STUCK IN THE MIDDLE WITH THE LUMINEERS
For this and more music and theatre reviews,
Ah, the Challenge of the Mundane.
The least desirable show to be dispatched to as a professional music critic is the show that leaves you feeling nothing in any direction.
It’s easy to take down the show you truly hate because — in my experience, at least — a truly hateful show is hard to come by. A responsible critic always seeks out and recognizes the good to be found in a given performance before ripping into the bad. Thus, on the rare occasion that there’s really no good there, the truly hateful show writes its own review because there’s no call for reasoned equivocation. You just have at it.
To wax effusive about the show you truly love, on the other hand, is abit more difficult, but that’s chiefly because we music-writer types tend to be abject nerds who fret the whole time we’re writing over whether or not we’ve adequately and accurately conveyed just how much we truly, truly loved that show. Still, at least you’ve got something to work with. At least you’ve got a direction.
Get stuck in the no man’s land between where there’s no opinion either way, though, and you’ve got nothing to say. Which brings us, belatedly, to the Lumineers.
The Denver-based folk-rock quintet crammed Toronto’s Sound Academy to the very edge of human comfort on Thursday and Friday. It will then return to the city on July 31 to headline this year’s Edgefest festival at Downsview Park before a crowd that could potentially top out at around 10 times one of those nightly tallies, and very well might.
No sane concert-promotion outfit — least of all a savvy international organization like Goldenvoice — would stake such a high-profile bill upon a band cycling back through Toronto so soon after a pair of soldout shows in the same market if it wasn’t confident in the Lumineers’ ability to keep drawing in even higher numbers. Why is this happening? I have no idea. Absolutely no idea. “Seems like the easy answer here is ‘the middle,’ ” ventured one @stephencarlick on my incoming Twitter feed last night. He was actually responding to a question someone else had rhetorically tweeted forth about “when in a set should a young band play (its) hit?” after the Lumineers boldly unloaded their ubiquitous breakthrough single “Ho Hey” to an expected din of to-the-backbars celebration a mere four songs into Thursday night’s program. But as far as I’m concerned, he nailed the entire Lumineers phenomenon right there. The easy answer is the middle. Nothing that frontman/guitarist Wesley Schultz and the rest of the Lumineers — drummer/co-founder Jeremiah Fraites and cellist Neyla Pekarek, along with touring members Stelth Ulvang on piano and Ben Wahamaki on bass — brought to the Sound Academy stage on qualified as much more than a perfunctory revisitation of aggressively strummed folk-rock tropes the Spirit of the West would have shunned as hopeless cliché 20 years ago.
It’s not bad, it’s just boring and rudimentary. Current single “Stubborn Love” — which drew a more uproarious response than “Ho Hey” and suggested the Lumineers have a future beyond one-hit-wonderdom awaiting them — is a decently rousing bit of rootsy-tootsy popsmithery, but most of Thursday night’s set observed an overwhelming sort of by-the-books “Americana” conservatism. “Submarines” and “Classy Girls” inspired boozy singalongs on the floor, and a drawn-out version of “Slow It Down” featuring Schultz accompanied by Fraites thumping on a kickdrum at the front of the stage emerged as an unlikely lighters-inthe-air anthem. Nevertheless, none of the material aimed for anything more ambitious than the obvious and proceeded nowhere but the shortest distance between one predictable point to the next. Even Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” was delivered with a portentous gravitas that totally missed the canny sense of humour at work in the original.
Not truly bad, not particularly good. Just right there in the middle, trumpeting its mundanity. Next to the Lumineers, Mumford & Sons looks like Radiohead, Great Big Sea like . . . I don’t know . . . Pink Floyd. It all operates on a sliding scale of degenerative familiarity. We’d all better learn to live with it, though. It doesn’t look like the Lumineers are going anywhere for awhile.