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Concert Thu Jan 18 2007
Haziest Shade of Winter
Musically, you might peg the Minneapolis-based artist Fog (a.k.a. Andrew Broder) as adrift in his own eccentric orbit, one that falls somewhere between the post-mod folk-pop of Beck and the Anticon camp of “outsider” hip-hop. His self-produced 2002 debut was an enigmatic affair, featuring a varied batch of tunes hung on Broder’s sampler-constructed noise collages and scribbly turntable noodlings. Lyrically, the album seemed a product of seasonal affective disorder -- a sketchily-told chronicle of reclusion and emotional turmoil during the darkest, bleakest depths of a Minnesota wintertime. “Is it depression or disease?” he mused in the opening verse of his debut single “Pneumonia,” concluding on the chorus that his life was “Hard to fix because / It took me so goddamn long / To figure out that I broke down.”
To say that Fog outings have since grown more structured and listener-friendly is to speak in pretty relative terms. His newer songs have become considerably more, well, song-ish -- richer in terms of invitingly nuanced narratives, and fleshed-out with more conventional musical arrangements. That aside, his music retains a loosely-grounded experimental edge. You can catch Broder and his band at The Abbey this Saturday night. By way of a comparable billing, Chicago’s Brenmar Someday will also be on the supporting bill, performing his own compositions of breakbeats and found sounds that -- in both sound and spirit -- harken back to the home-spun, ramshackle charm of Broder’s earlier work. The show starts at 10pm; and tickets are $8 in advance, $10 at the door.
