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2004-09-16 - 4:35 p.m.
Travistan
A couple Saturdays ago, I went to see the first show of Travis Morrison’s first tour with his first post-Dismemberment Plan backing band, at the Talking Head in Baltimore. I hadn’t been to the TH in a while and was annoyed that they had once again changed which door is the entrance of the building. That shit is confusing. Shortly after getting there I spotted every member of Lake Trout, and at one point was kind of surrounded by them, which was a little weird, having one of your favorite bands elbow past you at the bar all night. The first opener was Temp Sound Solutions, which was basically a guy wearing a weird shiny, dome-like helmet/mask and a Nintendo Power Glove and a trucker hat. He played guitar over pre-recorded tracks, mostly covers of music from Nintendo games. It’s kind of a neat gimmick, but there’s a band called the Minibosses the same thing much better. And his schtick got old really quick, especially since he insisted on standing in front of the stage instead of on it, and spent most of the set with his back to the audience, which meant that not only could you not see much unless you were in the front row, but there wasn’t much to see anyway. It got dreadfully tedious. At one point he played a song that he mentioned was by a band he was in called the Idea Men, which was Rjyan Kidwell’s old band before he was Cex, and that was when I realized that this was the same guy who played drums with Cex at a show I saw last year, which was maybe the worst Cex show I’d ever seen. The 2nd opener was Spotter, which is the solo project of a member of the D.C. band Avec, who also happened to be the girl who had to explain to me which door to go in when I was outside the club. She played an acoustic and sang in the dramatic and kind of precious style that reminded me of Ani DiFranco at times. She was a pretty captivating performer, though, and she did a kickass cover of Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me A River”. It’d be easy to do something like that in a half-assed way for the novelty value, but she really nailed it, got down the nuances of the vocal performance and everything. Travis played with a 5-piece band consisting of a drummer, a percussionist, and 3 keyboardists, including himself. There were no guitars or basses in sight, which was kind of cool, although at times they could’ve stood the addition of one to make their sound a little meatier. Travis has gotten a lot of hateration already for his post-Plan stuff, and his album’s not even out yet, but I’m still interested to check out what he’s doing. I recognized about half the songs they played from the MP3’s on his site and from when the Plan played them live before deciding to break up. But pretty much every song was played that night in a completely different arrangement from what I’d heard before, including a Go-Go-inspired version of “Angry Angel”. Travis sang a bit of “Waiting Room” at the end of “My Two Front Teeth”. They played for about 50 minutes, probably about his whole record, and towards the end of the set ended up mixing it up by throwing in an under-rehearsed Janet Jackson cover that come off pretty well. Then after their last song, they decided to take a couple minutes to learn a song onstage, deciding on a key to play in and getting down the rhythm, and then broke into a spirited rendition of Travis’s controversial cover of Ludacris’s “What’s Your Fantasy”. I was pretty impressed at how well he kept up with the tempo. As a live band, they don’t really hold a candle to the Plan, who were one of my favorite live bands ever, but I didn’t really expect them to and enjoyed it for what it was. -al
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