Oh the joy. At the Troubadour, celebrating the Section Quartet's new CD Release, Fuzz Box, I'm waiting around with two friends for the set check to roll around, then the opening band to start, meanwhile I'm contemplating whether I should steal a poster off the wall right now, or after the show.
Out comes a tiny woman, all in black, looking like margo tennenbaum in her mid-forties, she is "opener" Sam Phillips. Her sole accompaniment is a tiny tape recorder on which ran tiny piano chords, just loud enough to give one a sense that it was just you and her in the room, and you need to be quiet like a mouse to catch everything. The faces she made at the crowd made one immediately fall in love with her.
The String Quartet, masters of stringed instruments and beautiful versions of some pretty beloved songs from the Clash to Tool to Postal Service, they can create things on strings with their fingers that seem impossible to imagine are coming from a stage with only four people on it. They seem to become alive as a symphony of multiplicity, yet its just them four. That night they awed the crowd with Yeah, Yeah Yeah's "Phenomena", David Bowie's "The Man Who Sold the World, Sound Garden's "Black Hole Sun", The Strokes' "Juicebox", Queens of the Stone Age's "No One Knows", and my favorite, Radiohead's "Paranoid Android" (breathtaking).
Along with appearances by Linda Perry and Grant Lee Phillips, out comes Jon Brion (I <3 Huckabees, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) and does a beautiful version of Bowie's "Life On Mars", accompanied by the quartet. I believe I melted on the spot but I can't remember anything else.
Go Give Them A Listen! Right Now.
