation as when I hear Edward Grieg's ominous "In the Hall of the Mountain King."
His epic vibrato whistling was a cornerstone of the show, as he projects from his pursed lips with the wrath of an opera singer. He did some fancy stuff like swinging his electric guitar by the strap over his back in the middle of a song to pick up the violin and bow over the lush layers of pre-recorded pizzicato string arrangements. Sometimes he clapped rhythms and spun the "womp-womp" gramophone speaker, which looked like a Zissou Society prop. Audience banter was endearingly dry and pointed.
"Is everybody all right?" he asked somewhere at the start.
"Are you all right?" a woman shrieked from the crowd.
"Yeah, I'm fine, ma'am," he replied.
In the second half, he noted, "This dry desert air isn't good for the whistling," and chugged a water bottle, segueing into the song "Tenuousness" with sing-songy lines such as "First it wanes, then it waxes, so procreate and pay your taxes." Bird restarted the next song three times like trying to start an old, stubborn jalopy.
"Sometimes, I just don't get it," he said, which I always find charming - when a good musician stumbles in the spotlight and rolls with it.
His time signatures are complex and changing. During the encore, the audience tried clapping along in 4/4 time, and he told them he appreciated the extra dimension, but "if we keep this up, it's going to lead to disaster," so they all laughed and left him to his own devices. Then he said he loves the Handsome Family, who were his friends in Chicago but now live here, and that he couldn't come to Albuquerque without playing one of their songs, "The Giant of Illinois."
His drummer, Martin Dosh, who performs on his own as Dosh, was responsible for the dance beats, which he uses in his own musical endeavors when he's not playing with Bird.
You can investigate further at MySpace.com/andrewbird and MySpace.com/doshanticon.
