Music Review
The Circus Tumbles In, to the Sound of the ’70s
By JON PARELES
Published: January 5, 2011
Rock and the circus made a wary liaison when circus acts joined indie-rockers at the Big Apple Circus tent in Damrosch Park on Tuesday night for the Rock & Roll Circus. On Monday, at the end of a free concert in the same tent, fans of the punky Brooklyn band Japanther had swarmed into the ring for moshing and crowd-surfing, so alarming the circus’s security people that the show was shut down after three songs.
Kirsten Luce for The New York Times
Ariel Pink performs at the Rock and Roll Circus.
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Tuesday’s bill, with paid admission, nonpunk bands and Big Apple Circus acts interspersed with the music, had a different tone. Aska on keyboards and Nick Zinner (from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs) on guitar started the evening with quietly woozy oom-pah-pah circus waltzes. People happily oohed and applauded for the aerialist and the pony act, and did the wave at the bidding of the meticulously costumed drag-queen ringmaster, Acid Betty. But when the headliner, Ariel Pink, started climbing one of the scaffoldinglike tent poles as he sang, security guards rushed over and demanded in no uncertain terms that he climb down. He did, maintaining a nonchalance that lasted through his brief set.
Ariel Pink is a self-made cult phenomenon, a studio-dwelling songorrheic character like Prince or, closer in musical style, Robert Pollard of Guided by Voices. For a decade Ariel Pink has been recording hundreds of low-fi pop songs that reclaim some of the cheesiest sounds of old AM radio, particularly from the 1970s and 1980s. He adds a craftsman’s convolutions to the structures and tops them with lyrics that can be wistfully lovelorn or willfully twisted: “Rape me, castrate me, make me gay/Lady, I’m a lady from today,” he sang in “Menopause Man” from his 2010 album, “Before Today.”
He wore shades and an amateurishly bleached Kurt Cobain-style hairdo, with a reddish-pink striped jersey and pants. He didn’t bring a band, just backing tracks, and he had two women from the Big Apple Circus as his go-go girls, dancing and hula-hooping in the ring with him. His deadpan manner never waivered as he wandered around the ring and into the audience, crooning his choruses and falsetto hooks. The set was a hip, aloof in-joke that ended when he strolled up an aisle as he sang and continued out an exit, not to return.
Revivalism from the ’70s dominated the lineup. Saint Motel, from Los Angeles, reanimated power pop with lean guitar riffs, the long-breathed melodies that A/J Jackson sang in his smiley tenor, and a willingness to veer in noisy directions. Wearing uniform white shirts the band members reveled in the space of the ring, with Mr. Jackson jittering all around, dropping to his knees and at one point playing guitar on his back.
Amazing Baby, from Brooklyn, was less mobile onstage and made a denser sound. Will Roan sang about troubled romance in a surge of walloping drumbeats and guitar-strumming: glam-rock as filtered, perhaps, through My Morning Jacket.
There was little interplay between the bands and the circus. Performers risking their lives in midair naturally wanted the musical cues they’re used to, although some circus acts briefly danced as the bands played. But as the songwriter Aska created plinking Minimalist patterns and sang dreamlike incantations, five female Mongolian contortionists shared the platform, twining their bodies into their own astonishing patterns. For a little while there was synergy.
Ariel Pink is a self-made cult phenomenon, a studio-dwelling songorrheic character like Prince or, closer in musical style, Robert Pollard of Guided by Voices. For a decade Ariel Pink has been recording hundreds of low-fi pop songs that reclaim some of the cheesiest sounds of old AM radio, particularly from the 1970s and 1980s. He adds a craftsman’s convolutions to the structures and tops them with lyrics that can be wistfully lovelorn or willfully twisted: “Rape me, castrate me, make me gay/Lady, I’m a lady from today,” he sang in “Menopause Man” from his 2010 album, “Before Today.”
He wore shades and an amateurishly bleached Kurt Cobain-style hairdo, with a reddish-pink striped jersey and pants. He didn’t bring a band, just backing tracks, and he had two women from the Big Apple Circus as his go-go girls, dancing and hula-hooping in the ring with him. His deadpan manner never waivered as he wandered around the ring and into the audience, crooning his choruses and falsetto hooks. The set was a hip, aloof in-joke that ended when he strolled up an aisle as he sang and continued out an exit, not to return.
Revivalism from the ’70s dominated the lineup. Saint Motel, from Los Angeles, reanimated power pop with lean guitar riffs, the long-breathed melodies that A/J Jackson sang in his smiley tenor, and a willingness to veer in noisy directions. Wearing uniform white shirts the band members reveled in the space of the ring, with Mr. Jackson jittering all around, dropping to his knees and at one point playing guitar on his back.
Amazing Baby, from Brooklyn, was less mobile onstage and made a denser sound. Will Roan sang about troubled romance in a surge of walloping drumbeats and guitar-strumming: glam-rock as filtered, perhaps, through My Morning Jacket.
There was little interplay between the bands and the circus. Performers risking their lives in midair naturally wanted the musical cues they’re used to, although some circus acts briefly danced as the bands played. But as the songwriter Aska created plinking Minimalist patterns and sang dreamlike incantations, five female Mongolian contortionists shared the platform, twining their bodies into their own astonishing patterns. For a little while there was synergy.
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