Dark Star Orchestra @ The Variety Playhouse in Atlanta

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, the Grateful Dead were and are a force to be reckoned with—the blissed-out crystallization of a culture devoted purely to bliss itself. The Dead spawned not only the jam band concept, but the jam band culture, including the raggedy, tie-dyed legions of ubiquitous yet unassuming fans that remain still today determined to keep the dream alive.

Enter Dark Star Orchestra, self-described only as a band that “recreates Grateful Dead shows, song for song, live on stage.”  Yet to call DSO a mere cover band would be doing them a major disservice.  This aint no wedding ensemble folks, this is the pinnacle of devotion, supported by sheer talent and validated by the acceptance of preexisting fan base with very specific tastes.

Since 1997, DSO has performed hundreds of shows across the country, drawing heaps of critical praise for their impressively obsessive attention to detail. The band is known to actually recreate specific Dead shows in their entirety, with ardent artistic loyalty to the original pieces that has been said to wow not only the critics, but even the fiercest of Deadheads, including 5 members of the original band that have played alongside DSO. 

Stepping into the Variety Playhouse for Friday’s show, my first thought was, where did these people come from?  One thing’s for sure, the Deadheads are alive and well, and either I’m not going to the right places to find them in Atlanta or they’re a traveling contingent, following DSO across the country just as they followed the Dead in previous decades. Grizzly old guys with grey manes and foot-long beards mingle with young jam band-aids in dreadlocks and baja pullovers, swaying around like underwater plants and illustrating the 

incredible breadth of influence the Dead still hold, even sixteen years after their demise.

About halfway through a five-hour set that truly blew me away, the bear-like man behind me shot his Red Stripe-bearing fist in the air and yelled, “October 27, 1980! Radio City Music Hall!”  This man definitely did not have an iPhone anywhere on or around his person—he just knew.  As did the majority of other diehard heads in the room, I soon discovered.  “The next three songs will be ‘Truckin’,’ ‘Scarlet Begonias,’ and ‘Fire on the Mountain.’  Then there’s going to be a really epic drum solo.”

Sho’ nuff, there they were, nearly as clear and true as they must have sounded back in 1980, judging by the reactions of a crowd filled with people who would know much better than I.  Coasting along through the catchy shuffle of “Truckin’” to a rousing, jammed out version of “Johnny B. Goode” to a drum solo that was, indeed, epic, to a melt-in-your-mouth rendition of “Casey Jones” for dessert, DSO proved that they have earned their reputation as the next-best thing to a live Dead show.  And really, what could be better for the ultimate Deadheads than masterfully recreating the magic of their idols amidst a riled-up crowd of their own brethren?  These six grey-haired dudes are not only keeping the dream alive; they’re living it, too. 

Review & Photos by Hilary Cadigan

The Walkmen @ Variety Playhouse 1/13/10

Nearly busting my ass trying to get down my ice-encrusted front steps and all but skating to the Variety Playhouse through the virtual ghost town that is Atlanta four days after a five-inch snowfall, I arrived at The Walkmen concert very much in need of some musical defrosting. After enduring The Lower Dens’ underwhelming and rather cacophonous-in-a-bad-way opening set, it was time for Hamilton Leithauser and his men to take the stage.  A lovely stage, I might add, draped in velvet and bathed in soft aquatic-colored lights.

The Walkmen’s music triumphs in its ability to intertwine vocals and instrumentals in a way that feels at once intricately arranged and casually slapped together.  Hamilton’s voice gyrates from the dissonant, bellowing indie-rocker moan to the bluesy, woozy swoon of an old-time crooner.  There are flickers of anyone and everything—a Dylan lilt, a Waits rasp, a Sinatra swing—that come together into something uniquely familiar and familiarly unique.  And the band plays on: sometimes with seas of rolling drums and clanging guitars crashing up against walls of organ (second encore, “The Rat”), sometimes with buzzy little landscapes of spunky percussion and catchy hooks (Lisbon stand-out “Blue As Your Blood”).  It works.

