Alienation and Despair - Music Reviews
Alienation and Despair - Music ReviewsAt precisely 7:00, the crowd stood up. For the previous half-hour or so, Shibuya's On Air West had been filling up, and people had been sitting on the floor. The audience was mostly young, mostly hip (in a flares-and-cool-haircut way), with what seemed like a disproportionately large number of women. And at seven, like clockwork, they all rose and moved forward. Because in Japan, shows start ON TIME. But, mercifully, Morphine didn't come out for another ten minutes, proving that not everything has to follow a schedule.
The trio walked casually on stage, accepting the applause and the cheers, bowing a couple times (it IS Japan, after all...), and picking up their instruments. While Mark Sandman checked his tuning, Billy Conway tested his drums, and Dana Colley fiddled with his reeds, the audience sat back and waited for the music. But instead of starting, Sandman gestured at Colley and said "Ladies and gentleman, DAAAA-NAAA COLLEY!" Which, of course, set off the clapping and hooting and whistling one would expect. But Sandman stepped back with a frown, and said, "I said... DAAAA-NAAAA COLLEY!" And, of course, the audience tried to outdo its previous clapping and hooting and whistling. Sandman nodded his approval, Colley looked a little sheepish, and then they started playing.
Sandman's two-string slide bass set up the gut-rumbling opening bars of "Have A Lucky Day", while the power of Colley's baritone sax put out the booming resonance that characterizes Morphine's sound. Billy Conway's drums are actually the sharpest element of that sound, even his bass drum punctuating things with a comparative brightness that accentuates and complements the depth of the bass and sax. And no matter how good your home stereo is, no matter how many times you've fiddled with your equalizer, no matter how many times you've cranked the volume to eleven and danced around your room playing air bass..... NOTHING compares to the live show. The bottomless depth of sound takes on a physical form that envelops you literally from head to toe.
Mark Sandman, like most of the performers who come to Japan as an end-of-the-summer-tour vacation/gig, does not speak Japanese. But, like everyone, he picked up a couple of the polite phrases, the ones like "Koonichi-wa" and "Arigato", you know the sort of crap. And he was pretty clearly at a loss for what to say between songs while he re-tuned that two-string bass. So at first he just sort of said nothing, and was answered by silence from the crowd. Silence. It was like you could hear a pin drop; an eerie experience in a club packed with 600 sweating Tokyo-ites. And as the show went on, those silences became more and more... well... reverent. Sandman realized after a while that even if they couldn't understand everything he said, this audience wanted to hear him talk, in addition to hearing him play. So after a few songs, "I'm Free Now", "Thursday", and "Candy", he did begin to talk a bit; joking "Thanks for coming, good night!" The audience groaned, as you would expect, and he responded, "Okay, just ONE more song. But it's a long one... about an hour and a half." Then Colley started into the tenor part for "Candy", and the show went on.
But there were still a lot of pregnant pauses throughout the show, where Sandman just sort of fed off the silence, establishing an almost witchy rapport with the audience, teasing them along, making them strain to hear everything he said to Colley and Conway. But even when he wasn't working the audience, he was still playing with them... because as they were straining to catch his comments to the other players, he wasn't saying anything; simply communicating with them by gestures, or by a raised eyebrow.
After "Different From The Rest" he introduced the next song by saying it was "...sort of experimental." With that, Colley picked up his tenor sax and strapped it on next to the baritone, then proceeded to play *both* instruments at once. No mean feat, that. After the experimental song, it was another new one, "The Imaginary Song". Both melodically and lyrically, this song is quite catchy, and displays Sandman's unique vocal style and wordsmithing ability to great advantage.
Next, yet another new one, "Hazel White", which Sandman localized in his introduction, saying it was "...the story of a nice girl from Kyoto who travelled to Tokyo... and fell in with... a BAD CROWD." Analyzing it without the benefit of repeated listening, and Sandman's introduction to the contrary, the song also seems to be a metaphor for the resurgence of heroin use in the States (but that's just my initial interpretation...). The equally-open-for-interpretation "Head With Wings" followed, with Colley's deft manipulation of the baritone sax adding a spine-shivering squawk at the bridge.
More new Morphine followed, "Get In Your Go-Cart", a song of sibling encouragement with a number of interesting hooks, including the mantra-like repetition of "Yes!" (which on the second chorus, Sandman cutely changed to "Hai!"), and Dana Colley abandoning his saxes toward the end to make engine-revving sound effects. After "Go-Cart" came the new song "Taxi", which featured another of Colley's two-sax specials.
"All Wrong" was next, and another debut, "This Is My Shame", during which Sandman seemingly abruptly stopped cold to glare at the audience and recite cryptically "If I am guilty, so are you. It was March 4th, 1982." Long silence, then he walked over to Conway's drum set, and suddenly the song was picked up from exactly where it had stopped. A couple choruses later, he did it again, stopping abruptly and staring at the audience like an angry schoolteacher and reciting "I got all the time in the world. I got all the time in the world to spare." This time, he held the pause even longer, leading some in the audience to mistakenly figure the song was over and begin scattered clapping, when he suddenly picked up the music again, this time taking the song all the way to its natural finish.
At this point, Sandman had the crowd in the palm of his hand, and began teasing them again... saying "You've been a great audience, thanks and good night... oh, all right, ONE more song, but that's it!" People had been calling out requests, and "Cure For Pain" kept coming up, with one Japanese fan saying "I'm dying! I need a Cure For Pain! Give me Morphine!" It was rather cute, actually. Sure enough, the next song was "Cure", which the audience received with a frenzied enthusiasm. This encouraged more in the crowd to shout titles, at which point Sandman turned to talk to Colley and Conway, then returned to the mic and asked for a request. Since it was Japan, and it is a great song, your own humble reviewer suggested "You Speak My Language". Sandman apparently agreed it made sense, and "Language" was next, followed by a hauntingly beautiful version of "You Look Like Rain". It was clear the show was winding up, and with a rollicking version of"Buena", the band went off. But after the obligatory stomping and hollering, they reappeared for an encore, with Sandman saying "Are you ready for... PART TWO?!" The encore was another new one, "Penetrate My Radar", another delightful romp through Sandman's twisted double-entendring lyrics. After the encore, the lights came up, and the bouncers came out (if you can call a 5'4" balding Japanese guy with glasses a bouncer, that is...), and the show was over. After a little while, while the roadies starting packing stuff up, Sandman came out to talk to the stragglers. One young girl fixed him with an extremely odd stare, just locked eyes with him, saying nothing, until he signed her notebook, and even then, still staring... very strange. Asked about where he came up with the idea for a slide bass, he said he had seen "...some drunk guy in a bar playing slide on a bass with a beer bottle. It sounded interesting, so I gave it a try. But it sounded better after I cut two of the strings off. It's kind of funny, everybody else these days is adding strings to their basses, getting six strings, eight strings, who knows how many strings, but I'm actually getting more sound from less strings." They'll be playing again tonight; a "mini-gig" at the HMV store in Shibuya, which has a little stage downstairs. I can't wait to get another fix...
slaught-bear