Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (Polyphonic Spree, 1st Unitarian Church)

[promo pic – I didn’t take my camera – from www.thepolyphonicspree.com]

In times such as these, when our leaders are spitting on each others’ medals and spirituality is on sale at Target (Do they keep the little red Kabbalah strings near the copies of Dianetics?  Let’s not be exclusionary, now...), why not embrace something as simple and stupid as sun worship?

Yes, I have seen The Polyphonic Spree.  And lo', it was good.

The Spree, in case you’ve only been listening to bands that don’t wear robes, are a relentlessly positive twenty-six-piece band from Texas.  That’s a lot of band, and they’ve gone out of the way to include instrumentation beyond your bass-guitar-drums basics.  There’s a nine-piece choir, a French horn, a harp.  A theremin, for chrissake.

But not really for Christ’s sake.  Though they sometimes come on like the Branch Davidian Players, they’re fundamentally non-denominational.  If they’re pushing anything, it’s dumb happy nature worship.  “Hail to the sky/It’s time to watch a show/The trees wanna grow/Grow, grow, grow.”  “Hey now it’s the sun/and it makes me shine.”

Which is why it was an extra blast to see these pollen-sniffers perform inside the First Unitarian Church in Philadelphia.  Normally, concerts at the church (check out www.R5productions.com -- these folks put on low-cost shows with great bands) are held in the basement; the Spree show, though, was upstairs in the main hall.  The crowd was packed into pews, flooding the aisles; the choir twirled through semi-choreographed dervishry; the band hopped and bounced and jumped.  The whole thing played like a Ritalin-deprived revival, an orgy of optimism.

Cult – er, band – leader Tim DeLaughter (who actually said, “Whooo!” at one point) is the giddiest hobbit in the glen, tripping his daisy off and smiling until it hurts.  Though he seems to take everything seriously, there’s never any seriousness about him.  It’s more like these folks are full to bursting of themselves, and they want to share.

On the other end of the spectrum, there was Nellie McKay, alone at a piano.

McKay, who’s just a kid, is the type of performer who says, “This song ends in a sing-along.  Um, it’s in Mandarin...”  And means it. 

A sharp lyricist who sometimes forgets her own words, she comes touted as wünderkind material.  Her double-CD debut “Get Away From Me,” is one of the odder offerings of the year:  Foul-mouthed torch songs sit side-by-side with too-clever rap and cutesy songs about pets.  It’s fun, but often feels like a novelty act, too affected to be really effective. 

Live, she’s no seamless virtuoso, but the piano playing (though over-mic’ed) is secondary.  What she’s got are ideas and the desire to sell every last one of them.  A lot of the fun of her show is watching her face contort as she swings with every mood shift – effusively pouting then laughing then poo-pooing. 

Unfortunately, as she sat at the piano, half the audience – a real weird mix of middle-aged VH1ers and college kids – couldn’t see her face.  When she’d turn to the crowd for sometimes incoherent between-song banter she’d lapse into an adorable shyness that seemed to foster a sort of that’s-my-girl adoption.  You want the Nellies of the world to succeed, to share their exuberance and ideas and ridiculous eruditions.

But deep down you get the feeling that she won’t be a truly interesting performer until she’s in her late thirties, sullen and sauced and slurring her way through lyrics she was once too giddy to remember.

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