[acid-jazz] Thievery Corp Live Review

From: Jon Freer (jon-freer_at_excite.com)
Date: 2005-07-03 18:49:09

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    Event Review: Thievery Corporation Live - 25th June 2005, at the Academy 2, Oxford Rd, Manchester.

     

    The Washington DC based Corp’s main men are computer-based production wizards Rob Garza and Eric Hilton. Their music is an accessible patchwork of colourful multicultural fabrics, woven together with a forward gazing and often relaxed, electronic thread. Picking up influences from all corners of the globe, the Thievery’s way of working is to refine these exotic flavours and serve their listening public with an easy to digest take on head-nodding dub, arresting Asian soundscapes and other ‘foreign’ musical forms. It would be possible to dismiss them as sticky-fingered musical tourists, watering down the music of various cultures purely for commercial gain. However, this would do them an injustice, as, the Corp take these overseas influences and wrap them in a thick layer of sickly sweet Thievery Corp smoke, thus creating novel, if perhaps at times gratingly polite, worldly-wise soundscapes.

     
    Album cover-art inspired trippy video displays and coarse stage lighting accompanied the live show, which took place in a lofty-ceilinged rectangular room, the Academy’s second gigging space. The Corp’s ‘safe’ take on exotic music appeals to a broad selection of music fans, a fact demonstrated by the broad age range and social make-up of the crowd, who shook their hips and waved their hands in near darkness on this warm June evening. The sufficiently elevated stage was a heaving mass of musicians, with an average of seven lyrical masters and fine instrumentalists joining Rob and Eric on stage for each number. A united nations type line-up of committed percussionists, blasting brass players, tinkering guitarists and all manner of vocalists, from Jamaican toasters to angelically toned singers strutted their stuff alongside Garza and Hilton on stage. The Corp frontmen spent most of the evening fiddling with the electronic kit that sat in front of them. The sonic concoctio!
     n
    produced by this huddle of musical cosmonauts brought to life the easygoing grooves of The Thievery’s recent “Cosmic Game” and a smattering of older works. Tracks like the angry “Warning Shots”, opulent “Richest Man In Babylon”, the saddened “The Heart’s A Lonely Hunter” and a slew of others, ranging from heaving dubby stuff to sprightly guitared outings, touched minds and feet in a way that made the Corp’s recorded music seem like a back and white reproduction of a colour photograph.

    Jon Freer(jon.freer_at_gmail.com)
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