For her biggest London show to date, New England’s Merrill Garbus might as well have had a sign over the stage reading “Quiet please: wacky woman at work”. There’s that band name, so unnecessarily clad in unwieldy syntax. There were the matching outfits that Garbus and her two female backing singers, a female drummer and a male bass player wore; a riot of psychedelic prints in primary colours. Add in Garbus’s combination of looped vocals, Haitian rhythms, high-pitched yelps and childlike keyboard melodies, and the concert could have taken the shape of a fashion student’s nightmarish degree show. That all of these unlikely elements fused together to make such a welcoming event testified to the imagination and charisma bubbling under the stylistic affectations.
The concert was choreographed carefully, making it as much a performance-art piece as a musical experience. While Garbus stood centre stage behind a snare drum and a floor tom for the opening song Sinko, her backing dancers lined up impassively at the edge of the stage before jumping up and down in time with each other. Garbus joined them and all three did a shimmying dance routine, to the great excitement of the audience who responded by getting up from their seats and, for the most part, staying standing for the rest of the concert.
Two elements stopped the concert from dissolving into avant-garde pretension: great rhythms and a sense of inclusivity. Gangsta had a laid-back groove recalling both reggae and the lolloping beats of the Stone Roses, while Water Fountain was a playground chant of irresistible vibrancy that had 2,000 people in the Festival Hall doing gentle hand claps, if not outright dancing. “I want to thank everyone who brings more volume and amplification to women’s voices,” said Garbus, although it was the quieter moments of musical invention, not the “look at me” moments of amplified wackiness, which really stood out.
Art School, Glasgow, Monday; Field Day festival, E3, June 6