It took three songs of a five song set, but Young Man finally got the crowd appropriately worked up during his opening act Tuesday night at The Majestic. Colin Caulfield, an artist whose publicity material describes as a DIY phenom (and the description certainly seems appropriate; he’s his own singer, songwriter, producer, musician, etc on his studio albums), took the stage with a traditional multi-member band (well, you can’t play ’em all live) and opened strong, albeit to a sparse crowd, with a slightly amped up version of “Stay for Nothing.” The track is one of the best tracks on his latest album Ideas of Distance, and Caulfield’s new “fleshed out sound” (as described in the Pitchfork review of that album) was on full display.
It’s not as if Young Man backed off the pedal after that song, but more just that the crowd’s interest was being pulled in a few different directions ($4 PBR Tall Boys at the Majestic bar, I heard), which sucked some of the energy out of the room. Still, he recaptured the audience’s support at least long enough for the following conversation to occur:
“So how would you categorize this guy, anyway?”
“I don’t know, like, fast atmospheric indie?”
“No I mean, if you were comparing him to someone else,”
“Umm. Ok, so maybe if The Killers had never gotten gimicky and big?”
I would have gone with more “Neko Case meets Ariel Pink,” but that might have just been the run-off from some pre-concert listening. Because, in contrast to the laid back, “lo-fi” vibe that’s so evident on Young Man’s recorded music, in concert the performance was significantly more structured, even drifting at times into a legitimate rock sound. The faded out lyric effects were, at times, the clearest connection between what was on stage and what I’d heard hours earlier.
But that was probably planned. For a crowd waiting on pins and needles for the big syncopated electric octave opening of “Hang Me Up to Dry,” a complete commitment to delicately balanced fuzziness would not have been the best approach. And, lo, by the middle of the show the audience near the front of the stage had given up their cool-kids, arms-crossed poses, dropped their conversations about whether The Cold War Kids could actually discuss the Cold War intelligently and begun to lose themselves in Young Man’s set.
One too-long bridge and the brief time constraint inevitably foisted upon any concert’s opener kept the show from being as memorable as it might have been, but in all, it was a well-above-average opening act from Caulfield. Truth be told, Young Man probably deserves a better set of circumstances in which to perform.
