In a lot of ways, Lake Street Dive and Red Butte Garden go together. The band’s brand of contemporary jazzy pop complements the Red Butte crowd the way wine goes with cheese.
Rachel Price’s voice is a flat-out weapon, and when she unleashes it, it’s something to behold. She got her training at the New England Conservatory of Music and the jazz influences are clear.
But the Lake Street Dive sound is almost too polished and plays it way too safe. The band, after all, is named after a row of seedy bars in a sketchy part of guitarist and trumpet player Michael “McDuck” Olson’s hometown of Minneapolis. Yet the Brooklyn-based quartet has pretty much scrubbed clean all the grit and filth from its music.
That’s not to say the band didn’t put on an impressive show for the Red Butte audience Monday night. Price, as always, was on her game, with a soaring voice and a little shimmy in her hips, the wind blowing her skirt.
Lake Street got the audience on its feet out of the gate, opening the set with crowd-fave “Bad Self Portraits,” the title track of its 2014 album, and following with “I Don’t Care About You,” showcasing the band’s harmonies, which seem to have tightened up since I first saw them at The State Room nearly three years ago.
Price lavished praise on the venue, explaining how she witnessed Monday’s eclipse from the hillside overlooking Red Butte, and the band bounced through its repertoire of songs, largely focused on breakups and loneliness and independence.
The song “Hello? Goodbye!” showcased McDuck’s strength on trumpet, and bassist Bridget Kearny added a sprinkling of funk to “Only the Beginning.” Keyboardist Akie Bermiss sat in on the last half of the set, adding another layer of jazzy sound and backing vocals.
The highlight of the night came when the quartet huddled around one mic for a sort of breakdown, playing a cover of George Michael’s “Faith” and “Neighbor’s Song,” told from the perspective of a lonely narrator listening to the upstairs neighbors getting it on.
That’s about as steamy as it gets, unless you count “Side Pony,” the title track off Lake Street‘s 2016 album, a pretty silly homage to a much sillier 1980s hairdo.
Lake Street returned for a two-song encore, “You Go Down Smooth,” my favorite of their catalog, closing out the night with “Let Me Roll It,” a cover of a fairly obscure 1973 song by Paul McCartney with Wings, which, again, is probably in the audience’s wheelhouse.
It was a reliably Lake Street set with some spectacular moments provided by Price’s vocals. To borrow the band’s line, it goes down smooth. A little too smooth. If it embraces a little more soul and sex, maybe roughs out some of the polished jazz edges, this band has the potential to make music that’s less reliable and more remarkable.
Brooklyn-based Cuddle Magic opened the night, with four of the five members hitting the stage in overalls, looking as if they were either going to repair your car or do a Devo tribute. It’s unclear why the fifth member was overall-less, but it sort of foreshadowed the eclectic, not-quite-cohesive nature of the set. At times it was almost “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot”-era Wilco, then going off on a disjointed tangent with too-clever lyrics, like the ode to Kellyanne Conway.
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