Watching Kishi Bashi live is usually an underwhelming experience because his performances never seem to recapture the beauty of the recordings. So when I went to the Great Hall Music Theatre on February 11th to see his show, I was prepared for it to be a letdown. The ticket said “with special guests” on the bottom, leaving me curious as to what that actually meant in context. I found myself hesitantly walking into a lavishly decorated hall, with red carpet and high ceilings. The room was surprisingly empty, only filling to its capacity with hipsters holding Pabst Blue Ribbon cans within the last minutes before show time.
I suffered through the opening band, disappointedly thinking these were the “special guests” mentioned on the ticket. It was then to my surprise that when Kishi Bashi walked on stage with violin in hand, he was also accompanied by a petite, pig tailed drummer girl and a bearded man with a banjo. He opened with “Atticus in the Desert,” playing away on his violin alone. The sweeping sound of each chord was soothing and Kishi’s falsetto danced around the room. The song plotted along as it usually does, slow and contemplative, until the final chorus. At this point Kishi had stopped and there was a tense silence in the room. The bearded man to Kishi’s right broke the stillness when he picked up a drum stick and proceeded to hit the strings of his banjo. It produced a warm striking thump that pounded my heart. Everyone around me screamed and cheered in astonishment as the music exploded. The song’s rhythm left its steady pulse and quickly moved into a shrieking, disjunctive attack. It was enthralling hearing the song building up from the sombre, calm tones of a lone Kishi Bashi into a droning, powerful group effort.
The concert had an odd schizophrenic nature, though, jumping between Kishi’s poppy hits like “Bright Whites,” to immediately moving into the self-reflective, minor ones like “Manchester.” Kishi Bashi had me on a roller coaster ride; I laughed, smiled and danced, but was also morose at times. The lack of cohesion between the songs made the concert feel incomplete. Because this was a new direction for his live shows, you could tell that it was a couple of pieces away from being a solid act. It was upsetting being able to see the vision of how good it could’ve been, and seeing the reality that it wasn’t quite there.
Despite all that, Kishi Bashi surprised a lot of people, offering a new way to look at his music. I came to his concert with lowered expectations and was proven wrong on so many levels. While a lot of the newer elements of his show fell flat, it was fascinating to see his willingness to experiment and expand at work. What I saw that night made me excited for his future endeavors as a writer and performer. If anything, that should be the goal of any musician who’s performing for a group of people, and surprisingly, Kishi did all that and more. He managed to fill the gap that was missing between his wonderful studio efforts and once uneventful live performances.
Fermata over Whole Rest 