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• Looking for moe.rons

moe.

Wednesday, Nov. 4

Last Wednesday was the perfect night for the Lincoln Theatre in Raleigh to begin selling liquor, as moe. stamped the night with its melted notes, dueling guitar solos, driving bass and a blend of lights of all colors. The crowd of glow-stick bearing "moe.rons"—some still dressed for Halloween, or maybe they were just dressed for a jam—dove into the new offerings quickly, several enjoying Jager shots along with their beers. Then, through beams of rainbow light and beer goggles, the assembled mass

witnessed two sets of one of the leading acts on the jam-band scene.

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• "Let that sink in for a moment: Leonard Cohen, affirming life."

Leonard Cohen

Tuesday, Nov. 3

Durham went 10 rounds with Leonard Cohen last Tuesday night. That assessment isn’t just based on the stamina the spectrally voiced 75-year-old songwriter displayed after nimbly bounding onto the DPAC stage moments after 8 p.m. and animating 24 hits, choice obscurities—and one new work he’d premiered the week before—before dancing off three hours later, just after 11:15 p.m. It also conveys the feeling of much of that time.

Perhaps the single most underreported fact of Cohen’s career is the quality that bankrupts most of the glib descriptions he’s collected over 40 years in music—the godfather of gloom, poet laureate of pessimism, even the wryly self-bestowed “grocer of despair.” If his work is so unrelievedly dour, why did a near-capacity house leave the DPAC so conspicuously … happy?

Critics and scholars before me have connected Cohen’s muse to the notion of duende, the profound Spanish aesthetic embodied in the seemingly disparate fields of bullfighting and flamenco dance and song. To the degree it’s true—and I believe it is—for Cohen, it’s not because his basement baritone suggests anything like the trembling, high-pitched cries of the classical cantaores of flamenco. Rather, we heard that quality repeatedly Tuesday night, not in Cohen’s voice, but in the beautiful unquiet of Javier Mas’ agitated, Phrygian runs on the Spanish bandurria and archilaud—most notably in the luminous solo Mas seemingly excavated, chip by chip, out of the darkness itself at the beginning of “Who by Fire.”

Rather, Cohen’s connection to the duende lies more in the words themselves and their delivery, which at times is more spoken than sung. Much the same could be said for Federico Garcia Lorca, another poet who not only probed the duende in his verse but also wrote analytically—and lyrically—about its quality in his essays. It’s a difficult concept to translate, but duende has to do with the intimate relationship between passion and absolute disaster. It articulates the risk inherent pursuing the truest, most intensely felt emotions to the end, at all costs. Duende gives us the stern reminder that when we strive for the deepest love, we must ultimately be prepared to experience the deepest pain. It confronts us, at once, with the contradictions of intimacy and desolation; sex and alienation; love and total loss.

Since duende so admonishes and threatens us, perhaps we should be clear about what side it’s on. The answer might be surprising to some. Duende, it seems, is on the side of life. So is the art of Leonard Cohen.

Let that sink in for a moment: Leonard Cohen, affirming life.

When last night's show first started, David Yow, the Jesus Lizard's elemental front man ("singer" just doesn't get to it,) made an early impression on one of my friends—a palm print. Yow gallivanted his way across the forest of young punk dudes and oldsters trying to get a lift, stepped up to him and slapped him straight in the face. As the guy was telling me the story, he raised his eyebrows, smiled a little, and said, "Hard." Another friend was set adrift in "the pit," a term destined for sounding corny these days, but there it is. Distracted in a moment when he was helping suspend Yow mid-air by supporting his tailbone, he got clocked and lost his glasses.

Thing is, last night's The Jesus Lizard set at Cat's Cradle was hardly a place where negativity held any sway with people. It was fucking joyous. You could not turn your head without seeing someone grinning like they were gonna soil their pants. People who didn't know each other pulled each other up from the floor. Yow checked out every inch of the place, hanging from a fan one song, off to check the stability of some wooden staging boards the next. The band—Duane Denison, David Wm. Sims, and Mac McNeill—surged and jabbed like boxers. McNeilly pulled one of those anomalies you only see occasionally, a drum solo as brutal as their set in pace and pummeling heaviness. Denison and Sims blasted on guitar and bass what bordered on the best industrial clatter (certainly The Birthday Party is in there, always).

All this is what makes the combo of their sound and Yow's ring-leading such a physical thing: They beat everyone up. Metal schmetal. Last night it was hard not to get punch-drunk. Skulking around like he knew no other place but that room, Yow coaxed the lot along, feeding beer to the diehards down front, twitching himself around in inhuman contortions.