Zippier than any 5-Hour Energy Drink or Red Bull is the adrenaline rush of seeing three excellent concerts in three nights, which is how I spent last weekend: Yo La Tengo on Thursday, Matthew Larsen & the Documents and The Mitchells on Friday and Esperanza Spalding on Saturday.
Yo La Tengo is guitarist Ira Kaplan and drummer Georgia Hubley (married since 1987) and bassist James McNew, a Hoboken, New Jersey, trio with a hushed harmonious acoustic side (your eyes might get misty) and a howling cacophonous electric side (your ears will ring). On past visits to town their shows could be schizophrenic see-saws between viciously loud and calmly quiet, but this time around they helpfully divided those disparate elements into separate sets.
At the Academy of Music in Northampton, the band played 10 cozy songs with upright bass and minimal drums, and after a lengthy break, 10 rocking electric songs full of Kaplan’s trademark guitar spazz-outs. His solos aren’t your usual bluesy variations on a theme; he hunches over, his body jerking like a marionette tugged by invisible strings, and wrings savage noise out of his instrument. Whereas Pete Townshend might windmill his arm against the guitar, Kaplan at times was windmilling his guitar against his amplifiers.
Each set had its highlights. The night started with “My Heart’s Not In It,” a beautiful folky cover of an obscure 1964 soul-pop song from Darlene McCrea, with Hubley standing at a simple drum kit, lightly tapping, singing with a sad glow. As soft as the instruments were, her gentle voice was even softer — you could hear the sound engineer pump up the microphone level mid-verse to make her audible. Later McNew almost stole the show singing the haunting original “Black Flowers”; during the set break, the group of friends sitting behind me dove at their phones to find out what the John Cale-ish song was called and what album it was on.
“Let’s wake up the neighbors / let’s turn up our amps / the way that we used to / without a plan” is a lyric from one of the cacophonous songs Yo La Tengo played that night, “Big Day Coming.” The band hasn’t changed much since that song came out in 1993; the musicians are still introverted, everyday folks who are passionate believers in the power of music.
They closed the second set with the sprawling jam “Blue Line Swinger,” which slowly built from ramshackle chaos to a timeless feedback-laced four-chord indie-rock chug. As the song hit its apex, Ira started pogoing wildly — the loosest anyone onstage was all night — hopping around freely in front of Georgia, who for many minutes had been kicking rhythms out of her drums with such serious extended effort that she looked like she was nearing the end of a marathon, tired, but in the zone and unstoppable. It was a great climax to the show.
The Mitchells and Matthew Larsen & the Documents played at Gateway City Arts, a venue tucked away alongside Holyoke’s quiet canals. From the unbusy outside of the building you’d never guess there were 100 jovial people hidden within at a “Dark Dining Room” concert, in a space lit by dimmed lamps and battery-powered candles, with chairs and tables and food and drink.
The baby grand piano onstage was for Larsen, who with his band The Documents was celebrating the release of a brand-new album, “Holding Pattern,” on the eve of a tour scheduled to take them all the way out to Los Angeles and back. Accompanied by co-vocalist Alex Peterson, guitarist Greg Saulmon, bassist Mark Schwaber and drummer J.J. O’Connell, Larsen’s sweet voice led the band full of three-part harmonies, percussion, glockenspiel and thoughtful playing from everyone involved. Family and friends filled the house with applause and warm vibes.
Starting off the night was The Mitchells, a local rock band playing its first show in two years. Frontman/guitarist Caleb Wetmore started the group at the University of Masachusetts Amherst in 1995, writing songs with intriguingly off-kilter guitar parts, unique lyrical interests and a scientist’s eye for details. Joined by bassist Jon Herbert and drummer Mike MacLean, Wetmore crooned songs from the band’s three most-recent records, reaching deep into the catalog for the evocative “Flashlight Hunter,” in which a young protagonist, who “got a good deal on D-cells,” crouches next to wheel wells on a summer’s night, giddy to capture something, “lurching over gravel / and low-hanging stars.”
Saturday night I saw singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Esperanza Spalding at the Calvin Theatre in Northampton. The chairs down front had been removed to make room for standing and dancing; I eagerly left my assigned seat to join the excited throng up against the stage.
Costumed heroes abound these days, swarming all over cinema and TV screens, but those characters are often about as uplifting as a boardroom meeting. Meanwhile Spalding is a real-life human superbeing — her strapless bass was even clamped to a metal plate on a thick belt she wore (wielding the instrument like something not too far removed from Thor’s hammer or Cap’s shield).
Spalding sang with breathtaking control and power through a headset microphone, while her hands flitted around a five-string fretless bass (which she never looked at once), also while stepping nimbly, leading her band (guitar, drums, a trio of backing vocalists) and making a true effort to connect with the crowd through her uncompromising yet accessible music.
Her total command of the energy on stage was an inspiration to at least one aging newspaper columnist, standing and shimmying there among the smiling and diverse crowd of parents and their kids, gray-haired folks, couples on dates, local radio personalities, a ponytailed prog-rock fan, college students, 21st-century hippie dancers, and on and on.
The last lyric Spalding sang in the show before the encore was “No more acting these predictable roles / just us living unconditional love” — she’s living those words herself, setting aside her previous musical life to tour as “Emily” (her middle name and childhood nickname). It’s an alter-ego of sorts (though in interviews Spalding refers to Emily as another person), free to pursue her early interests in acting, movement and dance, and also free to follow inspirations that “people in suits don’t give a s*** about,” as she told an interviewer earlier this year.
I didn’t get the significance of every theatrical element (marionettes? backing vocalists wearing ties decorated with a single green leaf?) but I definitely understood the important big picture — and she lovingly konked us all over the head with it via this couplet, not wanting anyone to miss it: “Your heartbeat’s calling you up and out / that’s what this show’s about,” Spalding sang as she smiled big at the audience and lifted her right hand toward everyone.
At the top of the concert, the three backup singers had lurched onto the stage like automatons, standing behind an iron fence; by the end of the show, they were busting dance moves center stage and jumping off it completely to party among the crowd during the night’s most celebratory song. Its refrain: “Funk the fear / live your life.”
Ken Maiuri can be reached at clublandcolumn@gmai l.com.