Dean Wareham at the Roxy
TRUE, week of 6/24. Post #5:
Caught Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips at the Roxy, and realized that while they do indeed radiate glamour, it’s not the kind I expected or that they have aspired to. Sure, Dean hardly looks like he’s trying as he leans into his surprisingly lyrical melodies or soars through a guitar solo, but his is the not-having-to-try of someone who never puts down a guitar, can’t stop humming, rather than smug insouciance. And they both smile a lot: at us, the music, each other. By the end, their brand of effortless seemed a product of hard practice—at interplay, at songwriting, at staying in love with staying in love. A lot less Serge Gainsbourg or even Lou Reed, in other words, than Bryan Ferry. And their cover of Joy Division’s “Ceremony” is so buoyant, by the end, that it restores the joy to the riff, sounds remarkably like the racket Ian Curtis might be kicking up, still, if he’d somehow put himself back together after love (or epilepsy, or depression, or whatever it finally was) tore him apart.
Caught Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips at the Roxy, and realized that while they do indeed radiate glamour, it’s not the kind I expected or that they have aspired to. Sure, Dean hardly looks like he’s trying as he leans into his surprisingly lyrical melodies or soars through a guitar solo, but his is the not-having-to-try of someone who never puts down a guitar, can’t stop humming, rather than smug insouciance. And they both smile a lot: at us, the music, each other. By the end, their brand of effortless seemed a product of hard practice—at interplay, at songwriting, at staying in love with staying in love. A lot less Serge Gainsbourg or even Lou Reed, in other words, than Bryan Ferry. And their cover of Joy Division’s “Ceremony” is so buoyant, by the end, that it restores the joy to the riff, sounds remarkably like the racket Ian Curtis might be kicking up, still, if he’d somehow put himself back together after love (or epilepsy, or depression, or whatever it finally was) tore him apart.
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