BY MIKE SHANLEY + ROXANA HADADI / PHOTOS BY ADAM FRIED

June 9, @ Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA

By Mike Shanley

John Vanderslice's albums aren't slick, but they possess a certain polish, especially his latest effort, Romanian Names. Its dreamy blend of harmonies, string and horn trimmings, keyboards, and ever-fascinating story lines has enough meat to satiate Vanderslice fanatics.  In person, however, the songs take on a different shape.

Returning to the Andy Warhol Museum, Vanderslice and his new quintet presented some alternate views of his material, and the new perspective started at the top of the set. Whereas the studio version of "Forest Knolls" has a synthetic, metronomic beat that created suspense and interacted with understated keyboards and some well-placed saxophone accents, the tension reached new levels in person. The band evoked the sound of a door that was about to be kicked in. Drummer Matthias Bossi pounded his floor tom for the duration of the four-minute song with no variance. Vanderslice and Sylvain Carton filled in for the saxes with some nasty guitar leads.

Rather than detract, approaches like this brought out aspects of the songs that aren't always apparent on the albums. With Vanderslice, this can definitely act as a mark in his favor since he creates moods through arrangements and words that can make one of those aspects overshadow another. The yearning quality of "Tablespoon of Codeine" was bolstered by a heavier rock sound, again courtesy of the two guitarists. Ian Bjornstad, the only holdover from last year's band, really orchestrated the melody of "Plymouth Rock," the first-person account of an early American settler who's been left to die after being brutalized by American Indians. Only during "Tremble and Tear" did things fall short, when the song's high harmonies (from Bossi, no less) got buried under the acoustic guitars.

For all the dark, occasionally apocalyptic lyrical fodder in his work, Vanderslice is anything but a frail, paranoid conspiracy theorist. On the contrary, he's probably one of the most congenial, good natured bandleaders in all of indie rock. A master at between-song banter, he repeatedly made reference to a new obsession, a video he had seen of a frenetic dancer at the Sasquatch Festival. At one point, he brought Carton - a Frenchman raised in Georgia - to the mike to introduce a song in a southern drawl, only to be embarrassed when the guitarist spoke more like Maurice Chevalier than Jimmy Carter.

Always one to get closer to his audience, Vanderslice repeated the success of last year's encore by leading the entire audience into the lobby of the Warhol for a few songs. Free from the confines of a mike stand, he stomped around like a matador as he sung "Nikki Oh Nikki," accompanied by Bossi's floor tom, bassist James Riotto's beer bottle and harmonies from Bjornstad and Carton. When the lobby's acoustics proved to be too boomy, the pied piper led his flock around the corner to a gallery for the final song of the night.

The Tallest Man on Earth opened the evening with a solo acoustic set. Swedish singer Kristian Matsson is actually more of a regulation size fellow, standing closer to 5'5". Comparisons to Bob Dylan (seen in local print prior to the show) also seemed a bit inaccurate, aside from instrumentation. In truth, Matsson sounded more like the lovechild of Tom Waits and Tim Buckley, with a boisterous delivery that maintained some romantic qualities. His set got rather limited as it proceeded, relying on delicate finger-picking on two guitars that both seemed to have the capo on the same fret. But his lyrical flair, which made him sound as American as any pithy folk singer, kept the momentum going.

***

June 16 @ the Black Cat, Washington, DC

By Roxana Hadadi

John Vanderslice would be the coolest soccer dad ever. With his supremely laid-back attitude, charmingly pleasant crowd banter (topics discussed included shivs and how much he pays his backing band) and ever-present striped polo and neutral khakis (we swear we saw him wear the same thing while touring with John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats in March, he's like a modern-day Danny Tanner. Just add Uncle Jesse's musical talent, Uncle Joey's comedic timing and Bob Saget's cursing abilities and you've created one thoroughly entertaining, reliably awesome performer.

And who cares if Vanderslice is a repetitive dresser? At the Black Cat in Washington on June 16, he delivered a markedly different set than the one at Sixth and I Synagogue in March, and the variations weren't just electric vs. acoustic. This time around, Vanderslice brought in the full band, performed numerous songs from his latest album, Romanian Names, and indulged in a whole lot of jamming, effectively producing a solid, satisfyingly complete set that debuted both new material (including a song from the seven-track Moon Colony Bloodbath EP that Vanderslice and Darnielle created together) and revisited old favorites. Though the crowd was small (the Black Cat's Mainstage, which has a capacity of about 700, was about a third full), they definitely left satisfied (and maybe even with a snack, considering that Vanderslice offered to share a blueberry pie that a fan baked for him with the rest of the audience).

