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Tomorrow Never Knows Sat Jan 17 2015
Landlady Connected with Lincoln Hall on Friday Night
It's always interesting to learn the story behind an artist's songs. Partially because it gives you tidbits to obnoxiously throw into the conversation when a song comes on: "Oh, fun fact, when I saw him live, Vance told the audience that he wrote Snaggletooth about Sia" but also because it can honestly give new insight and appreciation into a band's tracks.
Brooklyn based collective Landlady opened for Hamilton Leithauser of the Walkmen on Friday night at Lincoln Hall, and lead singer/keyboard player Adam Schatz was throwing out some of the most interesting openings to his tracks I'd ever heard. Some of them instantly made my understanding of the song crystal clear. Before "The Globe": "This is a song from the perspective of aliens who are cutting up the Earth." Yep, yep and yep - that makes total sense. Others were a little more enigmatic and intriguing. Before "Girl": "This is a song about a man who is calling customer services about his defective sex robot...it's dedicated to my twelve year old cousin who's in the audience tonight." ...Huh.
The experimental rock collective (who list their genre as "surprise" on Facebook - well played) brought on a guest trombone and sax to supplement their normal keyboard, guitar and bass, and made their way through quite a few tracks from their 2014 album Upright Behavior and a smattering of pieces from their 2011 Keeping to Yourself. Playing to a progressively larger and larger crowd, Schatz finished it up by explaining that the last song was about loss and solitude - a universal idea for all, no matter who you are - and asked everyone in the venue to gather close to the stage and sing the mournful, "always, always" backing to the wistful, beautiful and brilliantly simple, "I wish that you were still around" chorus on "Above My Ground."
Even though the closing song was ostensibly about loneliness and solitude, the vibe in Lincoln Hall was clearly more about connectedness as Schatz came to the front of the stage to be near the audience who had crowded in close to help with the finale. Experimental rock isn't always the easiest genre to make accessible to a crowd, but Schatz does it with charm and ease.