Luna’s sleepy slacker rock soothes MoCA crowd (9/16/00)
By Seth Rogovoy

(NORTH ADAMS, Sept. 17, 2000) – Rock singer-songwriter Dean Wareham led his quartet, Luna, through two sets of his dreamy, depressive guitar-rock at Mass MoCA’s Hunter Performing Arts Center on Saturday night. The dark, scruffy Wareham took the stage with a minimum of fuss and launched into a procession of tunes drawn from his band’s five albums, going back to its 1992 debut, “Lunapark,” and through the group’s latest, “The Days of Our Nights.”

Standing stock-still and betraying a minimal amount of emotion, Wareham, wielding his Gibson Les Paul guitar with deft authority, stared out at the crowd and intoned the choruses and verses of songs that told stories of dreams, nightmares, and quirky corners of waking life.

Wareham’s bandmates, including fellow guitarist Sean Eden, drummer Lee Wall and bassist Britta Phillips, were his equal in their cultivated laconicism, pretty much staring off into the nether reaches of the vast Hunter theater and letting the music carry them and the crowd away.

At times the band had the appearance of having just woken up before coming out on stage. The musicians seemed to be fighting the necessity of becoming fully awake. Their ideal goal, perhaps, would be to play an entire concert in their sleep.

This wasn’t so much a function of boredom or indifference, but rather an aesthetic choice. Wareham’s studied indifference, three-chord minimalist guitar-rock and mumbled, nasal, deadpan vocals combine for a kind of anti-rock that has its antecedent in the spoken-word guitar-rock of Lou Reed and his post-punk minions, and its influence over the last decade can be felt in a host of bands and styles loosely agglomerated in the categories of slacker-rock and hypno-pop.

And over the course of his band’s two hour-long sets Wareham was a hypnotic performer. If his lyrics tended to get lost in the wash of echoey guitar chords and slow- to mid-tempo rock songs, a few choice lines occasionally bubbled up to the surface, much like in dreams where one or two words or phrases come to stand for the whole.

Thus lines like “why must you be a mystery to me?” could well be taken for a hypnotic catchphrase, the singer himself suggesting to the listener what to make of the singer.

Luna is as much about the dual guitars of Wareham and Eden as it is about the former’s songs. The two guitarists eschewed flashy guitar histrionics for a subtler, more architectural approach. Rather than screaming blues runs, they built their solos on simple melody lines, twisting and turning and climbing over and under each other, building up a dreamy wave of echo, reverberation and distortion.

Phillips is the newest addition to the group. Her stark, blonde beauty stood in contrast to Wareham’s dark, heavy-lidded look – sort of a healthy Keith Richards – and her muscular bass-playing (on an instrument that appeared to be at least as big as its diminutive player) was in itself a statement that upended cliches of rock ‘n’ roll masculinity and femininity.

The biggest joke of the evening was not the encore featuring a Luna-fied version of the Guns ‘n’ Roses ballad, “Sweet Child o’ Mine.” Rather, it was when Wareham sang a song entirely in German, and nothing was lost in the translation.

The Pioneer Valley quintet Drunk Stuntmen warmed up the crowd for Luna with its own quirky, eccentric set of original rock music.

It comes as little surprise to learn that the Montague-based band has performed tributes to performers as various as Hank Williams, David Bowie, the Clash and Pink Floyd, as the group’s music is stylistically all over the map. At one point they’re playing a soft, country-rock ballad a la Neil Young, followed by a complex, arty five-minute rock suite with tempo and key changes worthy of Frank Zappa.

Songs like “First Class Clown,” in which they sing of a town where everyone plays guitar good enough to play at the town’s single bar – a song directed toward “the first-class clown in this high-school town” – suggest that Drunk Stuntmen are a roots-rock answer to alt-rock wiseguys They Might Be Giants. One song traced a day in the life of a gravedigger, starting in Burt Bacharach-pop mode and ending as a harsh hard-rocker; another grafted a Led Zeppelin riff to a jazzy melody; a third, also about the idiocy of rural life, suggested a rural version of the more urbane, intellectual Crash Test Dummies.

The Hunter theater proved itself to be a great venue for live rock. Its large stage provides generous, close access to the performers for a maximum number of concertgoers. Its high ceilings and all-around roominess make it comfortable for those who want to observe from a distance, outside the massed crowds up front. And Mass MoCA’s production crew is unmatched at seeing to every technical aspect of a performance, from sound to lights to staging to audience comfort and enjoyment.

[This review originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on Sept. 18, 2000. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 2000. All rights reserved.]

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