Barenaked Ladies – Talk to the Hand: Live in Michigan
Shout Factory (11/6/07)
Unrated
67 minutes
Barenaked Ladies (no “The” necessary) are a band that thrives on their live performances. While performing live, at times they seem more like a comedy troupe that learned how to play instruments than an actual pop band. In saying this, and as somewhat already shown by their album Rock Spectacle, I’m saying that you really can’t fully appreciate the band from only listening to their studio albums—kind of like The Who, only with less destruction.
Of course, for a band who hit the big time in 1998, and really peaked, popularity-wise, in the States around 2000, the glory days of youth have passed them by. These are no longer joking kids—the kind of guys who thought it would be a lark to name their band so it sounds like a nudie show. These are people rapidly approaching their middle years. It shows, not only in their faces, and in the kind of antics they pull on-stage, but in the maturity of the band’s songs.
This CD/DVD was recorded and filmed in Michigan, natch, this past June, at the DTE Energy Music Theater, which is an outdoor, tented venue in suburban Clarkston. The band plays for a little more than an hour, mixing in old hits (it’s weird to say that, but they’ve been around for fifteen years), with stuff off their last two albums, Barenaked Ladies are Men and Barenaked Ladies are Me. They play one song for the true diehards, a lost classic called “Powder Blue”, and also have time to make up a song on the spot, about a drunk guy in the crowd who was playing two beer bottles like maracas. It’s with this last song that they most clearly recapture the feeling of the old days—laughing, joking and flying by the seat of their pants on stage.
Musically, the band has probably never been better. They always had impressive vocals and harmonies, and it seems that they get better with their instruments on every album. Here they all play a variety of instruments from song to song (or in the case of keyboard/guitarist/accordionist/vocalist Kevin Hearn, from chorus to bridge), and even show off their acoustic chops, performing “Be My Yoko Ono” and “For You” clustered around a single microphone, accompanied by bongos, an upright bass and a banjo.
Part of the feeling of maturity comes from the subject matter of their newer songs. Their last two albums deal with grown up themes, of family and mature love, and of anger and rage at the situation in which the world and their countries (Canadian/American) seem to be. You cannot just play a song like “Adrift” and crack jokes. It doesn’t happen.
Still, they manage to poke fun at their own situation, where at the end of the song “Angry People” the band just drops their instruments, a pre-recorded riff comes out, and they start to do a dance routine that soon breaks down to an equally choreographed brawl which ends with vocalist Steven Page breaking a bottle over band-mate Ed Robinson’s head, then all five members freeze-frame posing for the audience. It’s like they know they’re self-righteous, so at least they can lambaste themselves as well.
Two complaints about this DVD stand out: one from a casual fan point of view, and the other, which is more of a nitpicking complaint. First, it seems pretty clear that either (a) this was edited or (b) those concert-goers got gypped, because this concert clocks in at just over an hour. I would have liked to see more songs, even if they weren’t spot on. It’s live, we understand if there’s feedback or what have you. Second, I have a problem with the order of the songs. The song “Wind It Up” is a perfect song with which to close out a show—it’s hard-rocking, it’s got a satisfying ending (no fade outs or unresolved musical measures), and for Pete’s sake, it’s called “Wind it Up”! You hit that, then you do “If I Had a Million Dollars” for an encore. Instead, they play “Wind It Up” in the middle of the set, and close with “Easy”. Just bothersome to me.
As for the extras, there’s not that much—a sound check, a photo montage of the concert you just watched, and a backstage interview with the band. The last thing is the only one worthwhile, as the band tells stories of crazy fans, crazy band-mates and the dangers of getting a boatload of people to take a naked picture.
Oh, one more thing. The reason the album is called, in part, Talk to the Hand is that the band feels Michigan itself looks like a hand. There are no sassy black women from circa 1993 present.
Rating:
