Brightest Young Things

all words: Phil Runco
all photos: Julian Vu

One of my favorite techniques of concert marketing is to slap “An Evening with…” onto the front of the bill.

“Going to the Styx concert?”

“Concert?  Nah man, I’m spending ‘An Evening with Styx.’”

I suppose it’s meant to imply that the twenty or thirty or fifty dollars you’re shelling out will purchase you something beyond a run-of-the-mill concert, something intimate, something shared between audience and performer.  Something special. Flipping through the BYT archives finds more than a few examples of such Evenings, and I wonder how many of them ended with audiences believing they had been treated to something extraordinary.

Jens Lekman’s performance at the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue on Wednesday was not “An Evening with Jens Lekman.”  But if it had been, I don’t think many would have left feeling unsatisfied.

I can’t speak for those stuck three rows deep in the balcony, or for the uninitiated Lekman fan, but from where I was sitting, and with a fairly well-grounded appreciation for the Swedish singer’s catalogue, it felt like a night pretty damn close to special.

Oh you’re so fanboy, Phil. Well let me explain.  Let me explain.

Almost four years have passed since last we saw Lekman. It was the spring of 2008 and he was at the Black Cat, delivering a high-flying set backed by a tight squad of musicians capable of recreating the Technicolor snap, crackle, and pop of the painfully endearing Night Falls on Kortedala.  (Look ma, no samples!)

Wednesday promised something decidedly different from the outset. The bustle, chatter, and clanging bottles of a typical venue were obviously nowhere to be found on such holy ground.  Well, apparently that flies in the basement, but not upstairs, where the audience filed into pews with nothing but official Sixth & I bottles of water (!) and hushed reverence.

Curious gazes surveyed the modest set-up: a microphone at center stage, an acoustic guitar and a smaller acoustic guitar besides it, and a drum kit in the background.  Conclusions were being drawn: not solo Jens, not full-band Jens, something in between.

Lekman appeared, his red and blue madras shirt tucked into slightly oversized, stiff jeans. Accompanying him was Addison Rogers, a burly and bearded hunk of drummer who with an easy smile and a surprisingly tender voice would handle most all of Lekman’s backing vocals.  (The audience would be called upon to assist Lekman with old favorites “Sweet Summer’s Night on Hammer Hill” and standard sing-along “Pocketful of Money.” They would need little encouragement.)

The two set about reimagining Lekman’s ornate chamber pop as something stripped down and immediate.  For a singer whose cult of personality is already central to his popularity, the setup provided unmitigated access to Jens.  It was the kind of thing that might get chewed up in the wrong environment, but here, the crowd ate out of his hand, too rapt even for catcalls.

Aside from a few songs plucked from Lekman’s mid-decade EPs (“I Saw Her at the Anti-War Demonstration”, “Black Cab”, the aforementioned sing-alongs), the majority of the set focused on material from Lekman’s forthcoming (at some point) third LP, and songs that didn’t make the cut.  Those latter songs – “An Argument with Myself” and “Waiting for Kirsten” – were recently released on Lekman’s An Argument with Myself EP, and the fact that both are absolute gems bodes well for quality of the proper LP.

But such speculation wasn’t quite necessary, as we were treated to some of the record's songs.  Lekman opened with the hushed and devastating “Every Little Hair Knows Your Name”, which along with the equally so “Cowboy Boots” (“In my next dream, I want a pair of cowboy boots / The kind that walks the straightest and the most narrow route / Anywhere but back to you”), hint that the optimistic – or at least resigned – Lekman of “The End of the World is Bigger than Love” won’t pervade on the new record.  Get ready for some gloriously sadsack shit.

Less morose – but pathetic in its own way – was “I Broke Up a Fight”, which found Lekman, um, breaking up a fight at the stairs of the Sydney Opera House. But this being Lekman, “breaking up a fight” meas rushing to intercede in a confrontation and inadvertently letting out a shriek so shrill (“like a 12 year-old”) that everyone feels awkward and has to laugh, thus disarming the conflict.  And this being Lekman, he made a song out of it.

Such is what sets Lekman apart from almost everyone right now: his ability to take something so banal, and turn into something utterly sublime.

