Last night the Orpheum turned, for an evening, into the land of the Chuck Taylors for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. The trio was joined by the first opener, Dave Burke-impersonator Imaad Wasif, who played his rather excellent set alone with his guitar and some kind of drone box electrothingee. He has gotta rank as one of the more humble performers I’ve seen, mumbling appreciation of the quiet audience between his songs.
The second opening act, Blood on the Wall — um… wow. I guess being from Williamsburg is now enough to qualify you to start a band and open for the Yeahs. Because it sure wasn’t musicianship, songwriting or stage presence. As Gillian said, for three bucks you can see better bands in Saskatchewan. Needless to say, Pitchfork Media loves ’em (or so the 8.1 rating suggests; the review itself seems to be a bunch of random sentence fragments from the author’s diary).
The YYYs were great though. Karen O came on stage with an ear-to-ear grin, a Renaissance squire costume, and a stiff-legged bounce, the sum of which made her seem like a particularly musical marionette. She ripped through a high-energy set, singing, whispering and screaming, and it’s obvious she loves to perform — everything you want and need in a punk-glam frontwoman. I’m sure she was a handful for her parents.