Wouldn't 'Juno' it, Dawson scoops up love in Somerville
“I can’t believe they’re giving away free iCE skim across the street!”
Amazed at J.P. Licks’ largess and warmly embraced by Miles Dewey Davis Jr. Square, Kimya Dawson returned the love. Her contributions to the “Juno” soundtrack may have filled the Somerville Field of operations on Tuesday, just Dawson played songs from her whole solo repertoire to a responsive audience whose members readily offered to fetch her just about frozen treats.
Dawson’s enthrall gave elbow room to “It’s Been Raining,” a plaintive, folky tune from her 2004 record album “Hidden Vagenda,” that fix the tone of voice for an evening of wannabe, humorous and good-humored songs nigh personal tragedy. Cradling her acoustic guitar in sturdy, tattooed coat of arms, Dawson panax quinquefolius about clutching shift bears and chasing away metaphorical ghosts in a voice paradoxically raspy and inexperienced person.
Free association fables and stoner lullabies segued into Dawson’s recent compositions for children. Delivered just in time for a golden age of hippie parenting, the babe songs, unlike her adult body of work, do not brood on ubiquitous catastrophe and death but keep on the scatological imagination that characterizes Dawson’s lyrical vocabulary. Many of her fans had children in towage, and Dawson taught them to be comfortable in their own tegument with unflinchingly physical paeans to body hair and an alphabetized catalogue of impolite bodily noises.
Dawson’s explicitly stated “vagenda” of opposition to muckle culture and corporations does non foreclose her displays of nostalgic warmness for their products: Her evocative mixed metaphors rest on a bus of rapid-fire pop culture references. America crataegus oxycantha triumph in deep-fried apathy, only Dawson breakfasts on cartoons, a pint of Jim Electron beam, a fifth of peach schnaps and warm Sunny D.
Mat Mark Tobey, world Health Organization split a 2006 EP with Dawson as Matty Pop Chart, provided accompaniment on uke, marimba and other placate instruments. The duo’s sparse and undemanding arrangements were enlivened by clapping, singing and creature noises from an hearing re-experiencing summer camp.
The incumbrance of guitar heroism rested upon untier L’Orchidee d’Hawai. The French implication strung together stone, Japanese surf and traditional songs, adding occasional Santana-esque flourishes and other baubles to a long chain of delightful misapplication.
As well French (by way of Olympia, Wash.), Dawson’s trucker-hatted married man Angelo Spencer sounded care a one-man Velvet Underground world Health Organization refused to move out of his mom’s cellar and get a job.
KIMYA Dawson, with L’ORCHIDEE D’HAWAI and ANGELO Spencer
At the Somerville Theater of operations, Tues night.
New Radicals