Lovin’ Like a Landslide (Cloud Cult, Arlene’s Grocery)

I don’t think it’s a good idea to see the same band three times in five days, in general.  Unless you revel in routine or are chasing beats as regular as bran, the overandover can make mountains out of minor flaws and turn set lists into checklists.

Which is why it’s nice that each of this week’s three Cloud Cult shows had its own identity.  Monday’s show at the Knitting Factory had a little bit for everyone:  It served as an introductory overview to a largish showcase crowd, a first-look for fans who’ve discovered their music since they were here in September, and a welcome-back for those of us who saw them at BMJ and CMJ.  Tuesday’s acoustic set upstairs at Pianos was homey, intimate (yes, the write-up’s coming).  And Friday night’s finale at Arlene’s Grocery?  This one got a little weird.

Not necessarily a bad thing.  There’s a weirdness about their music that shouldn’t be avoided.  Cult leader Craig Minowa seemed to find his songwriter’s voice in madness, which is why I prefer 2003’s iddish They Live on the Sun to its prettier, more straightforward follow-up Aurora Borealis; one of the things that makes Hippo so exhilarating is its ability to harmonize the self-destructive urgency of the former with the latter’s desire to continue and communicate.  Or, to oversimplify:  Sun is despair, Aurora denial, Hippo acceptance.  And Hippo’s holistic view demands that everything – including all the world’s weirdnesses – belongs.

Advice from the Happy Hippopotamus is a very silly title for a rock album.  But then so was The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, and that one seemed to do just fine.  I tend to get defensive over the band’s odder elements.  Perhaps it’s because I, too, am odd – in case you hadn’t noticed.  Or perhaps I just worry those elements will too easily distract cursory listeners from the simple, universal stuff underneath, that they’ll obfuscate, like the overeager burst of a fog-machine.

And that’s what we got.  After Minowa opened the set with another new solo song, he crouched down to the floor to start what I assume was playback – a computer voice, a la Radiohead’s “Fitter Happier,” demanded it wasn’t a robot, it was human* – then crawled to the back of the stage, flipped on a floor-based lightshow and whooshed out a few big puffs of (presumably eco-friendly) smoke.

The performance room at Arlene’s Grocery has a knee-high stage at one end of a narrow room; the room’s made narrower by a bar that runs most of its length on one side, and by the tables and chairs along the walls towards the front.  It’s an unassuming little space, and the stage’s proximity to the bar sort of makes you want to hear A Bar Band.  Three Dog Night covers, etc.

And all of the sudden there’s this kid on stage in bare feet and Huck Finn cuffs pumping out techno music while columns of white light rotate behind him and a little Lazer Floyd flower twirls on the ceiling above.

It might have been too much Weird for the space.  And the time:  The set lasted about forty-five minutes, and it felt like the more raucous numbers ran smack into the quieter ones.  A bit bipolar.  And the mix was a mess – you couldn’t hear Dan Greenwood’s vocals, and the cello suddenly appeared in the speakers a couple songs in (on stage, the monitor was filled with nothing but Matthew Freed’s bass).

For all that, it still connected.  Some people in the audience knew the music – there was a “Yip!” during “Transistor Radio,” someone up front even called out “Chemicals!” before the opening number (which wasn’t, this time, “Chemicals Collide”) – but there were fresh faces, too, brought there by Gothamist’s bold pronouncement (which ran on VH1’s blog) or the next act or whatever... During the more musically elusive stretches those people looked like they were trying to figure out if they should be enjoying themselves or not.  But the direct stuff got there.  Minowa messed up the intro to “Radio,” again, but wisely kept going.  At the beginning of the song, there was some crowd chatter.  Some chuckles at “canyons, caves, and catacombs” and “bicycle-boats.”  And then, pin-drop silence.  Jesus, I don’t think I’ve ever heard a room listen so hard.

I probably should have been listening harder, myself, but it was my third time this week for “Radio” and “Outside of Your Skin” and “Moving to Canada” and “Car Crash” and “Washed Your Car” and “Breakfast with My Shadow.”  Good things, all, but I’m afraid I was starting to take them for granted.  Like I’m going to have three more Cloud Cult shows to go to next week.

If only.

*

I didn’t keep track of set lists, sorry, and they did mix them up.  Can’t remember if “All Together Alone” or “Lights Inside My Head” came up, the previous Monday, but I’m pretty sure they did here.  “Clip Clop” was much more satisfying with big fuzzy electronic start-stop beatz than it was acoustically.

The new song at the top – which they played in Philly last week – was called “Deaf Girl’s Song” and careened precariously close along the edge of preciousness:  One of the lines describing how good the titular track began by comparing it to “the Fourth of July and New Year’s Eve” – trite and bland, it reminded me of a bad critic’s blurb... but Minowa pulled it off by personifying the holidays and having them “make love in the snow.”  Phew.  That was close.

*

I’m not sure if that computer-voice transition is officially a song, but back on Cloud Cult’s first CD, Who Killed Puck?, there’s a track called “Ready to Fight” where a human voice repeating “I am not a robot” slowly gets synthesized.  There, the approach (and Puck in general, I think) works in concert with Radiohead’s whole dehumanization thang; in this concert, recontexutalized into the band’s mature, all-embracing worldview it takes on – as I briefly discussed with Wes after the set – exactly the opposite meaning.  Instead of desperation in the face of self-loss, it’s self-actualization, the act of finding humanity in circuits and wires and whatnot.

That sounds, at 3:58am, desperately pretentious.  So I’m going to counter that with this track off They Live on the Sun (buy).  They did not play it, Friday night – I’m going to guess they never do – but it would have fit.  Aggressively weird.  An amalgamation of an uncredited Latin track, Minowa’s own developing mythology and quotes from Chris Smith’s documentary American Movie, it’s very much its own fucked-up thing... but it rocks, and shows off another facet of the Cult repertoire.  Everybody, get set to make happy:

Cloud Cult – Estupido (mp3) (buy)

“Why you always gots to be pissin’ on me?”  Indeed.

*

Bloggers, I know you’re out there:

Monday:

Brooklyn Vegan, Daily Refill, ProductShopNYC, Ryspace-1, Ryspace-2, Village Indian, Waved Rumor

Tuesday:

Brooklyn Vegan, Daily Refill, Underrated, Yeti Don’t Dance

Friday:

Gothamist, Indie-licious, Underrated, WaterCoolerGossip, Yeti Don't Dance

And elsewhere, last week:

Lost in Your In Box (Philly), DCist (Arlington),

*

From "East Coast Tour Wrap-Up" on the band's bulletin board (under peek & speak):

N.Y. - (knitting factory) What's better than Great? Playing N.Y.C. and having it feel like a Mpls. show... This was better than anyone could have imagined. I can't say anymore. The band was super excited for and after this show.
N.Y. - (piano's) - Great - Where can you go from the night before, we thought everybody who wanted to see cloud cult, had gotten it over with the night before. But people came to this show too. Surely there would be nobody left to come to Arlene's grocery two nights from now. This was a great show, the band got to jam a little with the M. Shanghai String Band. Lots o fun.
N.Y. - (Arlene's grocery) - I think the venue was a little tentative booking this show since it was the bands 3rd show in 4 nights in N.Y. The band wasn't expecting much of a crowd.... Blamo, another great N.Y. show. Thanks to all the bloggers for keeping me updated on the shows. Micah and I were in CT for this show. Craig even busted out the fog machine and laser light show for this crowd and the 40 minute set.
Thanks to all who came out to the shows. This was by far the best tour to date. The band was extremely happy, elated, etc...

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