But before it was time for indie rock and baked goods, Swedish bluegrass and folk singer Kristian Matsson - or, more commonly known by his moniker, The Tallest Man on Earth - took the stage. Though obviously not tall (in fact, Matsson's petite figure and James Dean-esque looks best bring the word "wee" to mind), the singer-songwriter made up for it with a voice much bigger than his compact, Prince-like body and with a set of 13 skin-crawlingly intense songs, mainly from his 2008 debut, Shallow Grave. Matsson started his acoustic set (he swapped between two guitars during his 45 minutes, and that was it when it came to instruments) with "I Won't Be Found," Shallow Grave's opener, and delivered poetic song after poetic song, weaving nursery tale-like narratives with a gritty, bluesy intensity that brings to mind other neo-folk musicians like William Elliott Whitmore.

Though each song lasted only between two or three minutes, Matsson also filled his set with lots of playing to the audience, such as getting up in fans' personal spaces (example: his crotch in this reporter's face), stamping his feet and gazing out into the crowd with a pouty, brooding gaze. But his fans (mostly girls, unsurprisingly) ate it up, freaking out the most during "The Gardener" (a longer song about Matsson lying to his love, killing those who tried to expose his fraud and eventually "dancing through the garden" growing over those murdered bodies), "The Sparrow and the Medicine" (during which a fangirl very uncomfortably yelled, "I think we should go out sometime" and made the whole crowd awkwardly fidgety) and a cover of Bob Dylan's "Moonshiner," a folk song about "if whiskey don't kill me/ Then I don't know what will." And then, after kissing the hands of those in the front row, Matsson was gone - enter, stage left, Vanderslice.

Right on time (Vanderslice and the band started things promptly at 10:02 p.m.), they launched into "Tablespoon of Codeine," which transformed into a jazzy, spacey number thanks to the lush keyboards and synths provided by Ian Bjornstad, and immediately after came "Too Much Time," quite possibly the best track on Romanian Names because of its ethereal, otherworldly quality. Though that lushness wasn't entirely present live (thanks to lots of reverb), the song still passed the awesome test, as Vanderslice's vocals stayed perfectly clear - especially during the calmly hopeless chorus, "I've got too much time/ Too much time gone by, and I can't find you if I tried."

And after "White Plains," from 2004's Cellar Door, Vanderslice decided to bring it out: The pie. "Someone baked us a blueberry pie, and I'd like to know who that person was," he asked the audience while holding up the wrapped-in-cellophane treat. After the responsible party yelled out an affirmation from the back of the crowd, Vanderslice's next move was... keeping the pie within arm's reach on top of Bjornstad's keyboards. "I'm going to put it here, to remind us of our reward," he joked, before going into "D.I.A.L.O.," which traded its studio crispness for a more funky, freeform sound; the achingly lovelorn "Trance Manual," which was just as pining live as it is on 2005's Pixel Revolt, and "They Won't Let Me Run," which Vanderslice and the group decided to play instead of the scheduled "When It Hits" because the drummer started playing the wrong song. "We're totally flexible," Vanderslice reassuringly told the crowd, who were more than happy to hear the older song.

After that came more mention of the pie (Vanderslice: "We should organize some paper plates or plastic forks or something"); a couple solo songs (the depressing "Romanian Names" and the fantastic "Lucifer Rising," from the Vanderslice/Darnielle Moon Colony Bloodbath EP and including lines such as "Call me John the Ripper/ Tearing at your skin/ One day I'll pay for this/ For now, just let me in"); and tons of other Vanderslice-led hijinks, such as borrowing a fan's camera to take pictures of Bjornstad and the pie, leading a clap-along and sharing stories about the group's trip to the National History Museum earlier that day.

And the music - which developed more and more into trippy, distortion-heavy impromptu jams during and in between songs such as "Forest Knolls," "Angela" and "Pale Horse" - kept the fans happy, especially when Vanderslice and Co. descended into the crowd for "Keep the Dream Alive." By that point, the enamored crowd would do anything Vanderslice asked for - especially if that included gathering around him, brandishing cell phones (and a few lighters that were hastily closed after warnings from Black Cat employees) and singing along. He's a persuasive man, that Vanderslice.

[Photo Credit: Adam Fried]