The Swell Season

Amy LaVere and The Swell Season
Gramercy Theatre sucks

This was my first concert at the nearby Gramercy Theatre otherwise called the Blender for some unknown reason. Amy LaVere opened with her base and amazing voice. She has this retro sound that reverberates like a wonderful violin with southern soul. She's collaborated with the Squirrel Nut Zippers and her songs a pure melancholy fun. She brings a slap-that-base style to slightly twangy ballads. Killing Him was a real pleasure from her new album. She sang about seven songs before yielding the stage.

After seeing the movie Once, I fell for the music of Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová. They are now touring as The Swell Season. I enjoyed their standards from the film album with a few fun additions. My favorites included a song about Banana man that Hansard wrote for his niece who was getting a little tired of all the sad songs and "star star" from his work with The Frames.

Unfortunately the venue, while wonderfully smallish with some great stadium seating, was acoustically and auditorily challenged. Hansard continually joked, but with intent, about the rock-like reverberations of the AC system. I think they finally turned it off. But even in Amy LaVere's set and during several songs of The Swell Season, certain instruments were poorly patched in and tended to either whine, squeal, or dominate over the other instruments and vocals. While this was annoying, it wasn't nearly as irritating as the audience.

Worse was the VIP section right in front of me. The eight jerks who finally showed up during the first few songs of Swell's set were not there as fans or even interested music buffs. Four of the eight were guys who proceeded to take out their Blackberrys and other PDAs the moment they took their seats. And they kept playing with them like adolescents just learning how to masterbate. After three or four straight songs with these four blue screens mucking with my peripheral vision, along with encouragement from another fan behind me, I asked them to put their toys away. This lasted for awhile only to have two of the guys leave, likely to check their phallic replacements elsewhere, only to be replaced by two other nimrods, one of whom pulled out his colored screen stroke machine which he kept out through the entire encore set! Argh, how I hate these a#$holes. Still, I was able to enjoy the music despite the less-than-idyllic setting.