Live Review: Thievery Corporation, Monday, April 20 @ Roseland-- Local Cut

Live Review: Thievery Corporation, Monday, April 20 @ Roseland

April 24th, 2009 [4:05PM] Posted by: Local Cut | 0 COMMENTS

Richard Speer is Willamette Week’s primary Visual Arts writer. He’s also a Thievery Corporation fan. Jennifer Newsted is an ace photographer and regular LocalCut contributor.

It’s great to see hippies and hipsters coexisting as famously as they did when Thievery Corporation blasted off Monday night at the Roseland. Turns out dreads and patchouli mix okay with Armani shirts and $250 highlights when vigorously shaken in the senesthetic sonic/aural/visual/olfactory melange that is the Washington, D.C.-based DJ duo’s trademark. Commingling techno and world music across cultural divides is something frontmen Rob Garza and Eric Hilton pull off with considerable finesse. Monday night’s show saw Latin, African, and European beats flowing into one another like musical lava, punctuated by the tinny twinge of the sitar. Call it trip-hop, lounge, downtempo, or whatev’, it was music to move to. Hardly anybody was sitting down in the balcony—the aisles, logjammed with jumpers and swayers and kneebenders, were virtually unnavigable to anybody aiming to pursue mundanities like getting a drink or taking a leak.

While tracks from Thievery’s latest studio album, Radio Retaliation, referenced political outrages du jour, their cast-of-thousands circus show and freaky light displays were all about the politics of pleasure. As a panoply of vocalists and instrumentalists floated and riffed atop the rhythms, colored spotlights and banks of flickering screens offered no end of effects behind, beside, and betwixt the performers: a hand-held camera plunging fast-motion through Bernini’s collonade at the Vatican; an abstracted but unmistakable semblance of Lizard King Jim Morrison; and pixelated simulated glitter, sparkling red and green and white. Like the Acid Test-era oil-emulsion light shows, and Saturday Night Fever colored disco dance floors in the 1970s, and the entirety of Burning Man in the 1980s and 90s, Thievery Corporation’s visual modus operandi would seem expressly engineered to complement or at the very least simulate the psychedelic high.

Speaking of high, there was some skanky THC wafting around indiscreetly, mingling midair with that great classic undeodorized Portland perfume: the smell of hundreds of people having a damn good time. Walt Whitman would’ve been in heaven. “There is something in staying close to men and women,” he wrote in his hymn to the body electric, “and looking on them, and in the contact and odor of them, that pleases the soul well.” This audience had reason to be well pleased: Garza, Hilton, & Co. gave them a more organic, interactive vibe than iconic one-man shows like Paul Oakenfold offer—or, for that matter, other, more implacable duos like Sasha & Digweed. The emphasis on live performance lent a jam-band improvisation to a genre often pigeonholed for droning, pre-programmed beats.

I know people who follow Thievery Corporation like Deadheads followed the Dead. I always thought it was kinda weird. After Monday night’s show, I went onto Thievery’s website and saw they were playing Seattle Tuesday night and Vancouver, B.C. Wednesday night. For about nine seconds, I pondered the logistics of a road trip. Okay, okay—it was ten seconds.
—Richard Speer

Jennifer Newsted’s photos (taken at the Sunday, April 19 performance):