2000-05-02 - Knitting Factory, New York
On Stage :
Solo concert
Setlist :
history
in the sun
big city secret
exhausted
ashes everywhere
prison
invisible hands
Recording :
2000-05-02 Knitting Factory
Review :
by New York Times :
IN PERFORMANCE: POP; Wandering Mirages Yanked From the Soul
By ANN POWERS MAY 8, 2000
Joseph Arthur built a maze of estrangement around his songs on Tuesday night at the Knitting Factory. This singer-songwriter turned his austere verses into wandering mirages, their elements dissected, reassembled and repeated until they could no longer be surely traced. Moving through selections from his second album, ''Come to Where I'm From'' (Real World), Mr. Arthur gave a disturbing shape to introspection, exploring the sound of the soul's inevitable loneliness.
Mr. Arthur's lyrics explore romantic loss and spiritual crisis. Surrounded by crushed flowers, flickering candles and his own Munch-like paintings of skeletal figures, Mr. Arthur, in sunglasses and SoHo black, embraced his arty heritage. The story told in many of his songs, of a damaged woman whose suffering precipitates the singer's, reflects the stale narcissism of a supposedly sensitive male. ''May God's love be with you,'' he intoned to a possibly dead lover during ''In the Sun.'' This could have been totally condescending.
Musical daring let Mr. Arthur glide beyond these cliches. His innovation is the use of tape loops and delays. He plays or sings a line, then layers it into an arrangement orchestrated with the effects pedals. By unsettling his words from their first utterances and letting them float in misty song structures, Mr. Arthur circumvented the obvious.
Occasionally he pulled back to just sing a ballad, benefiting from a casual humor in his pensiveness. Well-traveled ground can yield insight, and Mr. Arthur uncovered enough to attract the like-minded to his shadowy outlands.
ANN POWERS
