The Manhattan Project
Morning Roundup: Second Helpings Edition
Compromise Uncertain on Same-Sex Marriage Law
Fire at 17th and L NW Forces Evacuations
Sculpture Garden Ice-Skating Rink Remains Closed
It’s pretty remarkable how much one performance can change your perception of an artist. Take Patrick Wolf. Prior to his first ever show in the District this past Monday night, we might have classified him as a musician whose sensibilities lie somewhere between electronic music and Baroque pop. We now know, however, that while stuttering, glitchy beats sometimes take precedence on his albums, the heart and soul of his songs lie in the string arrangements.
Similarly, we might have logically assumed that Wolf’s onstage persona would be pretentious, self-absorbed or even standoffish, due to his characterization by the media as an enfant terrible. Shows what we know: throughout Monday night’s set Wolf was relaxed, affable and downright funny, occasionally stopping to laugh at his own dramatic posturing. And given the onstage unraveling of his live band during his last U.S. tour, we never expected Wolf’s band to be quite so loose and jovial on stage. Monday night’s performance challenged our perception of Patrick Wolf in just about every regard save for one: we still think he’s one of the most inventive young songwriters around.
Getting the night off to a suitably eclectic start, opening act and fellow Brit Bishi certainly helped pave the way for the main event. Anyone walking into the room during her set would have been treated to the following sight: Bishi onstage in a flamboyant gold costume with pointy shoulders, plucking away at a sitar strapped to her front like a guitar while awash in the reflected light of a disco ball. Most songs found her playing sitar and singing over jarring club beats, which she played from an iPod. While her music was not unlike that of club/house artists with pronounced Indian influences (think Panjabi MC but with live sitar and vocals) her stage presence suggested that she’s more songwriter than DJ. All in all, it was an engaging, if atypical, set and judging by the applause that she received before exiting the stage, most of the folks in attendance felt the same way.
Bishi’s costume may have initially turned heads but Patrick Wolf certainly saw to it that he wasn’t preemptively upstaged. After his four piece band had already taken the stage in formal attire (the upright bassist wore a tux), Wolf emerged from the darkness, looking like a kid who had pieced together a costume from his mother’s closet in preparation for a game of cowboys and Indians. Wearing a only a child-sized vest and a homemade garland above the waist, his body covered in glitter and his Strawberry blond mop decorated with feathers, the tall, gaunt Wolf certainly commanded attention. Sitting on a stool at the front of the stage, he lazily plucked out the opening line of “Wind in the Wires” on a ukulele, the band slowly falling in line behind him. The song took its time building up tension before Wolf belted out the chorus, his voice every bit as dramatic and rich as on record.
Following up with the opening “Overture” from this year’s The Magic Position, Wolf grabbed a violin and engaged in a string-on-string duel with his violinist. He then walked back over to the mic and sang while balancing the violin under his chin, taking occasional swipes at the strings with his ragged looking bow. “Teignmouth,” one of the highlights from 2005’s Wind in The Wires, found the band substituting analog for digital, the drummer’s pounding toms standing in for the song’s shuffling drum machine beat. Though Wolf’s lyrics — especially in his earlier work — sometimes smack of adolescent angst, his soaring voice manages to communicate an undeniable sincerity in the existential longing of couplets like “So when the birds fly south/I’ll reach up and hold their tails/Pull up and out of here/and bridle the autumn gales”. Granted, Wolf has a flair for the melodramatic but he makes up for this fact by selling songs like “Teignmouth” with an almost tangible conviction. One gets the feeling that he really would fly away with those birds, if only he could.
At first, “Bluebells” seemed like the night’s first misstep. A multi-layered composition of piano, ukulele and electronic sounds, Wolf had no choice but to rely on samples to provide the backbone for the verses. This made the song sound a bit pre-fabricated at first but the band managed to overpower the samples on the chorus, keeping in front of the pre-recorded bits for the rest of the song. Meanwhile, “Paris,” from Wolf’s dark debut Lycanthropy, started out with a familiar duo of violins but instead of exploding with a skittering beat and fuzzed-out guitar, the song found its way to an uplifting string arrangement. In this new context, "Paris" felt triumphant rather than claustrophobic and placed an added emphasis on Wolf’s dare to “come to joy.” At the song’s close, Wolf continued into the brief interlude that caps off the song on record; though the band members looked as if they had been caught off guard, they followed his lead immediately, without missing a beat.
At this point in the set, the lupine singer took a moment to explain that this was his first ever time in Washington and sheepishly admitted to not knowing much of our fair city outside of what he reads in the papers. He then rhetorically stated that living in Washington must be like sitting at the doorstep of power, before laughing at the obviousness of his own observation. “This is like when you walk up to someone with a broken leg and say ‘You’ve got a broken leg, don’t you?’” Despite his limited knowledge of D.C., Wolf still saw fit to extend an olive branch to the District’s most famous resident. “We put George Bush on the guest list,” he quipped while scanning the room. “I want to do a duet with him…maybe he’ll show up for the encore.”
Coasting on the light mood in the room, Wolf threw in a bit of substitution on “Pigeon Song,” singing “Washington, did you have to take my child away?” before breaking character and laughing when a sample of fluttering pigeon wings emanated from his laptop. It wasn’t fun and games for long, however: the distorted synth line of “Tristan” sounded as grimy live as it does on record and the pounding beat got more than a few bodies moving. Wolf followed up with “Accident and Emergency,” an electro gem turned orch-pop romp. Substituting a Pizzicato melody for the recorded version’s high-pitched rattle, the band managed to re-envision one of the highlights from Wolf’s catalog without sapping any of the energy. “The Libertine” was similarly altered, the song’s pace quickening until it sounded like a Romanian folk tune. “I was kind of born half-Jewish,” Wolf joked afterward.
Though Monday’s set leaned heavily toward older material, Wolf decided to close out the set proper with two songs from his most recent release. During “Magpie,” he was joined on stage by Bishi, who wisely eschewed imitation for her own vocal style when singing Marianne Faithfull’s lines. In the interest of bringing “a nocturnal end to the evening,” Wolf closed out the set proper with “The Stars,” the electronic blips and scattershot beat finally winning out on a stage lit only by the disco ball’s fragmented glow.
While we weren’t really sure what to expect going into Patrick Wolf’s first D.C. show, it should go without saying that we walked away quite impressed. Wolf’s strong Robert Smith-meets-Morrissey voice and charming stage presence, coupled with his skilled, nimble live ensemble made for a set that was by turns fun, engaging and uplifting. This might have been Wolf’s first D.C. gig but here’s hoping that it’s not his last. After all, the kid obviously has a thing or two to learn about our city. I suppose that’s just as well, though: turns out we didn’t know as much about Patrick Wolf as we thought we did.
Photo from Patrick Wolf's website.
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
tweet this
post to facebook
Post a comment (Comment Policy)