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to see me in my frazzled state, which was vaguely embarrassing. There were lots more familiar faces inside, though, and even if seeing Shearwater in NYC will never be like the nights in the front room at Emo's with Joanna and Summer Anne and Dylan and Phil and Dorothy, that eight-piece string section kind of totally made up for it.

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sed Ccwerecommend wi Ccwerecommend h Languages Rook, to further cement a reputation as a culty tour-de-force that will achieve gobs of critical acclaim, but never be wildly popular.

Which is a shame, really. But something tells me that the wide world isn't exactly ready for frontman Jonathan Meiburg's gorgeous falsetto vocals, stunning stage presence and byzantine story-songs -- not to mention the one-two punch of Thor Harris on any number of creepily beautiful percussive instruments and Kim Burke on bass, who, as ever, placidly, wickedly and beautifully keeps the whole performance on track.

But enough of my useless prattle -- you want to know about the actual show.

I'd never had the pleasure of seeing Michael Gira play a solo set before, and there's no way to describe how I felt during it all, except to say that he scooped out all the bullshit of my day -- of the past few months, even. I've recently been listening to the Angels of Light record Everything is Alright Here, Please Come Home a ton lately, and a massive dose of Gira's brand of the blues -- even if just for four songs -- was incredible to see and hear. He's the kind of performer who demands attention the moment he steps on stage, even when he hasn't yet sung a note. And he's aging handsomely -- his voice has mellowed to into an even bigger, booming instrument over the past several years. A song in his hands is something dredged up from the depths of the darkest corners of his, your, my soul and brought up into the light. The imperfections of his voice suddenly become the sharp edges of a perfectly cut diamond, almost too painfully beautiful to hear. An inopportune broken guitar string isn't a catastrophe -- far from it: Gira finished the song acappella without missing a beat, his voice both filling the room and crawling deep into my chest, pouring into the empty spaces I didn't even know were there to begin with. (Though, to be fair, perhaps the catastrophe was that the time spent switching out the broken string, however, robbed us of one more song.)

Gira, naturally, was quite possibly the best lead in for the latest incarnation of Shearwater -- we used to talk about how they transitioned from airy-fairy folksy to just plain evil over the course of a few years, which culminated in the incredible live shows that followed the release of Palo Santo. The band's a little less evil now, but no less intense. (I think this is most notably due to the absence of the taut and mercurial energy brought to the stage by former bassist/keyboard player/manic tambourine shaker Howard Draper. I didn't quite realize, though, how much I missed Howard until the second half of the set -- "Red Sea, Black Sea" really isn't quite the same without his demented turn on the tambourine over the chorus.)

But I'm getting ahead of myself here. The first half of the show was, as promised, Rook, played in its entirety with assistance from a string section, trumpets and harp. Though I'm currently quite enamored with the new album and think it is, quite clearly, the band's strongest and most challenging work to date, there were a few problems with this part of the set -- and there's a distinct possibility that I (and Pinkie) were the only ones bothered by these kind of nitpicky details. The sound mix left a little to be desired, though this could have been due to the problem of amplifying so many instruments on stage at once. The piano was too muffled while the drums were, at turns, too sharp and then completely inaudible. (I wanted to run down to the stage and throw the piano lid open; it seemed a shame to keep a grand closed in a hall that intimate ... perhaps when open it drowned out the strings?) This all wasn't terribly distracting once I got used to it, but compared to the mix, say, at the band's stunning set last summer as part of the city's River to River festival, the sound was pretty muddy and grim and, as Pinkie noted, a little too "adult contemporary" at times.

And, I'm not entirely sure that the projections, which relayed the story of the album's songs in some prettily-shot short films directed by Kahn and Selesnick (who also did the cover art for Rook) and starring multipercussionist/hammered dulcimer wrangler Thor as the archetypal last man, really worked for me. That is to say, I'm not sure that the music really needs this embellishment, and at times it was even a little distracting when I was trying to focus on the band's actual performance. If I didn't know better, I'd accuse them of precious pretentiousness, or even of using the projections as a crutch as they get used to the new lineup and new songs on tour, but I don't really feel that's the case -- and I even think that under better circumstances, all the parts of the whole may work well together. And, truth be told, we're very much looking forward to seeing Shearwater at a proper rock venue in June (not that seats aren't great, mind you, but they make the rocking out a little difficult) after they've had time to work out the new material on the road over the next month or so.

