Bathed in blue light and haze, they begin with one of this year’s most powerful songs, “Black Hearted Love.” It’s a moment and a melody that stops jaws from falling and pens from scribbling. They perform songs from Dance Hall at Louse Point and A Woman A Man Walked By, both albums on which Harvey and Parish collaborated—and now it’s “Sixteen, Fifteen, Fourteen,” with its insistent refrain “There is no laughter in the garden,” leading directly into “Rope Bridge Crossing.” All bright colors blaze pure across these languid and simple tones, with the band—Captain Beefheart keyboardist Eric Drew Feldman, bassist Giovanni Ferrario, drummer Jean-Marc Butty and John Parish on guitar and other strings—dressed as 20th-century gentlemen. Alive in the shadows of the stage, they’re a sort of anti-Kraftwerk; there are equal measures of passion and precision in both options. “Urn with Dead Flowers in a Drained Pool” energizes the shiver of disconsolate mourning they’ve summoned so deftly and precisely; Parish’s jarring, angular guitar reminds of everything from John McGeoch to the Australian barbed wire meditations of Jon Rose. It’s a performance that inspires fingers in the ears—partly because it’s loud, partly because in doing so one can more precisely decipher the inescapably worthwhile lyrics. “Civil War Correspondent” segues into “I’m a Soldier,” gradually including Parish on ukulele as the others come in minimally yet with great impact. The attention to space in the songs—that stunning care for the physical dynamic of sounds working—hammers meaning home better than any monolith monster wall of sound. Witness the withering psychodrama of “Taut” and the mesmeric, cochlea-boggling tones of “Un Cercle Autour Du Soleil” and “The Chair.” Harvey’s flouncy dancing falls somewhere between the moves of Bez from Happy Mondays and the Martha Graham Dance Company; “Leaving California” opens the range of her colossal voice like a drop of water in quality scotch—an experience. The album’s righteously scornful titular track leads into the smash hit “Pig Will Not,” a song capable of melting the minds of lesser men even as its declamations deliver that leathern crackle of a band blasting off into new infinities. The encore: “False Fire,” sung by Parish in his laconic, cool-but-not-cold way transitions seamlessly into “April,” and “I don’t know what silence means” was never so apropos a line as tonight, when rapturous applause relentlessly brings down the house—come, sweet deaf.

—David Cotner

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