Thread: Boston 5/22
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Old 05-24-2007, 08:41 PM   #73
Salem
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Join Date: May 2007
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With brilliance, Damien Rice arranges and rearranges old songs and new revealing a genius not recognized by me in years. Damien is smart, amusing, and unassuming. Even his t-shirts on sale in the lobby illustrate an unabashed lack of self-promotion. Neither his name nor his cd or song titles appear on the purple and brown cotton jerseys. Only his signature elephant graces the shirt. It's as if recognition of this symbol, to those in the know, permits entrance to a secret club whose one initiation rite is quite simple: grasp the music and you enter a place of astounding, limitless creativity.

I saw Damien Rice's concert Tuesday, May 22, 2007 at the Opera House in Boston. The show was about an hour and 40 minutes long with no opening act. How to put his show into words? I should earn a Pulitzer if I do him justice. I suspect I am not up to the task before me. Nonetheless, I will try.

On a small, dark theater stage, a group of five musicians including Damien file out from the wings and take their places: drum set, bass, keyboard, microphone, grand piano, cello, and guitar. They begin playing as the lights come on here and there creating visual effects supporting and combining with the vocals that whisper to us, shout at us, and soar above us in graceful arcs. The drums rumble, they snap, they clang and clash with cymbal bursts and ripples. The guitars strum and pluck and chant with chords and voices of their own. The bass moans, thunders, and opens our bodies from underneath traveling upwards. And the cello soothingly scratches our skin relieving an itch with which we'd long ago learned to live. Once relieved, we crave the mewling bowing crossing strings heavy and delicate straining high and bellowing low. Damien stands center stage before a stand with two microphones: one standard, the other affected. Darkness around the band suggests ghostly spirits at work, at play. Two bright, white stage lights illuminate Damien on either side from behind. Unsaintly backlit, he confesses his sins, his pains, his longings, and his humanity. Crying out to God and to us, do we hear him? Do we feel him? Do we know him? From his lips to our ears, our eyes, and our skins, how can we not love him and see ourselves and our own sins, pains, and longings? How can we not love ourselves as a result of his naked offerings? Light changes. A funnel of dusty, saintly light pours down around him from above. He and we are forgiven and continue on to a new song.

Full stage is visible now with a bright background of red light. Later now, the background is bright blue and yellow-green sunflower pollen dances upon the musicians. His "one happy song" as he announced pours over us. It is hard to stay seated. My body wants to be up and moving with another. But enough of that, there is more human fumbling to reveal. Anyone can sing a happy song, but who can so honestly expose frailties, delicacies, moments we'd prefer to forget but resign to die over and over again as our memories attempt to impose a childlike "do over" upon our human disgraces. Love, rejection, insecurity, cowardliness, desire… it's all here bolded and unfolded before us to behold with him or through him as his silhouette, now the height of the building, mimics him from behind. My pain was his pain too once just as my passion and my love, my feeble attempts to attract an other, my hits and my misses. Damien presents them all to us on soft and clanging metal trays made of cymbals bound with cello strings. Bold and bolder, meek and meeker on he goes alone without Lisa Hannigan who some thought defined his sound only for us to discover that she was merely another instrument wound around his rhythms. Although I did not miss her last night, I would welcome her return if she should per chance visit. I look forward to the cd she is presently recording. Damien, however, proved that he is the man behind the curtain in all respects. It's been a day since his show, and I already crave another. In the meantime, I have his cds and a purple t-shirt with an elephant on the front to help me pass the time.
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