Photos by Ebru Yildiz
Occupy Sandy currently counts around 500,000 among their charitable ranks across the country, and yesterday, at Brooklyn Heights' St. Ann's & the Holy Trinity Church, their efforts grew about 600 people stronger during a benefit concert featuring some heavy hitters. Vampire Weekend, the Walkmen, Dirty Projectors, Devendra Banhart, Cass McCombs, and Real Estate all performed short, acoustic-leaning sets for an exceedingly polite audience in a venue where the only music that's usually played involves a huge fucking organ.
Brother Max Colby, a Franciscan monk who was instrumental in making the show happen, noted in the beginning of the five-hour program that "a matter of five days and a couple of texts" were all it took to bring the bands together on the daytime bill. And while the event was extremely professional in nature, it wasn't hard to suss out the community-organizer vibe. A man directing folks into different lines at the church's entrance wore two pins on his jacket: an "Occupy Wall Street" one emblazoned with a Guy Fawkes mask and an "Occupy Sandy" button covered in American flags. As I sat down in the church's plush pews, I realized that this might be the most solemn, comfortable DIY show I've ever attended in my life.
First up was Real Estate, whose members come from both New York and New Jersey, making the show "really personal" for them, bassist Alex Bleeker noted. Though the band is sometimes criticized for being the indie rock version of "Seinfeld"-- that is, "the band about nothing"-- the clarity of the performance cast singer Martin Courtney's idyllic suburban musings, usually obscured in tangles of six-stringed reverb, in thoughtful new light.
Vampire Weekend, who would normally headline a stacked lineup such as this, were second on the bill, performing at a time that many of the characters detailed in Ezra Koenig's millennial picaresques would normally be rolling out of bed to get brunch. Whether intentionally or not, the group continued their career-long quietly subversive streak by leading off with "Oxford Comma" and Koenig stepping up in front of the packed church to utter the word "fuck" with spirited conviction. Though some of their re-arranged songs didn't benefit from the acoustic treatment, their cover of Bruce Springsteen's "I'm Goin' Down" carried extra resonance considering the devastation that took place in some of Springsteen's oft-referenced New Jersey haunts. Vampire Weekend have always cleverly communicated more than they let on through their songs, and a particular lyric from a new cut they performed was figuratively (and literally) chilling in evoking the nasty, cosmically cruel follow-up storm that hit the city just a week after Sandy's run at the coast: "See the snow, it's comin' on down."
A clean-cut Devendra Banhart took the stage next, accompanied by an upright bassist. And his performance consisted of his voice, the bassist's notes, and the bassist's voice-- and that's it. Banhart skipped and danced as much as the small staging area permitted, scatting and crooning as the bassist he plucked-out tones in a loose rhythm. One song was entirely in Spanish, while another opened with whistling and noises that resembled a cat drowning. The last song featured Devendra raising a fist to the sky, saying, "I am woman, hear me roar!" as the crowd laughed nervously. At four songs, Devendra's set was the shortest in a day of short sets, though he turned out the most proudly weird performance.
The Walkmen, normally a five-man entity, performed in a limited capacity as well, comprised of frontman Hamilton Leithauser and bassist/organists Peter Bauer and Walter Martin (they were accompanied by "some of our extended family" in the form of a quartet of horns). Their performance was more traditional than what preceded it, although it did retain an off-the-cuff feel: at one point, Hamilton frustratedly asked the audience for a capo, and he flubbed the lyrics to Donovan's "There's a Mountain" with a grin. The Walkmen have always possessed a gin-soaked sense of humor, the type of wit you'd expect from the guy at the end of the bar loudly complaining that the place has run out of pretzels. Their music is frequently beautiful, too-- when Leithauser howled the titular call to arms during "We Can't Be Beat", it was hard not to well up a little.
The notoriously enigmatic singer/songwriter Cass McCombs tends to play by his own rules, and he doesn't exactly seem like one for causes. To date, perhaps his biggest act of public activism was his plodding, over-explanatory protest single "Bradley Manning", dedicated to the titular jailed Wikileaks informant. It's hard to get a hold on what this guy's deal is-- which is part of what makes him special-- but it was clear that, for this particular performance, he was bringing out his bleakest material. His set was spotted with death and despair, almost to an antagonistic degree.
A brief moment of levity was provided during "Morning Star", one of five new songs performed in his seven-song set, when McCombs sang, "What's it like to shit in space?" But even that line was seemingly delivered as a threat. While I admire Cass McCombs as an artist, I'm just not sure he was a good fit for this bill, especially following the joyful catharsis that was the Walkmen's set. It's entirely possible that the overall grimness of the material he chose to present was an intentional reminder that where there's hope, there's also hopelessness-- then again, he didn't look terribly excited to be there, either.
Dirty Projectors' Dave Longstreth, Amber Coffman, and Haley Dekle headlined, and it didn't take long to see why they were an obvious top-bill choice: When the trio came onstage to line-check before their set, the audience was rapturously quiet. And when Longstreth pointed out that the warm-up was not, in fact, the performance proper, it didn't stop people from applauding their preparation.
In this pared-down formation, Coffman and Dekle's jagged vocal bleats did plenty to conjure the off-center dissonance that has long been this band's trademark. They closed with a stirring rendition of the title track to 2007's Black-Flag-covers-album-as-art-project Rise Above, and the lyrical mix of anger and freedom of individuality made for a fitting end to such an activism-driven event: "Society's arms think they're smart/ I find satisfaction in what they're lacking, 'cause we are born with a chance/ And I'm gonna have my chance."
