By Sami Martasian
Photos by Jeeyoon Kim
As a longtime Television fan, order I was equally excited and flustered thinking about seeing them Monday night at the Paradise. Would they be good live, cialis or would horror stories about previous performances passed on from my friend’s dad ring true? Would Lady Lamb The Beekeeper fit the bill or was this gonna be a weird show?
In honesty, I hadn’t put too much time into listening to Lady Lamb The Beekeeper before Monday night. Outside of Allston Pudding, I’m a musician and Lady Lamb has always been an artist that I wrote off as being part of something my friends and I call “the Joni Mitchell Effect”- when you’re a female musician people suggest/ compare you to whatever other female musician they can think of because they only know one or two. It’s frustrating and invalidating as it separates female musicians out and focuses only on the fact that the musicians are female and not to the actual content of their art. For example you can play guitar and sing and be really into metal but if you’re a girl, someone at some point in your career will ask you if you’re influenced by Joni Mitchell because they can’t think of any other female guitar players and it feels weird. Okay my point is, I’d been hearing the name Lady Lamb for a while in this context but didn’t put a lot of time into listening to her. My friends worship her and I’ve heard maybe two songs of hers in cars but it was hard to really get into Lady Lamb when it felt forced.
Well now I feel sort of like an asshole, because Monday night she rocked it. There aren’t many other words for it- she rocked. Lady Lamb was solo that night. She took the stage in total darkness and opened by singing a song a cappella. Her voice is not only powerful but also vulnerable and hearing it stand alone is eerie in the best of ways. Then she started playing guitar and I was totally sold. “Choppy” sounds like a bad thing but it isn’t- when Aly plays it’s like she doesn’t commit to a note or a lyric until she’s sure of it. Each song came in structural phases, each of which was necessary to lead to the next. There are moments that Lady Lamb can be sweet but those moments are quickly followed by powerful howls that rose above the pre-television chatter floating around the Paradise. For the first time in a long time, I felt like a high school kid again and briefly considered gushing to her after the show.
Then Television came out swinging. For musicians of their reputation and caliber, it was shocking to see just how humble and into playing their songs they were. There was little showboating and a whole lot of rocking. It was hard to know what to do with myself for the duration of their set, because it was difficult to choose between keeping my eyes glued to the masterful guitar work happening before me or closing them and dancing without thinking. Time has done nothing but given Television the opportunity to tighten their songs, become more comfortable playing live, and heighten the sort of intuition it takes to craft a song in a way that feels natural and fluid, yet also tight and flawless.
Every moment was taken in stride, a guitar string at one point broke and an audience member was pulled on stage to re-string it on the spot. The band took the opportunity to chant said audience member’s name and laugh. Television strikes me as the kind of band that has little to prove. Their place in music is so solid and unique that the bells and whistles that usually come with fame seem unnecessary to them. They’re here to make music and that’s that. Oh and then they played Marquee Moon and we all flipped out.
As strange as seeing Lady Lamb’s name on the bill with Television seemed at first, in the end they sort of complimented each other brilliantly. They brought out the excellent appreciation for the craft of music making that each artist contains. Well done.
