I Heard Your Voice In Cambridge: Elvis Perkins In Dearland

By Chelsea Spear

Brattle Theatre, Cambridge, MA
April 22, 2009

The music of Elvis Perkins has a cathartic quality that borders on the spiritual. His vivid, fever-dream lyrics draw on Biblical themes and imagery (note the title of his first album, Ash Wednesday, and its closing song “Good Friday”), his melodies share the memorable simplicity of hymns, and he and his band perform them with great fervor and no small emotion. Thus, it seemed appropriate that they would grace the stage of the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, Mass.

If the Boston arts scene had a church, this one-hundred-year-old theatre—which has played host to bands, art shows, and revivals of films by directors like Bergman and Fellini—could serve that purpose. (The no-frills Brattle auditorium, with its A-line structure, exposed beams, and modest proscenium, even looks a bit like the Protestant churches that opened their doors at the founding of our fair state.) On an unseasonably warm night in late April, Elvis Perkins in Dearland took the stage for a two-hour set that drew from their latest, self-titled album as well as Perkins’ previous solo debut.

Dressed in a white ensemble and a tweed jacket that recalled Adrien Brody in The Darjeeling Limited, Perkins opened the show with a solo rendition of “1-2-3 Goodbye,” restoring the song to its casual tone of heartbreak after recording a version for the album that smothered it with strings. The Dearlanders—bassist Brigham Brough, drummer Nicholas Kinsey, and keyboardist/multi-instrumentalist Wyndham Boylan-Garnett—joined him onstage, with Kinsey strapping on a marching drum for the joyous rockabilly swoon of “Hey!” Perkins’s little dance with Kinsey as he marched across the stage banging on this huge drum made the audience grin from ear to collective ear, even as they may have contemplated some of the darker implications of the lyrics.

The new album has a less melancholy feeling than Ash Wednesday and the thread that connects many of the songs is a balance of mourning what has passed and moving forward with the knowledge of what lies behind you. In performance, the balance of whimsy and sadness translates into tight arrangements, bravura performances, and playful onstage camaraderie. At times, the Brattle’s homey intimacy made the show feel as though it was taking place in someone’s living room. Perkins and Kinsey bantered about their prescription sunglasses, and the band recruited an unidentified audience member to play bass on the night’s sole new song, “Stop Drop Rock and Roll.”

Some of the songs also took on a more sensual tone when performed live. Hearing Perkins sigh, “I’m on fire! Ev’rybody’s on fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiire!” in “Stop Drop” made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. The muddled, depth-searching bassline and “Last Train to Clarksville”-influenced riff on the live iteration of “Send My Fond Regards to Lonelyville” took it away from the playful fairy tale of the recorded version, and drew our attention to lines like, “The weeks will pass in a tennis match before she for him undresses.” Perkins ran this song through his chest voice, giving it a gritty, eerie feeling.

The evening closed with a set of three encores. The final tune, the much-discussed “Doomsday,” found Kinsey once more strapping on the bass drum. Boylan-Garnett abandoned his harmonium and picked up a trombone, with which he marched across the stage, striking humorous poses in which he alternately resembled a marching-band brass player gone to seed and a handsome hippie figurehead on the prow of a boat. The dynamic among the four members of the band and their playful onstage cutups left the audience in the theatre beaming and singing to themselves: “I don’t let doomsday bother me. Does it bother you?”

Elvis Perkins In Dearland plays at Atlanta, GA’s Variety Playhouse on June 7. For more tour dates and information visit the band’s MySpace page or Official Site.