Gee muses

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

The Metro Theatre, Sydney
29/07/08

Famously, a reviewer once declared he’d touched God at a Radiohead concert. I didn’t at The Polyphonic Spree but I went so close it didn’t matter. This was the best concert of 2008. An extraordinary celebration of everything that is great about rock music; uplifting, deeply moving at times, thunderous symphonic rock, contrasted by great delicacy and shade, performed by a group of 23 musicians and singers. So good was this amazing performance – and I’m not prone to waxing lyrical and tossing out superlatives left, right and centre but I’m going to here - that I’d put it up there with greatest shows I’ve seen over the past 40 years: Led Zeppelin in 1972, AC/DC (1974 and ’76), Frank Zappa (1976), Radio Birdman (1977), Tom Waits (1978), The Cure (1981 and 2000), Bob Dylan (2001), Brian Wilson (2004), to name a few … revered company, indeed.

What made this concert special though was the pure inescapable joy that lies at the core of the Texans’ distinctly un-American’s music. They reach for the sky – physically and spiritually, and this audience was drawn in. The result was that incredible energy that surges back and forth between the two. Everywhere people smiled; for the whole two hours, they embraced, danced, sang, punched the air, moshed – nobody who was there will ever forget the cover of Nirvana’s Lithium that had the entire Metro moshing as one! Couples pashed, several people were heard telling their partner they loved them; the audience parted – like the proverbial Red Sea - when the band shucked off its black army fatigues for the original white smocks and returned to the stage via the back of the Metro and down the stairs through the crowd. People hustled just to high-five a member or get close. It all sounds religious, cultish, dangerously close to overkill but, you know what, it was simply glorious.

Led by founder and lead vocalist, Tim DeLaughter, who has an extraordinary amount of energy and a marvellous voice, the six back-up singers, two drummers, two violinists, one cellist, one harpist (yes, a harp), three brass players, a flautist, three guitarists, bass guitarist, and two keyboardists, simply soared. It was extravagant, poetic, humbling. People even cried with joy. It even blew The Arcade Fire away – and anybody who saw its January shows will know just how good they were. This was a massive triumph, a masterpiece, more reasons to believe than you dare to dream. I’m still smiling 24 hours later.

Who would have believed that out of the ruins of US indie psych popsters, Tripping Daisy, a band born of a different time and place and respirited in the ‘90s, would come the all singing, all dancing, quite remarkable entity that is the currently 23-strong The Polyphonic Spree?

And who would have thought a stage full of, initially, people in robes looking a bit like a mass breakout from some nearby cathedral or church, now dressed in black army fatigues and looking like they mean business, would be both viable in the economically challenged early 21st century and last longer than it took for the initial novelty to wear off?

Well, brothers and sisters, happily there have been us believers around the place since the beginning. Now, we could get all religious here but let’s not. There are no Tom Cruises in this story. Eight years after the Spree first formed and five since its first album, The Beginning Stages Of, it is now established as one of the world’s finest live acts and is buoyed by a cult following that is strong enough to keep this massive ark afloat.

Founder, lead singer, composer, multi-instrumentalist and songwriter, Tim DeLaughter, is baking in hometown Dallas, Texas, where the temperature is well over the old 100F (38C). “We’re frying, like little hot tomatoes. It’s a cliché but you really could fry an egg on the concrete out there,” he says.

DeLaughter is one of the smarter people I’ve come across in this business. A veteran of nearly two decades as a musician, he’s nudging into his mid-40s but his enthusiasm isn’t diminishing with age. With Tim, it’s matter of how much conversation you can fit in the time limit rather than trying to find enough conversation to get to the finishing line.
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‘heima’ is icelandic for ‘at home’ or ‘homeland’ and this film follows the band as they embarked on a series of free concerts in Iceland.

Hollywood beckons the Frames‘ singer/songwriter Glen Hansard. In one of the more fitting Oscar nominations in recent years, Hansard and Marketa Irglova, his co-star in the wonderful low-budget, big hit, musical will perform on the 80th Annual Academy Awards telecast on February 24.

Hansard and Irglova will perform Falling Slowly, their signature duet from the film, which is nominated for an Oscar in the Best Original Song category. How good is that!

Though this is the first Oscar nomination for Hansard and Irglova, the soundtrack album has garnered several accolades. In January, Falling Slowly was named Best Song at the Critics’ Choice Awards, and in December the soundtrack (Canvasback/Columbia Records/Sony Music Soundtrax) was voted Best Music from a Film by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.

The album also received two Grammy nominations this year. In 2007, the film won the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival.

Incidentally, Dylanophiles like Geemuses will have picked up on Hansard and Irglova’s version of the great man’s You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere, one of the highlights of the I’m Not There soundtrack album.

Anyway, everybody - all two of us - at Geemuses think this is the best Oscar nomination in years.

A decade and six albums since being unearthed by JJJ in 1996, Endorphin is in a happy place. His new album, Soon After Silence, sees him veer into a textured world of sound that’s moodier, deeper and less beats driven than before. The DJ and composer meet and exchange notes. His wife and two daughters make it a family picture. She took the photos for the cover, the girls sang. He produced as well. Once a major league star, Endorphin is now impressively free.

Soon After Silence is both subtle and personal; a homage to his French roots – he lived in Paris for many years before coming to Australia in 1984 – and the places that have coloured his landscape since.

“I wanted to make an album that was very artistic and inspired by France and Brooklyn and Japan, the places along the way. It is my personal record, for a lot of reasons. The way it came about was I moved house about one and a half years ago into an amazing environment. I’m still in Sydney but now my studio has a view. And I signed a big contract with a music licensing company in Hollywood for which I write a lot of music for film so the financial pressure became a lot less great. That allowed me to decide that I’d do what I wanted to do and do something close to my heart.

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