A Night In The Borough Of My Birth

Eleanor Friedberger / Hospitality at the Bell House, Brooklyn, NY, April 18, 2012 

I’d had these tickets since February, I think.  It isn’t always easy, even for coolparents, to get a sitter in the middle of the week; and CoolMom gets up extremely early for her commute in the morning.  So this wasn’t going to be a date night.  Instead, after I finished up my evening’s carpooling duties, I headed into Brooklyn on my own.

The Bell House is a great place to see a show if you don’t mind standing.  CoolMom and I had a great experience seeing The National there a couple of years ago.  The performance space holds only a few hundred people.  The sound is pretty good, and they have a great selection of beers.  As a member of the bridge and tunnel crowd, I also think it’s great that there is ample free, street parking near the venue.  I waited to enter behind a line of people getting their ID’s checked at the door, then the doorman just waved me through without even asking me for mine.  This happened despite my having gone to the trouble of wearing my dark-rimmed glasses, WFMU T-shirt, and Puma Suedes.

I arrived a few minutes before the nine o’clock scheduled show time and had no problem finding a decent spot in front of the stage.  I was standing among a group of about four people with big, digital SLR cameras.  Their conversation consisted of asking each other “Who are you taking pictures for?” and answering with the name of the music blog that had sent them to the show.  You, though, get my grainy iPhone shots and reviews written without any notes.

Hospitality walked onto the stage a little after nine and started right in with “Sleepover,” from their excellent, self-titled debut.  They followed that with almost every song from the album in addition to one or two that I hadn’t heard before.  Lead vocalist and principal songwriter, Amber Papini, looked a bit nervous, but that didn’t hinder her performance.  She conjures images of New York with her lyrics, and her unique voice came across just as well live as it does on recordings.  The rest of the band did a great job providing the atmosphere for those lyrics.  After the set, I was already happy I’d made the trip.

Eleanor Friedberger took the stage with her band at around ten.  It was evident that things would sound quite different from last year’s Last Summer given the composition of her band:  guitars, bass, drums, no keyboards.  “My Mistakes” was easily one of my favorite songs from last year.  The album version goes for kind of a Haircut 100 vibe with keyboards and a closing sax solo.  Last night’s version, like much of the set, was great with its new rock, almost alt-country arrangement.  Friedberger sings in an almost spoken-word fashion, but she has a very good voice.  Her voice and the new arrangements had me thinking a bit about Neko Case, especially on “Scenes from Bensonhurst.”

The New York theme, initiated by Hospitality, continued during Friedberger’s set.  Like Hospitality, Last Summer, with one exception, is all images of New York – Brooklyn, mostly.  Friedberger introduced that exception, “Inn of the Seventh Ray,” as having been written about her least favorite city.

In all, it was a great bill.  Hospitality hewed closely to the sound, achieved on their album, that’s garnered them praise.  Eleanor Friedberger gave the crowd a totally different, fresh take on her songs.

Glad I sucked it up and drove in for the show.  It beat sitting on the couch watching the Yankees lose to the Twins.