Logan Square Auditorium
2/3/07
A belly full of Greek food does not prepare you for the biting, awful cold that hung around Chicago Saturday night. A three-minute walk from car to concert hall felt so, so much longer.
Inside the young bundled-up city-smart fashionables ordered their drinks and listened to The Essex Green open the show. Brooklyn band, one of the many pop-heavy male-female combos around these days that plays that lush 60s-influenced sound that's heavy on harmony and bouncy melodies. Good stuff.
Logan Square Auditorium--third floor ballroom, still in pretty good shape. Probably an old dance hall where people did the Jitterbug and the Lindy Hop while they saved the world from European fascism. Wood floors and ceiling fans, and no one's smoking so the air is clear and fresh.
Camera Obscura are a quiet indie pop band from Glasgow, Scotland. You could easily write them off as a pale imitation of Belle and Sebastian or just one of the many 60s-centric indie bands I talked about earlier, but they usually rise above that pat description to make some pretty gorgeous music.
Center spotlights weren't on for the first part of the set, so Tracyanne Campbell played her quiet, pretty songs in the dark for a while. Lighting in general wasn't great and so the pictures I have are the best I could do. The band stuck to the new album, mostly, and only dipped into the older stuff here and there. I was happy to hear the B-side "Lemon Juice and Paper Cuts" and kept hoping to hear "Lunar Sea" and a few others, but their set ended too early for the deep cuts.
"Razzle Dazzle Rose" ended the encore and the show was over. Good song to close with, too; simple lyrics, written by Tracyanne, but they read like some adventurous 19th century Scottish love poem mixed with a shuffling drum beat and a lone trumpeter that sounds like some Mexican mariachi player that lost his way a long, long time ago.
No comments:
Post a Comment