For those who aren't listening to the song I've posted -- and I'd barely put it into the top half of my favorites -- The Rescues are pure uncut AAA music, plain and simple. (AAA = Adult Album Alternative, which is to say, for people who used to enjoy Nirvana but grew up, had kids, and stopped drinking and doing other drugs quite so often.) They're modeled a little after bands like Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles, so they're not afraid to be melodramatic and cheesy, and they live quite comfortably in the realm of depressive break-ups.
The Rescues weren't a great "concert experience." No moshing. No dancing. No stage diving. No biting the heads off of bats, and no destroying precious instruments. They weren't so loud I had to wear earplugs. In fact, the entire bar's audience stayed seated and subdued during the performance... in part because there's this ginormous sign on the stage that suggests the audience do just that. ("Respect the music" was the basic gist of it.)
[Embedded below is the YouTube video of what was the most powerful new song of the bunch, except I liked the version in Atlanta even a little bit better than the one below.]
So it might not have been a great concert experience, but it was a phenomenal musical performance. Every guitar chord and every voice and every piano key had a distinctive and audible place in the songs. It was like a high-course meal where each and every ingredient in a dish is distinguishable and vital, and you know you're eating an amazing meal.
Generally speaking, I'm more of a casserole and pizza kind of guy, so a good and loud Dinosaur Jr. concert is fine by me. But maybe because I don't get the opportunity to enjoy a concert like this, where four distinct and incredibly talented voices are constantly merging in and out of one another, watching The Rescues felt truly special. Equally cool was watching as they exchanged instruments. No one in the band played fewer than three instruments over the course of the 90-minute show. That's probably the reward of four once-maverick singer-songwriters merging into a single unit -- when they were solo, they had to learn all that stuff for themselves.
[Pictured at right are me and my Bizarro Lesbian Twin, one of about 2,000 lesbians in attendance. I have no problem whatsoever with lesbians, but it's either a damning statement for me or for her that we share exactly the same fashion sense. One of us is dressed to attract the wrong crowd, is what I'm sayin'.]Perhaps the most astonishing part of the concert was that they only played three songs off their only album. The rest of the time they played "newer" songs due to come out on their next CD. Historically speaking, there's a direct relationship between how much I enjoy a concert and how familiar I am with the songs being played. The fewer the songs I've heard before, the less I enjoy the concert. I guess I like having a baseline, some sense of what to expect.
Yet strangely, with The Rescues packed in at Eddie's Attic, because I could hear the words and the instruments and the harmonies, it practically felt like I was at a recording session. And the level of reverence the audience afforded them, almost like church, made it feel really intimate and intense and capital-I Important. Who knows if that was me, or if they have that power to make all their audiences feel like that. Springsteen's magic is that he manages to make 95% of his concerts feel like it's his first one ever.
Great performers do that. They assist in keeping your illusions alive. They help you believe in things just a little longer than you should. And on Wednesday night at this concert, The Rescues proved themselves plenty capable of keeping some terrific illusions about music and concerts and life thriving just a little bit longer.
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