Rachael Yamagata – Live @ The Vogue

Concert Reviews • Sunday March 29th, 2009 • 7:53 pm

The converted-theater crowd at Indianapolis’ Vogue was mournfully sparse for a Saturday night, but a quirky, upbeat Rachael Yamagata rocked the house, regardless. Indie rock’s reigning geisha started hushed with the sublimely sad “Elephants,” the title track from her latest record. Fingers plucked piano chords as she winced through the words, shoulders tense as the big wilderness cats she sang of. To her fellow femmes, roughly half of this audience, Yamagata gave fair warning for relationships: “You can flee with your wounds just in time, or lie there as he feeds.” This songstress is nothing if not dramatic and graphic. (How apropos that she’s to appear soon on the ancient soap One Life to Live.)

The band kickstarted its capable backing after that solemn intro, and the singer perked up for “Be Be Your Love,” a Happenstance highlight five years ago that got the post-sorority felines on hand singing and bobbing along. You have to give it to this girl: She makes heartbreak sound so damn appealing.

The night’s sonic zenith came with “Sunday Afternoon,” also from Yamagata’s Elephants release. Righthand axeman Michael Chavez, a seasoned pro, simply tore through an electric solo, catalyzing the largely polite, laid-back crowd into a fit of claps. The smoky-voiced siren played off that energy to plead with Every Lover, “It’s not about geography, or happenstance/ You need to fly and take a chance” before resigning herself to the song’s quieted glory line: “You’re scared, ‘cause I feel like home.”

With no one named Ray LaMontagne present, Yamagata took to singing his lower-register harmonies with dipped-chin glee on “Duet,” a bluesy, on-the-road weeper. Needless to say, this eve revealed a woman with a goofy side and not a lick of pretension. How droll, and how lovely. She regularly chatted up those in front of her and constantly shot down one chap’s cries for early-years song “These Girls.” “Just not feeling that one so much anymore,” she shrugged with a wide smile. Apparently that wasn’t the only song she’d penned that wasn’t going to make it this time: Her rendition of the lush “Over and Over” was painfully, abruptly aborted midway through, citing a desire to be and feel in the moment that just wasn’t coming to her. Call it a copout, or call it genuine. That’s so Rachael.

Other highlights included the bouncy, piano-driven “Letter Read”; the grinding guitars of bawdy rocker “Faster,” on which Yamagata herself traded her bench for a five-string; and a plugged-in take on “Worn Me Down,” a bittersweet Kelly Clarkson-does-indie rock ditty that had the singer inviting a budding-guitarist fan on stage to play the song’s four chords alongside her own henchmen. The results came off remarkably well.

Not so, unfortunately, with the fan who heckled/bantered with the singer throughout the show – in all fairness, she talked back gamely – before she finally invited him up also, to sing the latter lines of her benchmark song, “Reason Why.” This was the show’s lone encore. The fellow was funny enough, almost appearing touched, but his arrival gave the song and the show a bit of a flat, tacked-on denouement. Still, props to Yamagata for her humility and devil-may-care spirit. “So I’m not at South by Southwest this weekend,” she may have thought. “Well, well, so be it. I’ma make my own fun.” That she did, and pleasing on the whole, with a few moments peppered in where those watching and listening could feel Yamagata’s alto honey seeping in their ears.

Tagged as: Indianapolis, Piano Pop