Decemberists Lou Barlow Norfolk & Western

When I arrived, Norfolk & Western's Adam Selzer was already performing, backed, I think (it was hard to see), by Rachel Blumberg of the Decemberists on drums and, well, a big tape deck. Selzer has a wonderful, cool, whispery voice, and his songs, which were unfamiliar to me, seemed to have the same modern, lushly orchestrated take on traditional folk as bands like Shearwater and, am, The Decemberists. Still, you don't come out to the club to hear taped music -- and the canned backing detracted, I thought, from the overall presentation. If you're going to have violins, bring a fiddler, I say -- and if you can't afford that, there's nothing wrong with just one guy and his guitar.

Or at least that was what I thought until Lou Barlow took the stage. Barlow, once of Dinosaur Jr., Sebadoh and The Folk Implosion, author of impossibly beautiful, tossed off songs like "Skull" and "Rebound", was uninspiring on this occasion. He opened his set by remarking that the first time he played Pearl Street -- with Dinosaur Jr. -- was in 1986. "That's when I was born," yelled someone behind me, making it clear that no one was going to let him coast on the basis of history. He played a series of stripped down, acoustic only songs, his guitar fading in and out of the sound system. Some of them sounded like they'd be really good band songs -- at least one had the minor-key hookiness of a Folk Implosion tune -- yet the overall effect was like one of those Sentridoh cassettes: poorly planned, sloppily executed, and only intermittently indicative of Barlow's songwriting genius.

I didn't recognize any of the tunes he played, either from Sebadoh, Folk Implosion or Sentridoh, and the set did not include any songs from his upcoming solo album (due out on Merge next year), either -- because, he said, "I just finished mixing it, and I'm sick of it...but it's great." There was some entertaining banter, though. Barlow told a story about how he and Eric Gaffney once came to a Buffalo Tom concert to heckle, an evening that ended with Gaffney up on stage singing EL&P's "Lucky Man" while Buffalo Tom played a song that sounded like it. The last song was dedicated to Barlow's dad, who was in the audience and had a birthday the next day. It was easily the best song of the set, at once revealing and guarded -- a story about a bike ride with dad that went horribly wrong. Like all the best Barlow songs, it lets the listener in, but only so far, piling on personal detail and history, then ending in a chorus "None of your damned business."

Then it was time for the Decemberists, who set the pace early on with their most rhythmic, early Costello-ish songs ("Billy Liar", the band's latest single, "The Sporting Life", which will be on the new album and "Angel, Won't You Call Me" from the Five Songs EP), then settled into their acoustic Castaways-period, country-ish sound, hitting favorites like "How I Dreamed I Was an Architect", "Lesley Ann Levine" and "Legionnaire's Lament". Frontman Colin Meloy introduced "Clementine" as a "country-and-western song", and encouraged audience members to find a sweetheart and "dance in a country-and-western manner". This being Northampton, the only couple to take him up on it (at least that I could see) was a pair of women, who two-stepped claustrophobically on the crowded balcony. "Bachelor and his Bride" and "Odalisque" followed, then a pair of California-city-themed songs -- "Grace Cathedral" for San Francisco and, obviously, "Los Angeles, I'm Yours". I had seen the band perform a lot of these songs before, a couple of years ago, so the main surprise for me was how comfortable they'd become with their live show. They have always been excellent musically, but the band has become markedly more charismatic and kinetic over time. This became especially apparent with "Chimbley Sweep", which came to life on stage in a way that it has never done on record, with solos from the bass player and the guitarist, and helium-altered vocals from Meloy. The Decemberists still approach their live show like drama club kids -- Meloy announced after this song that each of the band's members had created a new "rock move" for the show and each performed these moves with a sort of triumphant self-consciousness during this song.

That was it for the main part of the show. After the requisite stomping and whistling, Meloy returned to the stage for acoustic versions of "My Mother Was a Chinese Trapeze Artist" and "Red Right Ankle". The encore closed with "I Was Born for the Stage", one of my favorite cuts from Her Majesty, which begins with only Meloy and his guitar and slowly builds. Band members stole onto the stage, one by one, adding their parts and thickening the sound, until the song climaxed with that dizzying, feedback-laced frenzy that reminds me so much of "A Day in the Life". The crowd wanted "July, July", and I was surprised that the band didn't play it, but there could not have been a better ending than this.

Article by Jennifer Kelly. Photos by either Jenny or Bill Kelly (It's too late to check).