Camera Obscura at Great Scott, July 6, 2006
I’m pretty dazed from the late night, so please forgive me if my little review of the show is a bit disjointed. With that disclaimer out of the way…
Last night’s show at Great Scott was really fun. The opening band, Georgie James (from DC!, as they reminded us several times) weren’t awful, but they didn’t inspire me to yank out my earplugs. They went on at around 10:30 or so, which meant that Camera Obscura didn’t go on until well after 11:00. Hence the incoherence here.
I’d seen pictures of Camera Obscura before, but I was still struck by how genuine and unpretentious they seemed. (This contrasted a little with Georgie James–but again, I’ve seen worse, and you can’t really blame an opening band for trying, can you?) The setlist pulled heavily from the new record, but also included a few picks from their last two outings, Underachievers Please Try Harder and Biggest Bluest Hi-Fi. I thought it was kind of cute that they wrote out their setlists on Days Inn notepaper–it was somehow both rock’n'roll and quaint. Ezra, who is becoming the seasoned concert-goer, snagged a setlist at the end of the night (woo hoo!).
This one doesn’t include the encore, which consisted of “I Need All the Friends I Can Get” and my favorite, “Suspended from Class”. They considered playing a request instead, which would have been cool, I suppose–but I would have been pretty disappointed if they hadn’t played “Suspended from Class”, so I was happy.
They sounded quite good, despite having to use borrowed guitars (and this on only the third night of their tour), despite enduring keyboard issues that forced them to restart “Country Mile”, and despite the fact that their little glockenspiel wasn’t well miked and its lid fell nearly shut mid-song. They had a good humor about everything, and even told us a joke (not a particularly funny joke on its own, but it was charming in context). Ezra and I agreed that Lloyd didn’t seem as enveloping as it does on record. I’m not sure if that was because the sound wasn’t right for that one, or just because the recording is so lush and wonderful that it’s a challenge to recreate it fully in a smallish club. We also agreed that “Razzle Dazzle Rose”, which didn’t knock us out the first few times we heard it on record, sounded great live.
More pictures here.
[...] Terri did such a good job of giving the low-down on the Camera Obscura show at Great Scott last night (not to mention taking lots of good pictures) that I feel compelled to add very little, except for this little video that I shot of the first couple of minutes of “Hey, Lloyd, I’m Ready To Be Heartbroken”. I’m very happy with how it turned out; the sound isn’t inaudible or too blasted out, and since we were right smack up front, it looks pretty OK for being taken by a teeny digital camera. And, it includes an intro spiel where Tracyanne Cambell mentions that Lloyd Cole’s wife and kids drove 90 miles to the show, but Great Scott wouldn’t let them in because the kids were under 18 (you can hear someone audibly gasp when she says this in the video; we’re not sure if it’s Terri or not). [...]