Over the Rhine – Live @ Taft Theatre

Concert Reviews • Monday January 5th, 2009 • 6:11 pm

It was an anniversary concert that only a regal theater such as the Taft could have housed. A wintry yet strikingly snow-deprived evening in Cincinnati had the night’s players saddled (in the best way) with responsibility for blanketing all comers with warmth and cheer. And come they did, not just for the feast of the ears that is hometown tandem Over the Rhine’s cache of nuanced holiday tunes but also to be a part of a historic live experience as the band marked its 20th year as a recording act.

Linford Detweiler (piano, guitar) and Karin Bergquist (voice, guitar, piano) were wedded legally years ago; they remain married to making thoughtful, fetching tunes out on their rural southwest-Ohio homestead and then releasing them like so many birds to ears as far-flung as New Zealand. It’s not so much a city mouse/country mouse thing, but rather that their scope and breadth of lyrical and aural vision cuts a global swath. (“From Cincinnati to Ensenada,” they might say, and do.) They want the world, and yet they’ll tell you plainly, even in song, that the world can wait.

So it goes with this contradiction-embracing outfit. Since laying down first demos in 1989, OtR’s sound has grown, frankly improving immensely after humble early days when they offered a more generic brand of ‘90s pop-rock. Today’s earthy oeuvre includes folk, pop, rock, jazz, and blues elements. Detweiler and Bergquist are addicted to blending new and old loves into personal journeys and words.

This Saturday served as night two of the annual homestand Over the Rhine puts on for both longtime and fresh fans. It meant this year that their second decade’s songs would get played. Those hoping to hear strains of 1996 piano ballad “Latter Days,” arguably their best, were due on the previous night. Still, fortune had it that ears were more than satiated as OtR’s mined from their rich albums since 2001. Notable is the progression and maturation of songcraft that Detweiler and Bergquist have deftly woven into each new record. The exquisite lyrics have always been there; it’s truly the music that’s caught up.

On this weekend before Christmas, Bergquist and her backers came out roaring in most serene fashion. Cerebral stay-together anthem “Born” had the audience enthusiastic immediately, then hushed in a hurry. The piano threading through the song once again provided the spine for the bandmates’ very own love tale to stand up.

A holiday mini-set featured jazz-soul number “All I Ever Get For Christmas Is Blue” and “White Horse,” the latter punctuated with lush backing harmonies lent by Kim Taylor, herself a local girl, a singer-songwriter and trusty ally. Elongated, simple intonations of “Hush now, baby” never sounded so good. It was unfortunate then that Snow Angels’ lyric-driven, regret-laced romp “Here It Is” found the rollicking band actually overpowering Bergquist’s golden throat. This was a first in seven OtR shows I’ve taken in and made for this night’s lone sliver of crit, a fairly minor one.

“The World Can Wait” from Films For Radio appeared next like a spectre and wowed, Bergquist’s fierce borderline-yodel rebounding to pierce the surging rock arrangement. Here was a singer in top form, one who so fluidly moves among many techniques and styles and personalities; at times she plays up her blonde Southern-belle sensibilities, and at others she’s a bombshell with eyes trained on storming hell’s gate. Such is the case with this song, an alternately angry and sexy anthem harboring the stellar phrase, “I wanna drink the water from your well/ I wanna tell you things I’ll never tell.” At its conclusion, my companion turned with a spot-on assessment: “She can sing anything.”

Bergquist hilariously followed “World Can Wait” with some familiar banter: “Oh, we were young. We wish we had our bodies back.” The song paired well with fellow Films cut “If Nothing Else.” Trumpet Child’s title track, a veritable postmodern hymn, arrived in wonderful bare-bones dressing before receiving extended piano-bass-drums play.

This two-act play had the taut band playing for a solid three hours. The second set began perfectly with standout “Ohio,” a Bergquist-on-ivories ballad glancing in the rearview at the singer’s geo-relational past as she named names and reminisces. Background singers shone on Ohio songs “Professional Daydreamer” and “B.P.D.” Their ooh-ahh coos and the spry organ of “Darlin’ (Christmas Is Coming)” injected this great room with a fresh optimism. Another of the eve’s crowning moments came then in the crestfallen wartime weeper “Snow Angel.” Bergquist’s remarkably restrained vocal worked well against Kenny Hutson’s quivering mandolin on this moving, halting song.

Bassist Jake Bradley and drum master Mickey Grimm dove in headlong on “Don’t Wait For Tom” as this randy band sent up the titular Waits character with the night’s best bawdy rock. The jam included Grimm’s fantastic, splintering drum solo, the first to raise bumps on my arms. Bergquist banged the crap out of a cookie sheet (why not?) on this track that’s always sounded like a mad circus on wheels, careening somewhere along the path between heaven and hell. Which way it’s heading is anyone’s clue.

A trio of encores began with Ohio’s underrated “Cruel and Pretty” riding the bittersweet line “Meet me in the backstreets of heaven” for its vast worth before bowing to “Changes Come,” another hallmark song and a late-breaking but night-altering performance always. Its ravaged-but-salvaged lyric is a gleaming example of OtR’s ongoing affair with paradox, so apocalyptic and hopeful at once. After that soaring, heartrending finish, “New Redemption Song” could only be an anticlimactic if fitting coda. It was so.

If music truly makes the people come together, and it does, Over the Rhine gets particular kudos for uniting everyone ranging from emo skinny-jeaned teens to tatted-up cougars cradling martinis. The band did it again on a tranquil night in downtown Cincy, tucked inside one of the Midwest’s grand historic venues that had them rocking in fine fashion. There’s not a band I know that both incites and dries tears like this.

Tagged as: Cincinnati