Tune-Yards, November 2 at the Music Box

The Tune-Yards are (yet) another band that I would have missed if not for Carla.  There's a chance that I might have gotten the album after I read about all the hype around it but I may not have had the patience to stick with it long enough to get through the weirdness and find the brilliance in it.  As it was, Whokill became an album that I kept playing and it ended up as my #1 album of the year.  I don't know if I could listen to a lot of albums that are as far out there but that one was just the right amount of strangeness that made most of everything else I heard stale and boring.  I figured Merrill -- basically, the band in one person -- would be just as weird in concert and I was right, though I don't know if I would have been truly disappointed if she was either more or less weird live.  Of course a lot of the album is about the production and that usually means it will be canned in concert but Merrill made it more of a live experience by looping her voice and the minimal instruments she used.  There’s a skill in that.  She was also touring with only a few other musicians, barely enough to make a band, including (and mostly) two guys that alternated percussion (mostly hitting things, not necessarily instruments, with drumsticks) and saxophones.  Merrill also made it a visual thing, with face-paint and day-glo all over everything.  If you’re going to be weird, go as far as you can with it.  The concert experience could have been just the album itself but she played stuff that wasn’t off Whokill and she didn’t even attempt to recreate what we’d already heard, just going off and doing her own thing, sometimes offering something familiar, sometimes just off in her own zone which we could only peer into for a moment.  And it was an experience as unique as the album, though the album will stand and live on as an odd but amazing artifact from the year, one that won’t be repeated, even by Merrill herself and whatever band she wanders away with after this rush of relative success, as she’s surely an artist who will do her own thing, especially since her own thing has taken her this far.  (And no, I'm not going with that weird, horrible capitalization that she usually uses for the band's name.  Weird is one thing but proper English is another.)  Cut Chemist opened the show.  We got in late, after eating dinner next door, and we regretted seeing only the second half of his set.  It was a deft mish-mash of a lot of different sounds, a great compliment to the headliners, with a visual element (images on a screen), adding some real artistry to what could have been just another DJ filler set.  I hope that was a really good meal.

Tune-Yards’ set-list:
"My Country"
"Es-So"
"Powa"
"Real Live Flesh"
"Fiya"
"Bizness"
"Gangsta" (with Cut Chemist)
"Hatari"
"Killa"
"You Yes You"

"Party Can (Do You Want to Live?) "