For the past two days, Washington DC’s 9:30 club has played host to two of indie rock’s most well regarded bands—The New Pornographers and Belle and Sebastian. While you’d never mistake one band for the other, the common traits of both acts on this nominally co-headliner tour are their highly inventive songwriting and dextrous musical arrangements. Over the past two days, fans of both bands came out in force, but it was clear after two days that the Belle and Sebastian partisans caught the better end of the deal. Hampered by an illness to a critical band member, the New Pornographers struggled to match the high-flying pyrotechnics of their most recent studio album, Twin Cinema. DCist came out to cover the show on its second night. This brief review of the New Pornographers’ truncated and star-crossed performance will be followed tomorrow with a review of Belle and Sebastian’s appearance.

The evening began with an abbreviated set from Vancouver’s New Pornographers, who performed under conditions that they no doubt hope they’ll never have to repeat. Two of the band’s most important members—rangy eccentric Dan Bejar and charismatic clean-up hitting chanteuse Neko Case—did not join the band on this touring jaunt, leaving nominal band quarterback Carl Newman to carry the torch alone. Frankly, these absences are enough to understandably elicit some degree of audience skepticism. But it’s simply unfortunate that they took the stage the past two nights without the vocal talents of Case’s more than capable understudy, Kathryn Calder. As Newman related, Calder has been struck with a “case of the gitis” that has rendered her barely able to speak.

Without Calder’s voice, a whole chunk of the New Pornographers’ catalog was rendered, for all intents and purposes, off limits. To their credit, Newman and his bandmates mounted an admirable attempt to make the evening special for their gathered fans by spending a lot of time talking and laughing with the audience. They performed “Graceland” as a special favor to an audience member who had requested it the night before (hilariously, that person--while they were in attendance and overjoyed to be so honored—was not the person who Newman believed had originally begged for the song the night before). They temporarily threatened the audience with a performance of “Oh Sherrie”, poked fun at how Calder’s only outlet for communication was to play “sarcastic music” on her keyboard, and allowed one particularly boisterous audience member to count them into “Testament To Youth In Verse.”

Nevertheless, it largely seemed as if having to perform for a second day under the same set of bad circumstances was especially wearing on the band (for a quality recap of Sunday’s show, check out The Upstate Life). A rather poor sound mix that solely favored Newman’s guitar and the drums certainly didn’t do them any favors, either—so much of their songs’ underlying melody was lost that it was a striking contrast to the crisp, airtight sound afforded to Belle and Sebastian. Oddly, it seemed that whenever the band set themselves up for a fall—such as when they dryly noted how hard it would be to perform “The Bleeding Heart Show” without Calder—they delivered a dashing, tight performance. When they chose to simply stew in the unfortunateness of it all, the songs bogged down: “Breakin’ The Law” was a hard slog for the band to get through, and there were a handful of odd tempo fluctuations, most notably in “Use It.”

Despite it all, dedicated New Pornographers fans did their best to support the band all evening, offering encouragement and showing genuine excitement when a crowd favorite got played. As if the band needed any additional adversity, their set concluded with Carl Newman inexplicably slicing open one of his fingers. He noted with irony that at the very least, his “blood all over the setlist” made it something of a collector’s item. It was an oddly fitting end to their portion of the evening.

SET LIST:
Twin Cinema
Use It
July Jones
Jackie
Graceland
From Blown Speakers
The End of Medicine
Testament to Youth in Verse
The Body Says No
Breakin' The Law
The Slow Descent Into Alcoholism
The Bleeding Heart Show
Sing Me Spanish Techno

Photo by Richard Folgar