Tune-Yards’ Exuberant Vulnerability
The thrill of a Tune-Yards show usually comes from watching Merrill Garbus build up and deconstruct songs using live recording, sampling, and loops. That “live” aspect, and the sonic warts that come with watching imperfect humans play instruments and through sound systems subject to randomness and failure, is what I find myself missing most from “the real thing” when watching the COVID-era livestreams, especially ones that are immaculately produced, mixed, and mastered before reaching a larger audience. Fortunately for us, last night on Noonchorus, Garbus and bandmate Nate Brenner rolled with the format and succeeded wildly.
For one, they took full use of having a camera that can do tricks with the push of a few buttons; it swirled and circled around Garbus’ face as the band opened with “hypnotized”, a standout from their great new album sketchy., making me realize why they called the show Party in a Can. (I could imagine being rolled in a giant can listening to the beautiful cacophony of drum machine samples, synths, and guitars.) For “Look at Your Hands”, Garbus broke the 4th wall and was handed a plastic arm from someone on the other side of the camera, which she carried around and used to hit her sample pads, like an even more absurd version of David Byrne’s American Utopia stage production. The camera was also able to reveal more of Garbus’ pedal wizardry, zooming in on her feet as she trigged samples and processed sounds, an electronic counterpoint to the raw, acoustic power of her booming voice.
I figured that since the performance would be less than an hour, it would act as a pseudo release show for sketchy., and Garbus and Brenner did play the warped, harmonic, shadowy “homewrecker”, bop “sometime”, and moving “hold yourself”. Though sketchy. is in this listener’s ears a welcome return to form from the far-too-electronic-leaning missteps of I Can Feel You Creep Into My Private Life, I was glad to hear the tracks that made Garbus break out as a creative force in the first place, like whokill’s bursting “Powa”, arpeggiated and exhilarating “Bizness” and the handclap hopscotch jam “Water Fountain”, whose namesake foundation was collecting donations from the livestream. (Garbus started the Water Fountain Fund after the release of nikki nack; it financially supports organizations dedicated to all sorts of water-related issues.) And there was also a moment where Garbus started humming on top of a skittering techno beat--“It sounds kind of like ‘Idioteque’,” I thought to myself [Editor’s note: It was], even going so far as to recontextualize some of the more dance-and-disco-heavy songs on Private Life.
Perhaps the most enlightening moment of the livestream, on the other hand, was the post-show Q&A, where fans had the opportunity to do my job and ask Garbus and Brenner questions about topics like their rhythm-driven songwriting, approach to album sequencing, how each of them specifically composes to sound off-kilter on purpose, and their hobbies outside of music. (Garbus gardens, while Brenner’s become an expert plant identifier--and watches a lot of basketball.) The thought-provoking final question had Garbus think about the very beginning of tune-yards, Bird-Brains, the debut album she recorded on a hand recorder mixed with a shareware assembling program, whose environmental limitations led to her now trademark percussion-dependent sound. At the time, she lived in Vermont and was nannying, unsure of what she wanted to do with her life and suffering from depression, wondering whether the music she was making was worth anything, affecting her own self-worth. That, according to Garbus, was the biggest fear she had to overcome when creating the Tune-Yards project, one that she overcame by simply succumbing to the joy of making exuberant, physical music. Brenner asked her whether this fear is still there, and Garbus said while it’s less, it is. Listening to her share her vulnerability, I thought about the band’s closing performance of “hold yourself”, a song whose restrained hip hop drum beat and soulful horns match the sentiment in the bridge: “We all have doubts / We all have rage / We all have trouble being brave enough to turn the page / But we will.” As the song broke down, Garbus ran circles around the room belting the chorus, “Hold ourselves now / Yes, we will hold ourselves now.” So, yes, while the fear’s still there, Tune-Yards is still overcoming those fears for Garbus.
