By Antero Garcia
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
Screw KCRW for getting such awesome bands on the same bill.
The Friday evening concert was held at the Wiltern Theatre, and
was dedicated to raising money for the popular publicly-sponsored
radio station KCRW. With six up-and-coming acts, the crowd was
enthralled. However, the diversity in musical styles between each
type of group was a but unsettling.
Kicking off the evening was the outlandish five-piece group
Sparklehorse. As the curtain opened, the band was revealed,
surrounded by machinery, metal, wires and pulsating lights.
Sounding like the progeny of Neil Young and the Flaming Lips,
raised by the likes of Kraftwerk, Sparklehorse is the culmination
of electronic doodlings and rigidly American melodies.
Though KCRW is known for the diversity of the music it plays,
this was a hindrance in its concert.
An impressive aspect of the evening’s events was the lack
of delay between acts. Unlike most concerts that feature more than
one band, there was literally less than a two-minute delay between
the time that Sparklehorse finished its set and the next act, Badly
Drawn Boy, came on.
With a guitar standing on the stage next to a neatly adorned
coffee table and a single chair, Badly Drawn Boy walked onto the
sparse stage in perhaps the hippest zebra-striped beanie ever worn
by man.
Approaching the microphone, Badly Drawn Boy explained that he
wanted to play a couple of songs that he had just recorded in the
studio earlier that day. As everyone waited expectantly for the
musician to strap on his guitar, Badly Drawn Boy instead fished a
small tape recorder out of his pocket, pressed play. As the new
song played out of the tape recorder, the audience laughed at the
audacity of playing a recording at a concert.
Next, Badly Drawn Boy had a tape cued to play through the
Wiltern’s PA system, playing more unreleased songs while the
performer lounged in his chair, smoking, drinking and reading a
magazine. It wasn’t until the last ten minutes of his set
that the musician strapped on his acoustic guitar and finished off
a humorous and musically gripping set.
The next three acts, as talented as they were, proved a bit too
diverse in styles, resulting in a distracting sequence of abrupt
changes in tone and mood. Shortly after Badly Drawn Boy came the
fiery pop sounds of Pete Yorn. With an almost Springsteen-like
sound, Yorn couldn’t have been followed by a worse choice
than the overwhelmingly sad, acoustic Eliot Smith. After his long,
emotional set, the country rock of Shelby Lynne was way too peppy.
For those who are unfamiliar with Lynne, imagine Britney Spears
plus 20 years, with a touch of country twang.
After Lynne’s set, the audience was starting to get
exhausted, and a KCRW DJ announced a short intermission while the
headlining act, Ozomatli, set up its gear. After a 15-minute break,
the lights were dimmed and sounds of syncopated thunder slowly
started to spew from the lobby of the theater. Ozomatli, a
stampeding herd of drums and rhythm and noise, marched through the
back of the theater, slowly making its way to the stage.
The nine-piece extravaganza played cuts off of its first,
self-titled album, as well as its latest release, “Embrace
the Chaos.” As the group roused the audience to its feet for
the first time during the evening, a sense of the unity and
diversity displayed on stage in the multi-ethnic posse brought
smiles of musical joy to the audience below.
Unlike the diversity between musical acts that seemed to lull
the show, Ozomatli’s uniqueness united the crowd.