Tuesday, July 20, 2010

DELTA SPIRIT in SANTA FE TONIGHT, Y'ALL!!!


"Toast" had the honor of interviewing Matt Vasquez and Kelly Winrich from Long Beach, CA's DELTA SPIRIT today. They played 3 songs and were generally very pleasant guys who obviously love what they do.

LISTEN HERE

They play live tonight (7/20/10) with a full band @ the Santa Fe Brewing Company (^_^)

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CONCERT REVIEW – DELTA SPIRIT – 7/20/10 Santa Fe Brewing Company, Santa Fe, NM

Delta Spirit is a sonic juggernaut.

This is the best bar band to come along in 10, maybe 20 years. Hailing originally from San Diego, CA, and now holed up in Long Beach, Delta Spirit is a band born to perform. They play with as much energy for 20 people as they might for 20,000 – something I’ve heard said about only a handful of bands in rock’s history.

I recall very much enjoying their new album, History from Below, upon first listen some weeks ago but, like all good bands, their songs reveal themselves as significantly more magnificent live – like the album cuts are sheepish-yet-solid Clark Kent and their live counterparts are Superman, rippling with unlikely musculature.

Tonight’s set was a spectacular tapestry of several new songs, a few old songs, and a couple of surprising covers. Oh, and one bar fight. Not the band’s fault, I’m sure, though they did steer most songs toward frenzy, and maybe this one blonde beef-head was just one susceptible microbrew over the line. The band kindly but firmly insisted he exit the venue, stage right, then kept right on playing, unfazed.

Their current single, Bushwick Blues, came near the beginning of the set, commandeering our attention and rarely letting it waver for the next 90 minutes. They did indulge themselves with detours into quietude and melancholia throughout the night, but always whipped the energy back to a foamy froth. It’s called dynamic range, young bands of the world – look into it.

Front-man Matt Vasquez has a unique vocal quality – able to shift from desperate, quivering prettiness to a high-grade, bestial yowl at the drop of a hat. The curious thing about this is how often he did it, and how effortless it all seemed. Their reading of St. James Infirmary bore an earthy, almost malevolent Tom Waits-iness.

The band admitted during a radio interview earlier that day they’d been playing most of the “new” songs for at least 2 years (during their extensive support tour for full-length #1 – Ode to Sunshine) before recording them for full-length #2 – History from Below, and it really showed on one of my favorites from the “new” batch: White Table. Though the arrangement wasn’t technically different in any drastic way, it did churn its way into a stunning multi-instrumental crescendo which put the album version to shame.

Wave upon wave of sound crashed against us, the undertow threatening to pull us into bottomless waters if we didn’t keep an eye on the shore. At least 2 members of Delta Spirit – Matt Vasquez and Kelly Winrich – are multi-instrumentalists (there seemed to be a fifth member not credited on the album, and if introductions were made from the stage, I somehow missed them), which allows each song to find its own unique arrangement or, presumably, for each arrangement to morph night after night.

Whether Vasquez takes it upon himself to preface certain songs with pithy anect-oids because he’s the front-man, or if he’s the front-man because he takes it upon himself to preface certain songs with pithy anect-oids I can’t say. He did preface a tease of Pink Floyd’s Wish You were Here by taking over piano duties from Kelly Winrich, and told of a time which is as likely to have actually happened to him as it was to have happened to any of us, when he was tripping in the bathtub and came to the conclusion that it was quite possibly the perfect song. Wish You Were Here segued flawlessly into their Ode to Sunshine radio hit, Trashcan, surprisingly well. Vasquez stayed on piano for this one, while Winrich picked up a modified trashcan lid to play additional percussion. Maybe that’s why the song’s called Trashcan, I don’t know. There wasn’t a pithy anect-oid about it.

Vasquez prefaced 9/11 by name-dropping Howard Zinn and encouraging us to read A People’s History of the United States, if we hadn’t already. This might’ve been received as overly-liberal left-wingery elsewhere, but luckily for Vasquez, Santa Fe is a blue city in a red state.

When he introduced the plaintive Vivian, Vasquez told about how he wrote it while he was on the road and got word that both of his beloved grandmothers had died, tingeing the song with a self-revealing emotional twinge. Vasquez seems fearless about wearing his heart on his sleeve. Either he’s too young to know better, or he’s just a strong motherf***er.

Delta Spirit’s music – especially live – is monstrous, epic, delicate, dissonant, and elegant; sometimes all at once. “Butterfly sledgehammers” is a term that keeps returning to me after the fact. Maybe their opening and closing house p.a. selections indicate where they’d like to be placed in the framework of rock’s living mythology – somewhere between Wilco and The Band. Earlier in the day, during their radio interview, Vasquez admitted the reason for playing music in front of people is “to convince them that you’re the best at it,” and I definitely came away a believer. It’s too bad in a way that their songs and their presentation are so monumentally good, because this is what simultaneously makes them the best bar band going, but also most likely to advance to arena gigging (à la U2, or Springsteen, or Panic, or KOL) in the near future.

In the end, as I remarked to an acquaintance in the audience, it was great just to hear some good old rock ’n’ roll for a change.

~ Chris “Toast” Diestler

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