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'Music - the art of combining vocal or instrumental
sounds (or both) to produce beauty of form, harmony
and expressions of emotion.'
So what's live music? An anomaly, that's what. It neither
lives nor breathes, nor exists in any other moment than
the time it disrupts the air particles on the way to
our ears. But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe music is alive,
maybe Yo La Tenga killed it, buried it, then
tour the world to peddle a show in which they coax it
back out for our listening pleasure. Maybe I'm mad,
but that's how it felt at the Roadmender on Thursday
- like a spectator wandering in on some strange cemetery,
a melody buried in a box on stage under an ethereal
digital landscape of sampled noise.
Kaplin, Georgia Hubley and James McNew are the multi-instrumentalist
undertakers entrusted with alternate responsibilities
- first Georgia awakes the distant song with the call
of her tribal drums, coupled with angelic backing vocals
to lure us in curly-haired, bespectacled James McNew
is the Egor of the group, frantically switching between
keyboards, drums, vocals and basslines which switch
from heart-crushingly beautiful to deep down and demonic.
Meanwhile Ira gets his Frankenstein schtick from veering
across the stage in a stooped feedback-drenched stupor,
screaming and harmonising in equal measure while he
wrestles his guitar to the ground. He drags the tunes
out kicking and screaming in a whirlwind of pyschedelia
until they burst out, free, to form soaring melodic
pop songs of grace and splendour in equal proportions.
Then just when you feel safe, YLT go back on the attack,
grappling with a load of prog-rock nonsense until the
meaning is buried again beneath a thicket of sound.
Art or music? Dead or live? YLT don't bring answers,
they sale across the Atlantic from New York Indie obscurity
to soundtrack your nightmares and accompany your dreams.
Relevant sites:
http:/www.yolatengo.com/
Natasha House for Crud Magazine 2004©
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