I never took any pictures or video when I saw Damien at Radio City Music Hall over the summer, but that concert blew my mind.  This one suffered a bit in comparison.

Before I get into the suffering, I would like to mention that I quite enjoyed the show, I think he is an excellent performer that really adds a lot to his live show.  There is a reason I have seen him three times in two years, he is quite a showman.  However, because he is so excellent, finding ways to laud praise on him is less easy than finding things to complain about.  Thus, almost all of this is complaining.  However, I want to see him again when he goes out on tour, so he is still in the plus column for me.

I thought the album O was quite excellent, but 9 less so.  That is because his songs go from intensely passionate but sometimes quiet to much more often quiet, and almost boring.  Really, there is something to be said for negative sound in a song, but you can only support so much of it.  His song writing career seems to be going from pure rock pre-O to almost whispering minimalism in 9. 

The flip side of this of course, was always his live show.  Not only can you better hear the raw emotion that went into some of these more quiet and introspective songs, but he adds loads to them.  Sometimes he adds a lot of louder instruments to a much more quiet album version.  Sometimes he just starts jamming out and can double or triple the length of a song, occasionally coming back to the lyrics.  Of course, the best thing he adds to songs are the pre-song explanations.  The best version of this of course was when he explained “Cheers Darling” at Radio City and drank 3 full glasses of wine and wandered around on stage and then climbed up the side of the stage way, way far up.  The crowd was on its feet.  This time though, the best line was:

“If you gave a young man a million dollars every night, you wouldn’t expect him to act in a sensible manner, would you?  So what happens, when, you know, a young man gets a million new sperm every night?”

He also did a bit where he improvised a song for the crowd, asking for moods, jobs and colors.  He then made some really long depressing song that was half jamming out.  Interesting to see it done, but it sounded a lot like his other stuff and really, we all would have just liked to have seen more of his other stuff.  You know, like we paid for.

Also lacking was Lisa Hannigan.  She is the female you hear on some songs and see in the videos and she also plays the oboe on stage.  Her soft haunting voice is really something of an essential counterpart in the songs he participates in.  To replace her instrumentally, Damien got a girl who looks very similar to play the oboe, but to replace her vocally, he just sings a bit softer and higher.  The effect is very similar to when they perform Eskimo and Damien sings the part of the opera singer.  There is a viable and noticeable difference, and it is quite sad.  I hope that in the future he brings in either a new female vocalist or at least guest vocalists for her part.