by Michele Zipkin
Erin McKeown graced Philadelphia’s Johnny Brenda’s with her presence on Sunday January 20th, in support of her latest politically and emotionally charged album, Manifestra. In her trademark tailored suit, McKeown performed songs from this latest release about “…personal politics and politics of the community. It’s about internal change becoming external action.”
After starting off the set with a song from one of her previous endeavors, “Aspera” from We Will Become like Birds, she continued with “The Politician” from the new record. Even though only a drummer and saxophone player supported her guitar work, all three instruments, four including vocals, filled that small venue with a wealth of rich sound. The sax added that punch to the guitar lines, and continued with some pretty mean soloing between verses.
McKeown prefaced the next song by telling the audience the story about how she went to Arizona to see the wall between the US and Mexico. It was a fence-like wall through which things could pass, and she described it as a spine, perhaps of a metal dragon. At the heart of the matter and the song, she explained “….every time we make an us versus them mentality, a part of us dies.” This of course was the inspiration for the song “Jailor”. If at all possible, this song was even more rockin’ live than on the record, with Matt Douglas’ baritone sax lines mirroring McKeown’s vocal lines. The sax melody interacted perfectly with her moving guitar work, all supported by intricate and very jazzy percussion from Marc Dalio.
“Proof” proved to be stylistic contrast compared to the previous number, with vocals in the forefront, soft guitar and alto sax. This is the first of McKeown’s songs with a music video accompaniment, for which she learned to sing the song backwards and at one and a half times speed, because in the video we see her covered in multicolored paint that is slowly dripping off of her, but in reverse. To reverse the video in order to capture the backwards paint effect, she would have had to sing the song backwards initially for it to be heard (or at least seen) forward in the final version. And she played the song backwards for us that night, which was titled “Foorp”- an impressive and amusing recitation of what sounded like warped versions of Russian or German.
But the entire set was not comprised only of tunes from her latest album. As the disco ball created blue lights that illuminated the walls of the cozy venue, the trio played “Let’s Put the Fun Back in Funeral” from Hundreds of Lions. It was fairly saucy, with Latin-influenced guitar and percussion. This led seamlessly into “The Lions” from the same album, with McKeown at the keyboard playing those eighth note chords that have a slight carnival flavor, all too appropriately.
After McKeown took the stage to play a couple solo numbers, one of which included “Beautiful I Guess”, the band reconvened to play “We Are More”. The crowd was invited to sing the “aahs” in the song, which is always a nice way to spark some audience interaction. But McKeown was very interactive throughout the evening, telling the stories behind her songs and humorously asking if there were any questions after a couple attempts to get her pedals to behave before the start of “Little Cowboy”.
The Penultimate number (before an encore) was, of course, “Manifestra”, the piece de resistance of the album. That blues-driven riff is perfect support for McKeown’s eloquent and thought-provoking lyrics that were more or less like spoken word poetry. The drums propelled the song and the sax provided jazzy and intricate soloing over those few thematic chords.
To close off the set the group played “Santa Cruz”, also from Hundreds of Lions. In a break in the upbeat energy of the song, Dalio did more fancy, jazz-like solo work. This eventually died down to a few percussive hits over a soft guitar progression, during which Douglas came in to add those high-register but low-key bright tones of the alto sax. The reverb on his instrument became very apparent and added great warmth and breadth as he shimmered up scales. McKeown did some mock scat in a fairly jocular manner before the song converged back to its original form, and the lovely evening of lyrically meaningful and instrumentally accomplished performances ended.
