Earlier this year, David Bazan was touring the country’s living rooms, playing solo acoustic shows at houses leading up to his first LP under his own name, Curse Your Branches (Barsuk).
Cut to ten months later and Bazan has just wrapped a full band tour in support of his now released LP.
This string of shows marks the first time since the disbanding of Bazan’s former moniker Pedro the Lion and his short lived electronic project Headphones, that the performer has recruited a full cast of characters to play out his songs on stage with him.
The tour saw it’s last performances in Portland and Bazan’s hometown Seattle. Accompanying and opening for Bazan were fellow Washingtonians and Barsuk label mates Say Hi, and frontman Eric Elbogen warned the crowd at Portland’s Mississippi Studios that David Bazan and his band of bearded men might be too much to handle. Sure enough, Elbogen himself along with Andy Fitts, Blake Wescott, and Casey Foubert (all bearded) joined Bazan (also bearded) on stage as he dove right into “Hard to Be,” the opener of Curse Your Branches.
Curse Your Branches is a very confrontational album, even for Bazan, a songwriter whose made a career of saying the hard stuff on record. Although this time, the confrontations are not as imaginative as they were before.
There is no fictional story teller or metaphorical evils. This is a side of Bazan that just barely surfaced in 2007’s Fewer Moving Parts EP, when Bazan voiced real concerns held about the state of the media and the direction of the country.
This time, however, his voice is not one of a slighted nation, but of a devastated man. This is the album that will see Bazan turning away from the Christian roots he was raised on and fed with, turn away from the evangelical calls he’s lived with and believed in before. And things get personal for Bazan throughout Curse Your Branches.
At the show in Portland, Bazan plays into his set three or four songs deep, then takes a moment to ask for questions. Almost immediately the topic of his faith is brought up. “Are you still a Christian?” someone asks. “No,” says Bazan. “Why not?” comes the question. “Because it turned out not to be true.”
The presumed faithful questioner says they will pray for Bazan. To which he responds with a note of “that sounds a bit condescending to me.” He then sums up his thoughts as, “Christians and atheists, we all have similar thoughts on many things, do unto others and so on. We’re not that different.”
This simple and honest answer appears to settle the debate on it’s own, as following questions regard his family, his son Nils David Bazan was born just months ago, and his music as in “If I grabbed an acoustic guitar, would you play ‘Slow and Steady?’”
Throughout the set, in which Bazan is on bass guitar, the songs old and new come out with a force and scope that Bazan has not shown live for half a decade.
And while a definite cold has been stalking the singer for a month or so, his delivery loses none of the personable in this amped up expedition. Bazan still sounds as heartfelt and humble as ever, he’s the same man in front of 300 as he is in front of 30.
–Charlie Swanson