Damon Albarn’s Aftershow @ Irving Plaza

Damon Albarn’s Aftershow @ Irving Plaza

One more frustrating bit of Governors Ball scheduling, but the evil of all evils: Damon Albarn and Outkast, the only headliners I had interest in, conflicting with each other on Friday night. Thankfully, on Sunday I was able to bail out of the festival grounds a little early and head downtown to Irving Plaza, where I saw Damon Albarn play a Governors Ball aftershow. In the three months since I saw Albarn at SXSW, a lot has changed. He’s settled on a setlist that perfectly balances the different eras of his career (though of course we’ll all always wish for more Blur; as cool as “All Your Life” is, it seems semi-withholding to have one of your two or three Blur songs be a b-side most people probably don’t know). (Also, he played “Slow Country” from the first Gorillaz album, which has always been a personal favorite.) His backing band has learned to play off of, not just with, each other, and the material from Everyday Robots has taken on new life in a concert setting. Songs were outfitted with epic new outros, and while the greyscale of their studio counterparts is fitting for the album, it’s nice to hear some more dynamics introduced into it all when the band plays it now. The new stuff now exists alongside all the older stuff very naturally — “Photographs,” for example, has a dramatic new ending that bled directly into the overdriven but still instantly recognizable guitar strums that open the Good, the Bad, & the Queen’s “Kingdom Of Doom.”

Everyday Robots didn’t totally make sense to me until I took a walk through Manhattan at about 7AM on a cold day in April after having only slept about two hours. That’s the kind of space where the album lives — in small, quiet, bleary-eyed moments. Albarn knows this. During last night’s show, he remarked about the “low key” nature of the record, and how that makes it terrifying to play on festival stages. Last night, with a host of diehards crammed into Irving Plaza, was the right setting — more so than at SXSW, and I’m sure more so than the other night at Governors Ball. Accordingly, Albarn was visibly overflowing with excitement the whole night. When the show’s last song, “Heavy Seas Of Love,” did finally arrive, he had his backup singers repeat the refrain over and over, for full minutes beyond the studio version’s length. He didn’t want it to end, he didn’t want to leave. The feeling was mutual. (Photo via Getty)