PERFORMANCE ANXIETY VOL. IV: Little Joy w/ The Dead Trees 12.07.08 | Troubadour | Los Angeles, CA by Noah Barron As a general rule, I tend to gravitate to empty signifiers and wordless music. Whether it’s because my crazy-ass brain is already too full of its own white noise to accommodate someone else’s, or simply because I’m a jerk-off narcissist who would rather hear his own thoughts about a piece of art than the art’s thoughts about itself, (witness this paragraph), I tend to find warm fuzzies in nonliterary, purely aesthetic music. For me it was always Cocteau over Dylan or Cohen, Aphex over Will Oldham. That’s not to say I hate poetry and love only techno—god, spare me—but I just rarely have the mental energy for more literature, especially the kind that lives on headphones. I’m already behind on “four lifetimes of reading,” as somebody recently said. But in that equation, I tend to forget there is a middle ground between hollow pop doggerel and heavy-duty lyric art. The human voice, and the words it expresses can be simple, sincere and—though unimportant, pleasant as all get-out. I shouldn’t be fan of a band like Little Joy. I mean, on the face of it, it’s a vanity project that strokes Fabrizio Moretti’s ego out in some alleged Echo Park flophouse (when he’s not in New York, swimming Scrooge-like in his Olympic pool of money). Worse still, Little Joy is, wait for it, Latin-inflected, sun-drenched twee-pop(!!!). Guh. The live players are Moretti (on guitar rather than skins), ostensible frontman Roderigo Amarante singing and plucking, and child-voiced Nico-deadringer Binki Shapiro (of course, Moretti’s supposed GF), plus a whole gang of backers culled from undercard the Dead Trees.
It’s basically a musical group hug up onstage, knocking off your (grand)dad’s big band and bossa nova records. I should hate that, I really should. Only the tunes are so damn good and so polished, you can’t believe Little Joy wrote them, because they sound like standards. The mythology surrounding the group—that they’re all friends who kick it at Devendra Banhart’s house, that they’re named after a funky cocktail lounge, etc.—should probably have been enough to sustain the experiment, so the fact that the music is actually pretty decent is a bonus in a shaft-me world. It’s rare to see a band nowadays so obviously having fun, so in love with themselves and each other and the tunes, also managing to be a well-oiled gig machine. It’s kinda gross actually…was this how Fleetwood Mac was? Just an ultra-precious incest lovefest of self-congratulatory rock virtuosity? Vocal duties are shared by the three core members: Amarante’s wine-sweetened lothario croon plays well with Moretti’s backing vox, and you couldn’t be blamed for thinking they sounded like, well, that other band Moretti’s in. But the real star is Shapiro, whose nervous-lovely soprano lends vulnerable weight in the gaps between the boys’ tag-team sloppy Zorba romanticism. But lest I get too sentimental, mistakes were made. For one, the crowd, who obviously loves Little Joy’s scrawny asses, didn’t get the encore they deserved. “I fucking love Los Angeles,” said Moretti. But then the lights came on and left the fans wondering, is this it? Gotta be skeptical when a Stroke says, “All the long months of touring, it’s all worth it to come home to a crowd like this.” Oh, you poor thing. For two, there’s the opening act, the Dead Trees, who have slowly been absorbed into the band over the course of the tour. Picture high school A/V clubbers with slide guitars and maracas banging out a workmanlike MySpace version of the Dire Straits/Allman Brothers aesthetic. In truth, I might not be the right person to judge—asking me to rate a country-dipped indie blues band is like asking me to choose between two bags of dicks—I just don’t have the critical tools for the task.
[Check out The Dead Trees performing "Shelter" off of King of Rosa in Dallas at the Lounge on Elm St. two weeks ago]
In the long view, the good feelings of the evening won out. Moretti and and Amarante sing, “Ain’t no lover like the one I got, she and I got a brand new start.” Maybe they’re right. In my relationship with music, maybe it’s time I reboot and allow goofy, well-intentioned tropicalia and forgettably lovely lyrics to sprinkle a little joy in my life, even if the effect is fleeting.
For more information:
>>The Dead Tress, www.myspace.com/thedeadtrees
>>Little Joy, www.myspace.com/littlejoymusic