Sebadohis a great band, but there was scant evidence of this greatness on display in Miami last night. The lo-fi indie group, which formed in 1986 as an offshoot of vocalist Lou Barlow’s other band, Dinosaur Jr., performed at Grand Central in a preview show before embarking today on the star-studded Weezer Cruise. They opened their set by conceding that they hadn’t played a show together in months, and boy, did it show.
It felt like the throng of fans – many of whom were undoubtedly hearing the songs live for the first time – were sitting in on a rehearsal, not an officially sanctioned concert. Before any note was played, bassist Jason Loewenstein found that his instrument was tuned to the wrong key, setting the tone for the sloppiness that would follow. In that first tune – “Too Pure,” a poor choice for an opening number – the bass throbbed so disproportionately that it all but drowned out everything else. This problem was never addressed, let alone fixed. Loewenstein played the first few notes of another song before stopping and restarting because of a flubbed note. Later, Barlow played “Magnet’s Coil” without the necessary capo, which partly accounted for its messy performance.
The occasional mistake is acceptable, because it proves the musicians are human, but an endless compendium of mistakes isn’t a concert; it’s a drunken jam session. The fact that the band acknowledged its difficulties in between rounds of rambling, disengaging banter doesn’t make it any more acceptable.
Barlow’s voice wandered off the mic so many times, and he sang off-key with such frequency, that the generosity of the set list – he played everything I wanted to hear and then some – could not be properly enjoyed. There were many times during the night that I grimaced uncomfortably during some of my favorite songs (“Soul and Fire,” “Oceans” and “Sister,” for example). After about 75 minutes onstage, the band finally started to function like a well-oiled unit, and “License to Confuse” and “Beauty of the Ride” sounded pretty damn good. It’s too bad almost half the audience had justifiably cleared out by that point. Hopefully Sebadoh has cleaned out some of its sonic cobwebs in anticipation of its cruise performances; that way, at least tonight’s debacle would have been good for something.
On a better note, Miami’s Jacuzzi Boys played an opening set of its custom blend of ‘60s psychedelic garage pop; it was all copious reverb and nonstop fun, enough to make you overlook the fact that all the songs sounded exactly the same. Plains, another local band, played before Jacuzzi Boys with a pleasantly unobjectionable sound rooted in late ‘90s/early ‘00s indie rock: some Built to Spill here, some Interpol there, some Shins over yonder.
