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The pre-concert small talk centered on dating: ex-boyfriends/ex-girlfriends (getting over them), kicking things off (the advisability of concerts as first dates), and making out to opener Skye's sultry vocals (probably not as thrilling as lip-locking to Black Dice).
Understanding Matthew Herbert's latest CD, Scale, requires a certain sense of romance. Even if it also has a firm political message, the record is awash with the presence of Herbert's wife, Dani Siciliano. It's as though Herbert has reconciled his experimental/political thought with love's ability to make such things seem inconsequential. That's why "Harmonize" -- perhaps the most gorgeous song on the album -- makes an old friend a metaphor for the world (and the singer, its people). And that's why it's OK that Herbert's music makes us smile as well as think. No matter how much he laments political realities, his work still upholds the old adage that love conquers all.
I suppose, musically, there's no more appropriate genre for cliché than the stage musical. Its particularly sincere enunciation of the power of love can cause us to cringe, but, for a certain illustration of conventional feeling, it does its job. Scale takes up the showtune's brash exuberance without those soaring melodies; lyrically and musically, the album smarts the genre up.
This foundation comes across more strongly live, since the artist's whole method seems a mad formula not quite coalesced. The band onstage consisted of Herbert (surrounded by electronics), a keyboardist, a drummer, a guitarist, a vocalist, and two musicians who took care of brass and flute. Herbert explained at the end of the show: there was not enough money to bring the whole band out from the UK, so they corralled two New York jazz musicians to play their parts. It was unusual to see them reading from a score, a sight which only re-emphasized the extent to which Herbert's songs take jazzy tunes and lace them with extra layers.
But if that's the case, the reality if you will, then how much of Herbert's popularity is based on gimmickry? Placing glitches and newly-recorded crinkles over "Jazz/Nu-Jazz" (Herbert's MySpace descriptor of his own music) is thrilling, but how "left-field", or "experimental" is it really? But then, maybe this criticism digs a little deep: electronic swoops and stalls, accelerations and decelerations change the nature of the compositions at a fundamental level -- at least, that's the rebuttal.
Neil Thomas played the role of Dani Siciliano for the concert, substituting satisfactory lounge-smooth versions of most of the melodies, cut with anemic falsetto that fell a bit short of Siciliano's full-blooded disco wail. This threw us for a loop, since Scale is defined to such a large extent by its female persona (a persona that separates Herbert from the current trend in alt-dance, which puts macho/heavy/rock sounds together with a beat). To be fair, Thomas features on much of the recorded Scale as well -- while he usually plays second fiddle to the female vocalists, he does but provide an important base. Dressed to match Herbert, Thomas was confident but casual, allowing the melodies to adorn the songs -- an indication that compositions were anchored around Herbert, not the vocals.
But for songs where musicians were playing from sheet music, how much leeway was there, really, for the maestro to direct his disparate orchestra? Amazingly, the strain was felt only periodically, when Herbert wanted to change tempo dramatically or emphasize a particularly complex re-arrangement. For the most part, you'd emerge breathless from a song, wondering how he'd engineered those sounds from that ensemble. The tunes themselves were effortlessly enjoyable, and the alternately clicking and banging beats provided fuel for an active crowd of friendly, slightly dorky enthusiasts. The calmer "Movie Star" and "We're in Love" were particularly successful, full of warm, chugging sound.
In apposition to his brash, exuberant tunes, Matthew Herbert himself cut a modest, likeably nerdy figure in a gold velvet dressing gown, his balding, oversized head reminiscent of a caricature waiting to be drawn. He shirked limelight, crouching behind an elaborate computer/keyboard/mixing panel rig while guitar or horns or vocals took turns in the spotlight. With an exaggerated, embarrassed movement he covered his ears at the shriek of feedback from the speakers that seemed to echo a snippet of each tune in the space between, as if clearing the computer's memory of the assembled samples used in the previous song.
But of course, we know by now that Herbert can own a dance floor with as little as the flick of a fingertip to his PowerBook (the logo was covered up with a strip of duct tape). He only let loose once, creating a banging house track out of the crinkling of a soft drink can. As the concert degenerated towards more loose, fun experiments, he offered us small moments of revelation: sampling the audiences' collective "Aah" on middle C and twisting it into a crunchy beat; paying tribute to the band in a relaxed jazz encore, each member improvising skillfully; and, in the send-off, allowing Thomas to offer an extended lesson in beatboxing.
In the end, Herbert's live show does what any concert should: it augments our understanding of the artist's work, simultaneously increasing our appreciation for his technical prowess and exposing some of the mechanics for easier dissection. Oh, and what's the title of this review about? It's how Herbert opened the show, recording syllables of that message out of order, building up a sing-song welcome of elongated vowels. It seemed he wanted to add "ladies and gentlemen" somewhere in there but it didn't quite fit, and just as the flowing line repeated, it momentarily spun out of control.
What Herbert is doing in the live setting is incredibly complex, and though these small strainings of time and genre bow beneath the completeness of the artist's vision for each song and the force of his beats, moments of doubt are perhaps unavoidable. In between such moments, however, Herbert transforms what could be a musical or classic-film score into ripped paper/disco revelation.
— 11 September 2006
