They blew the opener, and lived to tell about it. The second of two opening acts didn’t strum his guitar once during his set, and still won over some hearts. It was a night where all’s forgiven in advance, and the obsequious audience had everything to do with it (picture it: the guys all look like Alan Ginsberg (throughout various portions of his career, of course), and the girls were either bookish aerobics leaders, Sharon Tates or modern Emily Dickinsons).
Marla Hansen, violinist of Lekman’s band, opened. She instinctively told the crowd that they were great, but her set had to compete heavily with the white noise of conversation. PIty the opening bands that play the Logan Square Auditorium, because it takes at least two opening acts for hipsters to trade stories about the latest shows they’ve seen, and their favorite band’s side projects.
Theoretically, I have a problem with bands (read: musical acts comprised of at least one person) whose live show consists entirely of hitting ‘play’ on a laptop and singing into a microphone. I guess I’d better get over that old-fashioned hang-up… Honeydrips (aka Mikael Carlsson) has some lovely songs, though it would be nice to engage the audience with something in a live show that a download can’t offer.
By the time the audience was done impressing itself with indie insider-trading, Lekman took the stage with a smaller sortie than in his November appearance, and relied to a heavier degree on the laptop, which wreaked havoc on the set opener ‘I’m Leaving You Because I Don’t Love You.’ But for that blunder, they expiated with a lively ‘Opposite of Hallelujah’, infused by the Chairmen of the Board’s ‘Give Me Just a Little More Time’. Digital gimmickry validated, the band, after an anecdote from Jens about the ’silly’ song he wrote when he was 17, went into the second of their two biggest crowd-pleasers, ‘Black Cab’. This sounds, on paper, like too much too early, but Jens has a lengthy, solid cannon with someone’s favorite song always waiting to be played next. Most of us knew intimately every number in the setlist, so there was no protest to new song ‘New Directions’ about getting lost in Gothenburg. But as hungry for new material as is his audience, the real rejoicing was reserved for oldies but goodies like ‘Maple Leaves’ and ‘You Are The Light’. Nonetheless, it was the material from Kortedala, particularly ‘Nina’ and ‘Shirin’ that made so clear why it is one of the top albums of last year (my personal favorite).
Jens’ act thrived on the intimacy that was not possible at his other big Chicago appearance in Pitchfork, and the verbose audience was particularly attentive when the band left Lekman alone to play ‘Shirin’ and ‘Friday Night at the Drive In Bingo’ before the faux close of the set. If the band was a little desultory (which is not the pejorative it usually is), Jens’ quieter moments confirmed his gifts as a confident songwriter and performer, much more at home with 1,000 people than with one.
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