Thinking that might be droll merely proves my lack of the requisite falling-in-the-East River turn of phrase with which Jeffrey Lewis casually pirouettes past the listener.
Before Lewis’s doomed anti-folk wit is Andy Burns, draped in an undertaker’s jacket pilfered from David Byrne’s wardrobe he proffers musical melodrama and tributes to both David Lynch and frisbees as I muse, “Didn’t Donnie Darko die at the end of his movie?”
As Burns lurches between laptop and guitar like an agitated Happy Harry Hard-On I struggle to place these tunes in any firm context. I commend him. There is a splash of Sparks here, a mark of histrionic cabaret Kozalek; but Mr Burns is a refreshingly hard to tie down sport. Wet Rag is a soggy highlight.
Jeffrey Lewis
- The Curtin Hotel
- Friday 28 February
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Briefly adjourning downstairs I step into a whole other dimension of Brazilian jazz fusion and may that never collide with what is about to ensue in the room above. Anti-folk jazz-fusion seems a ghastly prospect. Lewis is accompanied on this tour by Voltage bandmate and Grasping Straw Mallory Feuer, she opens in a song that segues from violin to nigh incongruous electric guitar waves and embodies what I imagine was the SideWalk Cafe passed-cap vibe in its anti-folk heyday. I half-expect Rick Shapiro to roll onstage to holler about Leonardo DiCaprio and jacuzzis, but Jeffrey appears and unfurls a sheet to project a very Peace Eye bookstore kaleidoscope animation (circa 1999 Winamp media player).
Leading with Just Fun from forthcoming LP The Even More Freewheelin’ Jeffrey Lewis (dig that cover for a better casting choice than Timothée Chalamet), Lewis draws plenty of laughs with the unfamiliar before trundling through an assortment across his career. He notably neglects some of his best songs – even more notably because their absence seems to little detriment (a Fugs medley wouldn’t have gone astray).
Standing there wondering how his projected kaleidoscope on a sheet is any less amateurish than when used by a high school Tool cover band, Lewis launches into a revealing number that draws direct (and surprising) lines between himself and Hamell on Trial, and even harks back to Roger Manning’s SST recordings. So that Yippie-esque projection is gift-wrapping the DIY charm.
Naturally, Jeffrey has a plethora of his existential conundrum riddles for us this fine evening. Scowling Crackhead Ian – “I’m not sure if that is literally the name on his passport” – may well be a song about growing up in the East Village, or a mirror reflecting how St Mark’s Place has changed in the intervening years while leaving some behind (there are now more novelty crack pipes for tourists than heads). The Chelsea Hotel Oral Sex Song hasn’t lost any charm, remaining a bookend to Cohen’s track, and elevating it to my sometimes-sentimental ears. Sad Screaming Old Man serves up ironic insight into Jeffrey’s lyrical purgatory, with the titular elderly cloud-shouter lyrically informing Lewis in the final verse, “it’s all existentially hopeless eventually / you’re just dementedly shrieking like me, like you were meant to be” before the song crashes to a banshee-hysterical close.
Unbeknownst to me, Lewis’s sideline in comic books is also incorporated into his performance and with hilarious results. He first sardonically summarises Fitzgerald’s Gatsby in song with comic book slides, similarly dispenses with contemporary Chilean political history, and gifts us an Evil Dead II synopsis. A fabulously preposterous comic triptych, if ever there was.
The challenge lies in sufficiently suppressing laughter to absorb the lesson. Although I can’t speak for other attendees, I fail consummately.
Further surprises await, although in rendition not material. Originally released on an EP collaboration with Diane Cluck in ’01, The River always lyrically evoked bygone folk from the first, “I was dreaming of a mountain / In the sky above the flood / And a forest and a city / And a river made of blood”, it is soaked in imagery Biblical and profane. Lewis’s rendition with Feuer casts a line back to Harry Smith’s anthologies, while the hook emerges from the river with an anti-folk call-and-response hocketing ensnared. The way this clattering duet is splattered across an invocation of old folk and spirituals is deeply moving and profoundly clever.
Cluck apparently also chided Lewis to write a positive song. When he sings, “it’s obnoxious but I have to exist” one can but wonder if he succeeded – it is as though he can’t escape his existential dread. Jeffrey Lewis has no poetic nostalgia for French men fucking joyously and jubilantly on a Monte Carlo beach like “mermen on fire”, as in one glory of Cluck’s oeuvre. Yet his closing on a Leadbelly-pitched Heavy Heart, and raising the house lights to My Heart Would Know (Hank Williams) seem more appropriate in the moment than if one had suggested it prior. That Leonard Cohen oral sex song, and aforementioned The River have warmed our cockles, tempering the sly dread within “I just have to exist… and there’s ice-cream” et al.
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