Herbert With Live Band is at best something of a paradox, at worst something confusing and special: live musicians playing sample-based music that's meant to sound live. The new album Scale has more songs than process-based results (c. f. Herbert's Radio Boy albums), which makes this concert remotely possible at all for the drummer, bassist, keyboard guy, horn players, and the Siciliano fill-in who signed on for the tour. Herbert, meanwhile, takes on the position of mission control/mad scientist/w.h.y., processing the band's sounds real-time, amplifying crescendos, puzzling the rhythms, sampling the parts and retriggering them at will, in general complicating and cluttering otherwise straightforward pop-orchestral arrangements. He wore a bathrobe and when he bobbed his head he looked like Niles from Frasier.
Which, again, is my big worry re: Herbert, that he's going to such sophisticated lengths to make, in the end, possibly, just dolled-up Skye Music. Live, the slow jam "Birds of a Feather" had the benefit of a nice kick-up in tempo and more of a pronounced downbeat and plenty of whirling, twirling flute and vocal overdubs courtesy Herbert's knobbery. Really beautiful, but I wonder whether I'd fall as hard if, say, Norah Jones played it the same. "Moving Like A Train" I absolutely adored, a bouncey disco with a big syncopated thump on the bottom, gooey string swells and showtune horn punches throughout -- but then I just as easily could see Jamiroquai jamming on something like this and me saying, "Oh, that Jamiroquai, up to no good like usual," and walking around my apartment completely normal as a parody of the "Virtual Insanity" video.
So chalk it up to details and whatnots and what-have-yous -- I couldn't tell you why I like Herbert's songs more than Skye's except that Herbert's physical sounds are always slightly off, tweaked one way or another to make me feel the slightest on edge and more than piqued, with Herbert exaggerating the sounds even more live. That, and the more he masks the politics of his samples in his songs, the more I tend to like the songs and the more I'm interested in those very politics. It's a honey on the medicine chalice thing, a spoonful of sugar, etc., which is something that only made complete sense to me when I realized that the man who wrote all these songs is standing in front of me in a satin bathrobe, and copious amounts of chest hair are erupting out from underneath.
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