Posted by Todd
Beirut w/ A Hawk and a Hacksaw
Southgate House
Newport, KY: October 10, 2006
It was with no small amount of consternation that I decided to see the blogpopular band Beirut perform. It was a Tuesday night, and I am old. I had work to look forward to in the morning and I had already had too much to drink before the doors were even scheduled to open. Needless to say, it takes a lot to get an old curmudgeon like me out the door. But, I told myself, it’s not every night that you get the opportunity to see Eastern European folk music reinterpreted by children with roots in the western United States. So I went.
Immediately, I regretted my decision. It was like I had walked into the aftermath of a zombie movie: bodies were slumped over tables, the bartender’s eyes were rolled in the back of his head, and there was this awful droning noise bleeding out of the speakers. A waifish, bearded man was artlessly clanging on the E-string of his guitar and I assumed (hoped) that he was tuning. He wasn’t. He was looping. After each clang he would reach over and twist a knob or push a button so that the clangs could continue without his assistance and he could add more guitar effects on top, some of which was more palatable. His stage name was Animal Hospital, but he was actually the sound guy for the following two acts: A Hawk and a Hacksaw and the aforementioned Beirut. This may explain his addition to the bill.
A Hawk and a Hacksaw, which the more acute readers out there will note as a slightly misguided attempt at a Hamlet reference, consisted of a man and a woman. The woman, who was referred to as Heather Trost, played violin. The man, whom research proved to be Jeremy Barnes of Neutral Milk Hotel, played accordion, a motley set-up of kickable drums (including a drum stick on the knee at cowbell level), and a hat composed of jingle bells, which had another drum stick sticking out to hit a cymbal positioned behind his skull. Visually, this arrangement was quite impressive. Technically…well, nobody holds Allen Iverson’s scrappiness against him when he pulls out the miracles he’s known for.
Buried somewhere beneath a full-body armor of instruments, Barnes would grunt a few syllables into the microphone stationed near his mustache and kickstart into a frenzied polyphony of Balkan rhythms. Tapans and tambourines thumped unexpectedly, Barnes’s head jangled with no apparent sense of meter, and his fingers wound up and down the accordion in minor keys. Occasionally, he would bark at the Animal Hospital sound guy with imperatives like, “Kevin, I can’t hear the violin!” or, “Kevin, I need more accordion! More accordion!” Not being an expert on traditional Eastern European folk music, I can’t say for sure that what they were playing were songs so much as rowdy rhythms played out for a set number of measures before coming to an abrupt stop. Regardless, the the pair of musicians responsible for this racket had me utterly entranced. At the end of their set, when Heather and Jeremy walked into the crowd to play, I entertained the notion that this must be how courting rituals are played out by Bulgarian teenagers. The woman plays a flirty violin scale as if to say, “You don’t lose your temper when you drink vodka, I find that attractive,” to which the man responds by blurting out a raunchy accordion riff that suggests, “You have nice child bearing hips, let’s get together.” Yes, it’s possible I was consuming alcohol at the time - what of it?
(Continued)
