SumtinK

Hello Internet travelers, this is my first post for Sumtink. I am the one referred to as “current/soon-to-be-past heady-tour around the U.S.” Heady tour has ended, and tomorrow I begin my job in Boston as an organizer for an environmental/consumer issues group. Borrowing a phrase from Thurston Moore, I hope I will give you much material for your ears to taste, and for your other senses to delight in for that matter.

One of the steps on Heady Tour 08 was the Rothbury Music Festival in Michigan. It was a much-hyped first-time festival, and it turned out to be perhaps the best of the summer. At its core, Rothbury is a jamband festival with Phil Lesh, Widespread Panic, and Dave Matthews Band as headliners, but it reached out to a number of bands from several other music worlds as well.

We saw Panic 7 times this summer, and they delivered possibly the best show of a great tour at Rothbury. After the show we managed to detach ourselves from the intriguing scuplture displays made from wood and recycled materials and ambled over to the electronicaish music emanating from the neighboring stage. Most festivals feature DJ’s and jamtronica bands late-night to cater to the tripping and rolling crowd (fyi, on heady tour, that is called being “spun”). Sometimes these groups can be pretty predictable. Thievery Corporation, however, is another matter.

I had been a fan of the group for some time since I acquired their relatively recent album the Cosmic Game (get this album!). The two primary members, Rob Garza and Eric Hilton, create tantalizing cosmopolitan downtempo grooves that incorporate musical styles from Brazil, India, and Jamaica, often in the same song.
This combines with electronic textures to make some of the most psychedelic music you’ll hear. I figured that their live act would consist of the two of them mostly regurgitating their excellent studio material, and that my familiarity with them would make for an enjoyable but not very novel experience.

How wrong I was! Thievery Corporation travels with the DJ setup plus a bass, guitar, two percussionists, a horn section, a sitar player sitting on a raised dais, an army of vocalists of several styles, and several ornately dressed dancers. Admittedly, the music is not that different from on the albums, but they re-create and tweak the grooves in such an organic way that one gets the sens of on-the-spot creation that comes only from live music. Their band can play legitimate dub that sounds straight from Jamaica (and their Jamaican vocalists are amazing and really pump up the crowd), sensuous samba rhythms, and even Soulive-style jazz-funk. As they played “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter” with its lyrics about a spaceship, “beautiful forever” (sung by David Byrne on the album but not live unfortunately), we in the audience could sense the possibility of traveling to space and beyond without a tangible vehicle (not just with drugs, haha). Their live energy creates an incredibly optimistic sense of of our human creative potential, as individuals but especially as a collective of individuals. It is one of the few shows that I’ve been to where I felt like I was at an EVENT and CELEBRATION of life instead of simply a concert.

If you get a chance, go see Thievery Corporation! I promise you will dance your ass off and experience something really positive. The recordings cannot even come close to the live sensation, but check it out (on the bittorrent site, bt.etree.org, great site by the way): http://bt.etree.org/details.php?id=516624

If you’re curious about the visual spectacle, check out the videos on YouTube. The sound is typically terrible, but you can get an idea of what I’m talking about. Their website has some videos as well: http://www.thieverycorporation.com/video.htm

I’m excited to see where they go from here, hopefully they won’t rest on their laurels and churn out music with the same formula as some bands tend to do in their genre.