In person, The Walkmen aren’t exactly what one might expect.  Which is to say, they weren’t what I expected. Hamilton Leithauser is undeniably a cutie-pie; however, he looked like he was dressed for a first meeting with his girlfriend’s parents, and aside from his O-face singing contortions, behaved accordingly, with a likable but slightly anemic stage presence bolstered by inoffensive clips of between-song banter.  “Every time we come to Atlanta, which has been about eight times, people always want to take us out after the show.  And every time, it’s always the same place… a strip club. What’s it called, the Carmichael? The Clearwater Club?” Hamilton racked his brain whilst unknowingly inciting a Clermont Lounge chant in the crowd below, which is in and of itself an accomplishment, if not necessarily a difficult one ‘round these parts. Finally: “Oh right, right! The Clermont Lounge!  Yes.  Well we’ve never actually been there, but maybe this time…” 

Something tells me that today Hamilton remains still tragically unaware of the fact that Blondie the 53-year-old stripper can crush an entire PBR can with her boobs. But I guess strip clubs are best referenced only in passing when dining with potential in-laws, so I’ll give him a break.  He also talked about the weather, but given the fact that our little snowpocalypse was enough to shut down the entire Atlanta public school system for a week, I’ll give him a break there too.

Overall, the show was a surprisingly subdued affair, albeit suffused with a not-unpleasant sense of timelessness.  Featuring a good chunk of their newest album, 2010’s Lisbon, amidst a smattering of earlier favorites—including whimsically anti-nostalgic gem “We’ve Been Had,” the first song the band ever wrote and the last one they played on Thursday—the show felt intimate and satisfying, if a bit lackluster.  Straightforward in the same way that Spoon shows can be (and not just because Hamilton looks like a slightly more nourished version of Britt Daniel), The Walkmen delivered a perfectly adequate rendition of their much-loved tracks, but didn’t manage to propel them to any mind-blowing new levels.  

Review by Hilary Cadigan
Photos by Max Blau

CocoRosie at Variety Playhouse (Atlanta, 9/21/10)

Part Anthropologie catalogue, part Exploding Plastic Inevitable, a dash of Puccini and a splash of Charlie Chaplin. Throw in some CrazySexyCool-era TLC for good measure and you might have some idea of what a CocoRosie concert feels like.

Yeah, they're pretty easy to hate upon for their whole prodigal émigré shtick, but on Tuesday at the Variety Playhouse in Atlanta, CocoRosie was totally captivating, providing a full-sensory experience of shifting sounds and enchanting visuals that truly blew me away.

In the center of the stage sat an old wooden crib with a slightly sinister-looking baby painted on the side, innovatively converted into a drum kit and flanked by a grand piano, a bright blue harp, a lopsided keyboard, and a table covered in a clutter of battery-operated children’s toys that would later be used as instruments. The place looked more like a pimped-out nursery than a music stage, and Bianca "Coco" and Sierra "Rosie" Casady matched their surroundings well, dressed up like little girls who just raided a fashionable mother’s decade-spanning closet.

Live, the freak-folky sister act succeeds where their recordings fall short, managing to draw listeners fully into the strange, carefully crafted little world they so clearly live in. Heady, uncanny, and slightly cloying, this place is a cosseted fantasy land of lovingly crayoned rainbows and expensive vials of Parisian patchouli. There are plenty of vintage costumes to try on. Come on in.

There’s something a little Flowers in the Attic about the whole affair, but from the floor of the Variety—where throngs of decked out, boozed up cult fans screeched their praises and even, in rare moments of composure, tossed flowers—CocoRosie seemed nothing short of fabulous. As did the truly fantastic beatboxing of lovable Vanilla Ice doppelganger Tez, who wore sweet flip-up sunglasses and possessed some serious skillz on the mic. His 10-minute solo during an intermission was one of the coolest parts of the whole show. 

Also worth mentioning, the stupid fake mustaches that Coco and Rosie have been shoving down our throats lately (gender-bending sensibility: thoroughly noted) were, happily, nowhere to be seen.

The Casady sisters have certainly retained the bond they nurtured back in Paris while recording their first album together, the appropriately titled La Maison de Mon Rêve (The House of My Dreams). Their most recent album, 2010’s Grey Oceans, has a similarly enchanting feel to it. Sierra’s classically-trained soprano bubbles up against Bianca’s grating warble, which kind of sounds like the voice of Danny Torrance’s finger in The Shining (“Red rum, red rum, red ruuummm…” You remember).

In Grey Oceans, the sisters toy with a widened range of influences, all spliced up and pasted together, with results ranging from the intricate beauty of medieval mosaics to the tawdry, gluey messes of overwrought decoupage.

