Superchunk At The Henry Fonda, Tuesday, October 19th, 2010: Energy Is A Weak Word To Desribe Them -by Alyson Camus

Not touring for a long time can be tricky, but apparently, not for them. I’m sure their performance on Tuesday night met the expectation of all their fans: at the end of the show, most of these same fans may as well as been on their way out of the gym after some intense two hour workout, bathing in their sweat from head to toes, not knowing if they were drunker from the music or from the numerous glasses of beer.

Superchunk delivered a large chunk of their repertoire (I know), a long set of songs played with an incredible energy, followed by two encores when the songs were melting into each other, and when I was losing count of how many of them they had played.

Energy is actually a weak word to describe them on stage, there is a lot of moving, dancing, jumping, climbing, and the crowd follows, knowing all the lyrics of the songs, leaving me a little out of place. And these lyrics were mostly shouted, loudly, but not aggressively. Musically, there is a sunny side to their fast, speed-driven songs, which spring into many outbursts of Mac McCaughan‘s guitar, always followed by Laura Balance’s bass and Jim Wilbur’s constantly buzzing second guitar. A lot of distortions, countless epic guitar solos, a bunch of jumping-all-leg-apart-endings, the songs were compressed into each other, played with so little interruption I had a hard time to follow, because, of course I knew none of them! There were melodies, I heard them, but you need to work on these kinds of melodies for some time to appreciate them, otherwise you tend to let them glide on you like running water.

McCaughan’s guitar seemed out of control sometimes, it acted like a wild horse which did not want to be ridden, or a devilish-entity-possessed-machine which attacked his master, but fortunately McCaughan always seemed to tame the beast. Laura Balance was more in control although the jumping-hopping was incessant, whereas Jim Wilbur was a quiet force and Jon Wurster was pounding hard on his fast beating-drumming machine. I had no way to compare this performance to some previous ones, but they seemed to really push the energy level to the roof, to muscle up every beat of their songs. This is what happens when you don’t play for a long time, all this power and liveliness contained for 9 years has to get out.

During the encores (again I don’t know the song but I’m pretty sure it was question of ‘motherfucker’ for one of them), the crowd got super excited and it was as if everybody wanted to destroy everything, guitars, drums and barricades. London May, whom I had already spotted at the Dee Dee Ramone’s birthday celebration, and who had followed with a visible boost of appreciation most of the show on the side of the stage, joined them on stage, to take Jon Wurster’s spot on drums for ‘Horror Biz’. There were many other songs for the encores, and among them a Magnetic Fields cover (100,000 Fireflies), as they did not want to end the show, thanking the crowd many times.
When you realize that Mac McCaughan and bassist Laura Balance are the co-founders of Merge Records which has signed so many prominent artists (Arcade Fire, The Magnetic Fields, Conor Oberst, Neutral Milk Hotel, She & Him, M. Ward, Spoon,…), you wonder what else they could hope for.

The setlist found on line: