Conor Oberst (left), Jim James, and friends worked their way through more than 35 songs in a show that lasted nearly three hours Tuesday night.
(Josh Reynolds for The Boston Globe\)
Music Review
Monsters unleash a collective chemistry built of folk and rock
Conor Oberst (left), Jim James, and friends worked their way through more than 35 songs in a show that lasted nearly three hours Tuesday night.
(Josh Reynolds for The Boston Globe\)
They call themselves Monsters of Folk, but that’s a tongue-in-cheek handle for a group of guys who couldn’t be more serious about their cosmic approximations of rock, country-blues, and folk so heartfelt it made the Orpheum Theatre feel like a shoebox Tuesday night.
Together, Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst and Mike Mogis, solo artist M. Ward, and My Morning Jacket frontman Jim James make a formidable quartet that works so well because of their singular strengths as writers, singers, and musicians. We’ve seen this lineup before on previous tours but never as a collective group with its own album.
It wasn’t a night for the weary, either onstage or in the audience. Inching toward three hours with more than 35 songs and no intermission, Monsters of Folk hit hard and fast as the curtain rose to find them all in place and already playing, as if we had just stumbled onto a rehearsal. Ward, standing as he pounded a piano like Jerry Lee Lewis, led the band on the opening “Whole Lotta Losin’ ’’ from its self-titled debut.
They were a sight to behold - a vision of disheveled chic in their mismatched suits and ties - and if this supergroup had a star who hogged the spotlight, he certainly didn’t realize it. If anything, seeing these guys together reminded you of what makes them so great as individuals.
James, in particular, exuded a celestial presence with his soaring vocals and falsetto harmonies that were diminished only when he relied too heavily on the reverb. Drummer Will Johnson, the band’s only adjunct member, got away from the kit to accompany James on acoustic guitar for a haunting rendition of My Morning Jacket’s “Look at You.’’
Ward, by contrast, sounded like he was transported from another era altogether, his voice languid and lithe even as he tore into blistering guitar solos on “One Hundred Million Years’’ and “Chinese Translation.’’ And Oberst was his usual self, walking the line between sad-eyed songs about jukeboxes and neon signs and all-out country-rockers.
That left Mogis the most mysterious Monster, content on the sidelines as he filled in the cracks beautifully with mournful pedal steel and occasional mandolin flourishes.
Oddly, when they paired up in duo settings, the chemistry was often more electrifying than what they shared as a group. When James sank his head into Oberst’s chest at the end of My Morning Jacket’s “I Will Be There When You Die,’’ it was a tender physical statement of the musical intimacy that had been building all night.
By the last half hour, though, they swapped that intimacy for something more visceral and searing. Oberst’s jacket came off, and James’s nightingale croon suddenly grew coarse and jagged in a blaze of hard-charging rockers, including Bright Eyes’ “At the Bottom of Everything.’’
Winding down in a psychedelic haze of distortion on “His Master’s Voice,’’ the epic ballad left the band just as we had found them: poised and determined, but this time with the curtain closing out a performance that lingered long afterward.
James Reed can be reached at jreed@globe.com. 
© Copyright 2009 Globe Newspaper Company.
