Give What You Take

The title of this post comes from a song by Mojave 3 (on MySpace), one of my favorite bands. Mojave 3 rose from the ashes of Slowdive (on MySpace), one of the original so-called "shoegazer" bands that explored the beauty of noise, using lots of guitar effects and feedback to create a kind of shimmering "wall of sound" texture to their music. The unfortunate term "shoegazer" cropped up because many of these bands seems to stare down at their effects pedals while playing, appearing to be staring at their shoes.

Mojave 3, however, abandoned that style of playing and embraced a mellower style with elements of folk, country and dream-pop. They have now released five albums, my favorites of which are "Out of Tune" and "Excuses for Travellers".

The point of all this is that last night Mojave 3 singer Heil Halstead (MySpace) came to town for a solo performance at Cafe du Nord. I've been into Mojave 3 for about five years now, but have never seen them live. Last night Neil performed a roughly even mix of Mojave 3 songs and songs from his two solo albums, plus a few songs I had never heard before. About half the show was just him and his acoustic guitar, the other half he was joined by a bass player and a guitarist/mandolin player. I was very happy to hear some of my favorite Mojave tunes like "Prayer for the Paranoid", "Give What You Take", and "In Love with a View".

I have to start bringing my camera to shows... This post feels naked without photos from the show. I had to google these images.