Take “Waiting for Kirsten”, a tune about Lekman trying to track down Kirsten Dunst (or “manically stalking her through the night”, as Lekman would explain on Wednesday) during her stay in Sweden for the “Melancholia” shoot.  It’s not a remarkable story; Lekman never get the girl.  Yet Lekman uses one detail – Dunst’s being turned away from Gothenburg night club – as jumping off point for a discussion of his country’s principles on equality (“In Gothenburg we don’t have VIP lines / In Gothenburg we don’t give a shit about who you are”) and shifting social dynamics (“Cause times are changing, Kirsten / Göta Älv is slowly reversing / They turned a youth-center into a casino / They drew a swastika in your cappuccino”).  And every time the song threatens to go over the top, he pulls it back to the plot of his night’s pursuit.

Lekman may make it sound easy, but these songs were clearly labored over.

It’s a skill he’s honed, of course.  The material that preceded Night Falls on Kortedala can be fantastic, but hearing them among the newer songs at Sixth & I makes them feel pedestrian by comparison.  I love “Black Cab” and “I Saw Her at the Anti-War Demonstration”, but they could have been written by Stuart Murdoch or Jonathan Richman.  Only Lekman is capable of a “Waiting for Kirsten”.

But what of Night Falls on Kortedala on this night? Lekman made the audience wait until his set’s closer to hear anything from his breakthrough record.  It was on the previous song – “Golden Key”, another new one – that he had dusted off the sampling pad that had sat dormant up to that point, and he used it to flush the synagogue with the Motown backbeat and syrupy strings of “The Opposite of Hallelujah”.  After a night of Jens Lekman: Singer-Songwriter, it was a sudden reminder of his very Swedish ability to mischievously repurpose schmaltzy old songs and choruses for his own purposes.  “Right,” it dawned on. “I forgot he’s quite good at that too.”

He continued down this path in his first encore, working from samples of clubby tropicalia for a Ten City cover “That's the Way Love Is” into his lush “Sipping On The Sweet Nectar”.  A full spectrum of lights flashed furiously at Lekman’s feet as he danced around the stage, shaking a tambourine to the busy beat. Lekman lifted both arms and tilted side to side, airplaning off the stage as the song played out.

There was one more encore in Lekman, and he would go it alone.  The performance closed with “Pocketful of Money”, but it was a choice of “And I Remember Every Kiss” that was truly inspired.  After the excess of the second encore, reimagining Night Falls on Kortedala’s most bombastic composition as a simple ballad?  Brilliant.

Oh you’re so fanboy, Phil. Well maybe I am.  Maybe I am.

Lekman was preceded on the night by Geoffrey O’Connor, who gave a fearless and magnetically awkward performance. O’Connor makes indie pop as the leader of Crayon Fields, but solo his material – while certainly still fey – draws from a sleeker 80s palette.  He relied on a slow, wet pulse of a drum machine, often singing over his programmed beats without accompaniment, only to interrupt his singing for a romantic electric guitar solo.

Ironically, his music often recalled the stylized melancholy of Sweden’s defunct Honeydrips, who opened for Lekman at his last DC appearance. At other times, there was a sleazy leer to his songs, not unlike the flickering neon of Pulp’s This is Hardcore.

O’Connor was all over the place.  Literally. He crooned lonesomely at back of the stage, he peered over the stage, he ventured out into the crows twice, stroking audience members as he passed.

When the Australian singer conversed with the audience, his humor was so dry that you would be forgiven if you thought he was the one fighting the language barrier.  “I thought this was a fun city,” he remarked, playfully mocking the crowd. “This is where George Washington came went to get lucky.”

Whether or not part of his performance was lost in translation, it was hard to look away.

Previously in Live DC:

• 5/16: LiveDC: Mark Lanegan @ 930 Club
• 5/16: LiveDC: Horse Feathers @ Black Cat
• 5/16: LiveDC: M. Ward/ Lee Ranaldo @ 930 Club
• 5/16: Photos: Dance In The Circle @ Dupont Circle
• 5/16: LiveDC: The Cranberries @ 930 Club
• 5/15: LiveDC: Esperanza Spalding @ Howard Theatre
• 5/15: LiveDC: Opeth & Mastodon @ Fillmore
• 5/15: LiveDC: M83 w/ I Break Horses @ 930 Club
• 5/14: PHOTOS: Metal Lords feat. Rob Zombie & Megadeth @ Merriweather
• 5/14: GIVEAWAY: ART AFTER DARK @ Art Museum of the Americas