For a few years now, Chris Baio has been releasing solo tracks, and may be there is a sort of Will Butler-Albert Hammond complex, may be it is just what happens when you are in any band and you are not the frontman? At one point, you want to fly solo and share with the world your own project, you want to be your own frontman! Vampire Weekend’s bassist has been making dance tracks for a while, but I saw him doing his first solo show ever, at Bardot, in Hollywood on Monday night.
He played a few tracks from his upcoming release ‘The Names’, set to be released on September 18th through Glassnote Records. When I saw him installed in front of a large electronic gear full of knobs, I thought it would be an electronic show, but I was only partially right, it was rather a weird brand of electro pop, with probably a few shades of the dance tracks he has been making for years, and some real singing, clear and distinctive vocals that he was throwing at people’s faces in a very laid back manner. Baio was taking the mic in one hand, letting the recorded track play and it was as if he was becoming the lounge singer he had always wanted to be. As he was sharing more tracks, the sound was getting poppier and poppier before he was getting back behind his electronic gear, for more synth parts. He even tried himself at some interesting and funny mechanical dance moves as his music was full of clicking beats.
Some numbers sounded like breezy dance floors, with a multitude of eccentric noises he was carefully crafting on his knob pad, with beats, ticking noises and electronically transformed voices. The whole thing was layered and complex, fun and quite original, although there certainly wasn’t any earworm melodies like Vampire Weekend can come up with, actually Baio’s rather quirky electro pop had little to do with his other band’s music… until he played a few other tracks with bits sounding more like synth dance remixes of some obscure Vampire Weekend’s songs, as a few chunks of their decorated music were oddly surfacing.
I can’t say I was totally convinced, his performance had an odd feel at times, like a karaoke singing over some not-so-original Dubstep… still his dexterity at the knob machine, or whatever you call this thing, was impressive and I wanted to like his music more than I did, because he looked so at ease making all these sounds and rhythms, because his idiosyncratic personality was shinning.
Chris Baio has described his forthcoming album as ‘Bowie and Ferry-influenced pop songs and dumbsmart arena techno’, and has declared that ‘It is a record that has reverberated through my mind for much of the last five years.’ However, after this show and song titles such as ‘Brainwash yyrr Face’, ‘I Was Born in a Marathon’, ‘All the Idiots’, some mystery remains, unless I find some answers in Don DeLillo’s 1982 novel ‘The Names’ which gave its title to his new record.
