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CHRIS STAMEY
CULT APPEAL
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If ever a song deserved to be stretched to a 10-minute live version, it’s Chris Stamey’s "Something Came Over Me." That song may be the peak of Stamey’s two-decade catalogue, and he’s put it on three different albums. The lyrics recount a glimpse of the divine, and the tune is appropriately soaring in a vintage Brian Wilson–esque way. All three of Stamey’s recorded versions put the melody up front, but on stage it was something else again. With loose-cannon drummer Anton Fier driving Stamey’s band at the Paradise Lounge a week ago last Tuesday, the song took some avant-jazz turns, veering into free-form chaos before Stamey took a dazzling flamenco-style guitar solo. Then that chorus came back around, and so did the shivers. Stamey got a cult hero’s welcome at the Paradise: all 30 of the people who showed up were diehard fans who recognized the intros to nearly all the songs, including the newly released ones that made up the bulk of the set, and brought him and his band back for two encores. It was his first local appearance since the acoustic tour he and fellow ex-dB’s member Peter Holsapple made in 1991, before Stamey established a second career as producer to Whiskeytown, Le Tigre, and others. This new tour also followed two new albums, his first in 10 years: the lushly produced Travels in the South and the loose and garagy Yo La Tengo collaboration A Question of Temperature (both on Yep Roc). "Something Came Over Me" aside, Stamey drew mainly from those two albums, denying fans the chance to hear their favorite dB’s tracks or solo obscurities played live. (The former will likely get an airing when the dB’s wrap up their new reunion album.) But for a guy who’s barely stepped on a stage in the past decade, he seemed pretty much at home. The rich melodies on the Travels songs came through fine without the layers of overdubs, and he revealed a guitar-hero side that seldom comes through on disc. Fier’s drumming pushed the band into heavier territory (Stamey has toured in Fier’s band, the Golden Palominos), and the ’60s covers "Politician" (Cream) and "Shapes of Things" (the Yardbirds) showed that Stamey could easily have taken his friend Ira Kaplan’s title as indie rock’s king of feedback. But he’s always been an ambitious songwriter and is even more so now that he’s writing near-disco numbers ("Kierkegaard") that ponder the existence of God. "14 Shades of Green," which opens Travels in the South, is on the surface a blissful song about revisiting old haunts, but Stamey explained on stage that the real meaning is more sinister: the singer is a bus driver about to kidnap his old classmates on their 20-year high-school reunion. The layers of meaning are worth exploring on disc, but on stage it was enough to hear a reclusive master at work.
BY BRETT MILANO
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