Sound

I had the fortune of taking in a concert at Joe's Pub a lovely old room with much newfangled soundproofing that is attached to the public theater in NYC. Located on Lafayette street, it's a nice location -- and the just ceased summer rainfall made the evening quite a pleasant event. Again -- I'm hitting nearly the middle of August and I have yet to experience the swelter that I heard so much about. This morning there's even a nice cool breeze coming into my upper floor windows. Anyway -- back to Joe's Pub.

The concert in question was Tanya Donnelly, former lead singer of the band Belly, one time Throwing Muses conspirator, and some kind of relation to Kristin Hersh (whom I've seen a few times in concert). The opening act was Rachel Goswell (I think), who had a lovely foreign accent (British? New Zealand? I'll never know), but was what I like to call a "one note" songwriter. Essentially all of the songs she performed maintained the same tempo and tonalities, in such a way that no one song was distinguishable from any of the others. This, to my mind, is the mark of what separates great songwriters (one of the things, anyway) from capable or mediocre songwriters. If you can mix things up song to song, that shows a range of skill that helps to showcase whatever talent you may have. If you can do this same switch in the middle of one song, even better (and make it work for the song). She was sparsely accompanied by a lone guitarist. And one song featured a concertina, though, the melody played on it was simple and didn't vary either. Kind of emblematic of her performance. Though, to be fair, she had a lush and gorgeous voice and might just need some time to mature as a songwriter. There seem to be (the more music I see) an entire genre of women who fall into this clique -- the "one note songwriter." I'm thinking it's just a young songwriter virus more than something intrinsic about NYC, though.

In any case, Donnelly took the stage and began with a number of songs that I hadn't heard before. Which would've been fine, except the sound board operators at Joe's Pub seemed to lack even the basic awareness of what constitutes a mix. The piano that accompanied her was overwhelmingly loud to the point that you couldn't even make out some of the words that she was singing. The reverb washed over everything. So much so that the monitors were reverbing back to the front stage speakers. Maybe the room was poorly designed acoustically (it certainly was poorly designed for seating and standing purposes), but the mix was atrocious. Part of the set was disturbed by what sounded like a slightly flat guitar (hers, I believe) but she may not have noticed because the mix was of such poor quality. The instrumentation that was used -- guitars, steel pedal guitar (?), kurzweil keyboard, seemed to compound the wavelength of soundwaves instead of separating them out into distinct tones. This is, perhaps, why a simple drum, bass, guitar combo works so well -- each takes on a separate range of tone that doesn't conflict with the other. The steel pedal guitar had the added disadvantage of turning most of the songs into a country & western lilt, which again could've been due to a mediocre mixing job. Some of her songs stand out and keep ringing in your head after the show is over, and her vocal range (take note Rachel Goswell) during the song and between songs is outstanding -- as well as her ability to go from loud to soft, slow to fast, and make it synchronize with the meaning of her lyrics. At the end of her first a capella (save for an overwhelmingly washing reverbed piano) song ended with her own child crying out from the audience toward her, and eliciting a slight smile. At least, I assumed it was her child. If not, some poor mother should be careful what kind of sonic mixing atrocities they expose their offspring to -- they might grow up to mix as poorly as the fellows at the board at Joe's Pub. Hint to future sound board operators everywhere: If it doesn't sound quite right, adding more reverb doesn't automatically make everything better.