Several hundred people packed Space Gallery in Portland last Thursday night for a concert by the critically acclaimed folk artist Jolie Holland of the band The Be Good Tanyas. Singer-songwriter Matt Bauer opened.
The venue was fairly packed by the time Bauer, a fairly imposing man with a very soft voice, began his set of slow songs full of nature imagery. He began by playing the banjo, something he does skillfully, moving fluidly among complicated and intricate chords.
After about four songs, however, he switched to acoustic guitar and the hot crowd grew increasingly bored as his set wound on through a tepid combination of basic guitar playing and slow mellow vocals. When Bauer sings, it is hard to make out much more than a mishmash of nature motifs and odd phrases. He’s sort of a bad stereotype of a folk singer, a Bob Dylan 45 years too late who forgot to be a genius. It’s not to say he was terrible; he wasn’t, but he had nothing on the exuberant energy of Jolie Holland.
Holland was fantastic. She performed a mixture of fifties rock and roll and light country on a collection of interesting instruments, including a 90-year-old violin with a brass horn connected to it. Her collaborator, Grey Thurgood, accompanied her on a 50-year-old bass through charmingly funny lyrics and the kind of energetic pop songs that quickly get stuck in your head.
The crowd loved it. Many members of the audience bopped along to the songs. Everybody laughed when she introduced a song as being about “the warm feeling a woman might get when one of her tough male friends says he will break someone’s ribs for her.” People shouted out questions and requests, almost all of which her small setup prevented her from playing, but nobody cared. She just played some new material instead. It was a truly memorable show, well worth the weighty $18 it cost to get in.