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What started as a potential
production war between touring band Langhorne
Slim and a sound engineer in a dirty
venue on a Monday night, in the lionishly mediocre
city of Denver, turned into the best surprise
show I’ve caught so far in 2007.
During the first song of the
Langhorne Slim set, the guitar/drum/stand-up
bass trio faced off against the house engineer,
making such outlandish requests as more vocals
in the drum monitor—much to the displeasure
of the lone engineer. In these situations, a
band has two choices: let the sound guy win
by standing your ground and chancing that your
set will sound terrible, or let the sound guy
win by turning on the charm and adding “If
possible” to every request you make of
him. Langhorne Slim opted for the latter, probably
knowing that the sound guy always wins either
way.
With or without vocals in
their monitors, working cables or mics to play
into, I’m sure that I would have fallen
in love with this band either way.
Fronted by their slender namesake—a
quiet man dressed as if he walked through Rivers
Cuomo’s closet, then a pimp’s closet
for good measure—Langhorne Slim played
sweet, crisply structured tunes bordering on
the pop-folk sounds of ’60s and ’70s
singer-songwriters. Even Langhorne’s voice
retained the ironically soothing nasal quality
of Cat Stevens and Donovan. His cry rang as
potent as a bell when he sang, “So long
my only love/In which direction have you gone?/By
the time the sun’s gone down tonight/You’ll
know that you’re the only one.”
This lyrical simplicity was marked by another
simple formula: cool + predictable = exactly
what you want to hear.
Just two songs in, I was comforted
by the nostalgia that I had heard this all before,
but not as poignantly or clearly expressed as
when the words tumbled out of Slim’s mouth
over driving layers of drum and bass. Unpredictably,
Langhorne Slim’s charming vocals and poppy
guitar were backed by the frenetic metronome
of one-hit heavy drummer Malachi DeLorenzo
(who makes brushes slam bigger than most drummers’
sticks) and the rich stand-up bass of Paul
DeFiglia, for whom an electric bass
is no match in size or sound. No wonder the
percussion section of Langhorne Slim calls itself
The War Eagles.
Sound guy, nothing—Langhorne
Slim & The War Eagles can back up and throw
down in the front lines, winning any music war
they’re called to fight, and drafting
plenty of fans along the way.
www.langhorneslim.com
www.v2records.com
Anneliese Rix, March
6, 2007
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