Go figure. I spent a considerable amount of copy touting/dissecting the Posies’ 1993 long-player Frosting on the Beater, in anticipation of them playing the album in its entirety last Saturday night–and they went and played a two-hour set that cherry-picked from their entire career. Not that I’m complaining.
Frosting was well-represented–“Dream All Day,” “Solar Sister,” “Flavor of the Month,” and “Burn and Shine” all made appearances–but the band’s set covered the gamut from their 1988 debut Failure, to their newest release, 2010’s Blood/Candy. Several songs off of the latter pushed away at the outer peripheries of the band’s trademark pop–“Accidental Architecture” and “For the Ashes,” in particular, brimmed with odd time signatures and complex harmonics. But the core of the Posies’ sound–the almost telepathic vocal interplay between Stringfellow and co-founder/singer/guitarist Jonathan Auer–remained wonderfully intact.
One of the Posies’ live trump cards has always been their ability to hit those harmonies while still rocking their asses off. Stringfellow was all over the stage Saturday night, jumping and flailing like a cooler Ichabod Crane being electrocuted, while Auer fired off solos and vaulted into the air with rock hero energy. And though the band’s key figures live halfway across the world from one another nowadays (Stringfellow in France, Auer here), they cracked jokes and interacted like they’d never been apart. Bassist Matt Harris and drummer Darius Minwalla bolstered the sound ably, too (Harris won major court-jester bonus points for leading a short impromptu take on the Weird Al Yankovic Kinks parody, “Yoda”).
The highlights were numerous: A gorgeous reading of the Dear 23 ballad, “Apology;” the thundering take on that acrid 1996 chestnut, “Everybody is a Fucking Liar” (no band on the planet delivers cuss words in classic two-part harmonies like the Posies); the closing encore of 1998’s “You’re the Beautiful One” that preserved the song’s devotional romantic core without diminishing the band’s instrumental fire. No need to get fancier on the descriptive adjectives: It was all damned good. Here’s hoping they touch down here as an ensemble again, but soon.
