‘I am not a lyric person, I never pay attention to the lyrics even though my favorite songwriter is Joni Mitchell and I sing Stephin Merritt’s songs!’ joked Claudia Gonson before ‘Sadder than the Moon’, ‘But I just realized that these songs are very depressing songs!’ she added with a big smile. Future Bible Heroes, a band which sounds a bit like the Magnetic Fields – for the good reason that they are about the same people – played an intimate concert at the Echoplex on Monday night. I knew about the Magnetic Fields of course, but not about this side project which has nevertheless existed since 1997! The big deception is that they are currently touring without Stephin Merritt, who is having a serious hearing condition called hyperacusis, giving him an over-sensitivity to certain frequency ranges of sounds and, I guess, preventing him to perform a lot. Thus, on Monday night, the quartet made of Magnetic Fields’ Claudia Gonson and Shirley Simms, and Figures on a Beach’s Chris Ewen and Anthony Kaczynski, had the delicate and delightful – looking at their accomplice’s smiles all night long – task to perform Merritt’s new songs. Claudia Gonson was the one doing most of the vocals – and she has a very nice voice – but they all participated at times, probably making people not longing too much for Merritt’s baritone voice.
They all looked unusual, yes it’s unusual to see band members sitting down for once, then their mutual complicity and exchanges with the audience had a unique intimacy, rarely seen at the Echoplex or elsewhere. They looked like an old fashioned chamber orchestra playing for friends (and themselves), but also playing for Merritt, who wasn’t there but ‘was probably sleeping’, as Gonson said.
Actually, Shirley Simms was the only one sitting down, but the rest of the band didn’t move an iota from their spot during the whole set, so the effect was the same, and despite the disco-dance-y beats lightly filtering through the songs, the audience wasn’t moving much either, but was rather absorbed by the sweetness of the music itself. They are currently touring in support of their new album ‘Partygoing’, their first one since 2002, which is a collection of dreamy (often sad) ballads, very hard to figure out genre-wise sometimes, but deliciously electro-light. Lightness was probably a common theme for all these tunes, and probably partially due to the composer’s hearing problems, the music sounded very delicate and eerie because of the hardly danceable beats escaping from the drum machine.
Behind his synth, Chris Ewen looked like an experimented alchemist, preciously touching his keys and knobs expressing the most profound satisfaction on his face. When they were not singing, Shirley Simms and Claudia Gonson were talking to each other all the time, responding to the most random words said by people in the crowd, or discussing the meaning of the songs with humor as if they were doing a Saturday Night Live sketch – doesn’t Claudia Gonson look a bit like witty Molly Shannon anyway? Anthony Kaczynski, on the extreme right of the stage, was playing bass and doing some singing, looking a little isolated from the rest of the band. There was even a little table installed between the two women, and the ambiance was cozy and casual, the total opposite of the theatricality installed by certain bands on stage. No grandiosity, no artifice, no rockstar attitude, of no! Just regular people and central stage Claudia Gonson who was singing the songs with the enthusiasm of a Merritt’s fan girl.
And there were plenty of these radiant pop songs, sometimes transformed into upbeat dancefloors (not really) thanks to Ewen’s lo-fi electronics, while irony and humor were always pointing their mordant heads in the lyrics… dark humor? ‘Let’s Go to Sleep (And never come back)’ was a hilarious suicide synth-pop song if such a thing is possible, saying ‘what makes life so long?/why should we wait till we have a stroke/or die of a heart attack?’, and despite the uplifting tempos and the large smiles on all these people’s faces, death, despair, isolation, loss, failed dreams were of course at the center of all these glittering synth numbers, which had the most depressing titles like ‘Digging My Own Grave’ or ‘Hopeless’. ‘Living, Loving, Partygoing’ – and Monday was video premiere day for the song – full of glitching noises bringing us at a John Waters’ party, was too upbeat to have been written by morose and depressed Merritt, but sung by Claudia Gonson, it sounded like a schoolgirl party. ‘When I sing these songs, I have the impression I had sex with all these men’, she said,… ‘But I didn’t!’. Songs were going from nightlife party-going to the hilarious advice of ‘Keep Your Children In A Coma’, which tempered how life was difficult these days, ‘Life is hard for kids today/They have to program everything/Dude, they have to use computers/Just to sing’…
‘Don’t ask me why he wrote all these songs’, she also said before ‘I am a Vampire’, and these songs were turning very weird, with crazy ‘Drink Nothing But Champagne’ resurrecting Jesus to hear him say ‘Don’t drink the water, ’cause water’s mostly piss’ then asking advice from David Bowie to Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler and occultist Aleister Crowley, and ending on the happy drunken tone ‘We drink nothing but champagne/it makes life shorter than drinking water’… Whaaaat?
But since all parties have to end, they did ‘The World is a Disco Ball’ and disappeared to come back for more girl harmonies on their funny rendition of Human League’s ‘Don’t You Want Me’… ‘Stephin left Los Angeles to New York, Yeah we got him back, but he wrote this song for you’ said Gonson before their last song of the night ‘When Evening Falls on Tinseltown’. It was strange how Merritt was there the whole night without being physically there, but I was left with so many questions, where do all these lyrics come from? Does Stephin Merritt ever like parties anyway? And isn’t writing a whole album about partygoing and not being present for the actual party just… rude? Actually it reflected the whole tone of the night, sarcasm and jokes delivered on synth melodies and the poet bowing out, leaving us perplex and satisfied.
Setlist
Losing your affection
Let’s Go to Sleep (And never come back)
Sadder than the Moon
Digging My Own Grave
All I Care About Is You
Keep Your Children in a Coma
A Drink is just the Thing
Hopeless
She-devils of the deep
Lonely Days
Living, Loving, Partygoing
Kiss me only with your Eyes
Memories of Love
I am a Vampire
Drink nothing but Champagne
The world is a Disco Ball
Encore
Don’t You Want Me (The Human League cover)
When Evening Falls on Tinseltown