The second half of the show, on the other hand, more than made up for the slight weaknesses in the first bit; at the risk of slipping into yet another moment of over-sharing, I felt like revisiting Palo Santo and assorted b-sides (especially some of the older ones that the band played for years before recording them -- like my long-time favorite, the sinister and lovely "Mountain Laurel") was just what I needed after that ultra-fantastic Bellmer Dolls set a few weeks back that totally threw me for a loop and the deep-down blues that opened this show. I was perfectly primed for an emotional purge of the highest degree, and thus spent the last five songs or so completely in tears -- of fierece pride, for this band, who I love so much and of pain, too -- for my dead past that still haunts me when I least expect it to.

A few weeks back, I mentioned my little private aerie that I lived in after leaving my fiancé, before I moved to Brooklyn -- it was always really, really perfectly cold there (the air conditioning was new, and really worked) and I had ice blue bedding and there was tons of natural light that filtered in through porthole windows 15 feet up, and it was kind of like living in a ship sailing to the Antarctic. There were many, many nights I would come home from work in the spring and summer of 2006 and just blast Palo Santo (a clandestine promo of the Misra version of the release, mind you -- a burned CDr with a hand-written tracklist), ensconced in my perfectly cold studio flat, freezing out the parts of my life that I wanted to forget; consigning them to the furthest, most compartmentalized places of my brain and heart as dusk fell, making everything purple and dim until it all went black. And I felt that chill again as Shearwater moved backward in time for about half an hour, hitting the high points of that album. I'd almost very nearly forgotten that it -- that they -- got me through that terrible summer and fall, when I was so miserable and disjointed (really -- go read the posts from that time -- they're kind of ... frightening) as I tried to recover from the awfulness that had been the past five (ten?) years of my life.

I had to practically flee the venue when it was all over for fear that I would start crying all over again on some unsuspecting acquaintance -- I wasn't nearly as successful at avoiding post-show conversations this time around as I was a few weeks back, but I didn't regret most of them, as I had a chance to catch up with a few people I miss seeing because, uh, they kinda don't go to shows in basements in Williamsburg. Ever.

Speaking of basements in Williamsburg, I'm actually kind of sad to report that the Bellmer Dolls' residency at the Charleston has come to an end (though, they've got shows planned for the end of May and early June already, so we'll survive until then, I suppose!) -- as predicted, it was pretty freakin' legendary. The Choke were actually much better than I expected -- or more accurately, they're much better live than the tracks up for offer on their MySpace would lead you to believe; unfortunately, the performance does start to wear thin after a handful of songs, but what they may lack in sophistication and nuance, they more than make up for with some of the biggest doses of enthusiasm than I've seen in quite some time.

The jury's still out on Golden Triangle, though. Were they fucking amazing? Really terrible? Somewhere in between? What can you even compare them to, really --- save maybe if Throwing Muses were on K Records instead of 4AD? (Something tells me that about 14 people will understand that reference ... ) How about if we say the following: when it works, it really works (the psycho girl-group action that prompted Pinkie to mention the cold, unison vocals of Lansing Dreiden project LD Section 1), and when it doesn't (the falling-apart improvisational messes that reminded me of what I hate most about "Brooklyn" bands), it kind of feels like you're being beat over the head with affected oddness. That being said, Golden Triangle is definitely a band we'll keep our eye on in the future. And, if we could dispense any advice here, it would be to practice more -- until those falling-apart moments are an intentional part of the performance, and not an unfortunate side affect of your relative inexperience. (Really, it's not cool to leave your audience waiting for five minutes between songs without some kind of explanation. We understand technical difficulties; it's the silence that comes off as amateur-ish.)
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