St. Vincent closed an afternoon at Central Park that was on the brink of rain for most of its three hours. Although any of us would have gladly traded rain for a competent sound booth.
Sadly I can't recall a worse sounding concert experience. I have seen every impromptu recording on Vimeo that she's done, so it's impossible to believe that her band couldn't play its own music. The bass guitar and synths were so overwhelming that they drowned out all other sounds to the point that we felt them more than we heard them. The drum set was always too loud in the mix and the only consistently good sound was Annie Clark's voice.
After two songs of being patient the crowd yelled obscenities at the sound booth, who gradually improved things from terrible to very bad. The crowd watched guitar breaks that they saw but could not hear. Annie punched her guitar and shook it like an epileptic, and yet all we heard were the horns and the deep bass notes of the synth. It felt like a retelling of The Emperor's New Clothes in which everyone was rooting for the emperor.
Somehow, Basia Bulat and Tune Yards sounded great. Watching Merrill Garbus create complex looped rhythms from only a bass, a snare and a mic stand on stage was mind-blowing. The drums would sound incongruous at first, as if she had made mistakes, but somehow everything would converge into climactic bass riffs and tribal screams. Tune Yards sounded fantastic and felt even better vibrating out of those huge speaker stacks. When they brought out their horns and three drummers the sound became even bigger and yet the mix remained crisp. The crowd was generally left in awe.
Tune Yards plays the Rock Shop tonight, you can get tickets here.
St. Vincent - Bicycle (buy
)Tune Yards
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