The concert showcased this bold blending at its best. The lovely Judy Garland-esque chorus sandwiched between the mournful vocals, slow-jam percussion, and delicious brass accents of “Lemonade.” The lindy hop patty-cake cameo of “Hopscotch.” The gorgeously danceable “Fairy Paradise,” where smiling Sierra’s haunting coloratura sidles alongside a particularly delightful stretch of stoic Bianca-style lyricism in which “trance music makes the fairies dance.”

CocoRosie is what Tegan & Sara might become if they went to Devendra Banhart’s house, took a whole bunch of acid, and started believing in fairies. “Welcome to New Weird America,” the fairies would say. “You’ll like it here.”

Review & Photos by Hilary Cadigan

Tegan & Sara (Variety Playhouse, Atlanta 2/23/10)

When Tegan and Sara first stepped out onto Variety Playhouse’s vividly lit stage Tuesday evening, I was reminded of that iconic Diane Arbus shot of those creepy little twins standing side by side. With matching oversized gray button-downs, skinny black jeans, and brown pixie-mullets, the duo initially seemed somewhat mechanical, if not a little gimmicky. In an, “ah, the lesbian twins from Canada have arrived” kind of way. Nevertheless, the crowd—picture Lillith Fair gone hipster, with a sprinkling of enlightened teenyboppers and middle-aged Grey’s Anatomy fans—went wild. I, on the other hand, sandwiched between a particularly boisterous Lillith contingent and what appeared to be some kind of specially designated area for couples to make out, was alone, sleep-deprived, and slightly grumpy.


So there I stood, a lone sourpuss in a sea of amped-up superfans, wishing the individual behind me would aim her catcalling slightly away from my eardrum, when Tegan and Sarah strapped on their guitars and suddenly launched into an eclectic series of vibrant tracks from their new album Sainthood. Between the sparkly synth-driven electro-pop of “Alligator,” the pre-Blitz Yeah Yeah Yeahs vigor of “Northshore” and the delightfully volatile lyricism of “Sentimental Tune” (“Hard-hearted, don't worry, I'm ready for a fight/Unnerved, the nerve, you're nervous/Nervous that I'm right”), the new tracks were well-received and got the show off to a lively start. The band then moved into a stretch of older favorites, such as “Walking with a Ghost,” “I Bet It Stung,” and their biggest hit, “Where Does the Good Go,” inciting a surprisingly melodic audience sing-a-long that demonstrated the ardor of Tegan and Sara’s loyal fan base without alienating any of their more cursory supporters.

Tegan and Sara keep their songs short and sweet—nothing on Sainthood lasts more than 3½ minutes—allowing them to power through quite a few tracks in their 2-odd hours of stage time. Then again, a good chunk of that time transpired in their supposedly notorious banter. While the initial between-track comedy routines were of the lame “So this is Hotlanta? Feels more like COLD-lanta” variety, they eventually established with the audience a sense of mutual appreciation and affection deep enough to make the spacious venue feel intimate. The sisters took turns sharing youthful anecdotes and cultural musings, from stories about adolescent relationships (“a slippery slope to gaydom”) to anti-middle school tirades (“my best friend became a middle school teacher, and I asked her, ‘are you out of your fucking mind?’”) to ruminations on the apparent extinction of the slow dance (“now all the kids just want to, like… grind up on it”).


Like their repartee, Tegan and Sara’s sound remained highly accessible and all about blending, whether through their incongruent mix of crunchy guitar riffs and bubbly synth hooks or the uniquely familial harmonies of their almost-but-not-quite-identical intonations. Likewise, their lyrics—which they write independently, each singing lead on her own songs—managed to sound at once beseeching and authoritative, heartbroken yet sensible, passionate yet guarded. They were constantly whipping out new instruments: a series of different guitars, keyboards, tambourines, even a maraca.

I’ll admit it, I was impressed; especially during their stripped-down encore set, when the duo managed to pull off a gorgeously layered, sans-Tiësto acoustic version of their deviant trance hit, “Feel It In My Bones.” In fact, Tegan and Sara kept me engaged enough to withstand not one, not two, but five near-tramplings via 300-lb security guard inexplicably hurling himself down the aisle, and that, my friends, is saying something.



Review & Photos by Hilary Cadigan