Jonathan Lethem - You Don't Love Me Yet

I’m the house GUEST

I can’t get no REST

In your guest BED

I’ll sleep when I’m DEAD

The moment he’s delivered the word “dead” the singer’s voice is drowned in the band’s wave again. Though he’ll go on enunciating the houseguest’s complaint, these are the sole words a listener could distinguish with any confidence, and certainly the only ones that matter. The singer’s altered by them into a performer with a series of false faces to wear, urgent charades to put across. The band feels this, and it’s one reason the song is an unquestioned favorite. Tonight the band’s audience feels it too.

For that’s what they’ve become, in the space of a song: an audience. Drinks or cigarettes in hand, in bunches of two and three and four, unused Walkmans clipped to their belts or shoved in a purse, attentive to the band or babbling at conversations uninterrupted from their beginnings on the sidewalk, acquaintances of Falmouth’s and Harvey’s, journalists from local weeklies, art collectors, disc jockeys, graduate students, catering staff, an uncertain few who’d called the complaint line in the past week and been enlisted to the Aparty by Falmouth’s interns, curious seekers who’d received no invitation at all, even a few who’d spontaneously stopped their cars to see what the fuss was about—all had meandered together into a single entity, one massed along the periphery of purple light that covered the stage, and scattering from that front toward the kitchen, where Harvey and the interns now splashed together vodka and mixers, just to keep the atmosphere up. The party had become a show. It had never even considered being a conceptual art piece. It never would.

Without pause the band’s into “Astronaut Food.” On this number, more melodic and inviting than the previous, the women in the band make a bid to usurp the singer’s spotlight, and about a hundred men watching ask themselves why they’ve never had the eyes before to see they ought to have asked the drummer or the bassist on a date. Jubilantly singing into the single microphone the two women look fresh and alive, a thousand percent less ordinary than at the retail outlets or previous social gatherings from which these men are fairly certain they recognize them. As if sensing this shift, the singer glares at the audience between verses, daring them to presume in their dawning hunger for the figures onstage. This, in turn, is sensed by and thrills the women, who seem in a way to be taunting the singer behind his back.

This band’s got something, and some of the something they’ve got is the allure of an enclave at odds within itself and yet impenetrable to others, its members exchanging small gestures of disaffection within their troupe that makes others crave to be included in the fond dissension.

“Temporary Feeling” is quieter, in a way that disseminates silence in the room, chatterers and gabblers at the loft’s edges hushed by the effort of those nearer to the band who strain to follow the lyric. As far as anyone can make out it’s an intimate tale, in murmured passages of unrhymed lyric, prose stanzas which might or might not be the singer’s own confession, pages exported from a journal. Another magic spell this band trades in is the mystery of authorship: If a heart’s revealed here, whose? If a famous conceptual artist is putting on this show, should something about this band be taken to be in quotation marks? Is this band a stalking horse? Is the song a fiction, or a cover version, or the lament of someone hiding in plain sight? Who’s moving that mouth?

Seeded with quiet, the crowd hears itself exhale between the waning final chord of “Temporary Feeling” and the advent of their own clapping. This first full and unembarrassed burst of applause marks a threshhold in the audience’s belief that tonight’s performance is no accident but the event they’d come here to witness in the first place. It’s into the face of this loose barrage of cheers and whistles that the four members of the band, not pausing to mutter “Thank you” or to revel in praise they’d be petrified to believe they’d earned, serves forth, with a drum kick and a bass thrum and a chiming guitar figure, the instantly legible hook of their next song.

The song is “Monster Eyes,” and it comes set to make an impression. For band and audience alike, the evening finds its watershed, dividing Before from After. In the audience’s case, the watershed divides the perfectly agreeable songs they can no longer quite remember from the one they’ll go out humming, the one that causes everyone, during its third chorus or through the howl of cheers that erupt in its wake, to lean into someone’s ear and bark through cupped hands, “These guys are good!” or “I love this song!” The rest of the band’s set will unfold as confirmation: the audience has seen and celebrated something, and is entitled to feel special for having done so. Jules Harvey has done it again. Or Falmouth Strand. You weren’t sure what anything had to do with anything else, but cool people were certainly involved. You weren’t wrong to come out tonight. You’d found yourself right in the thick of something. You had to be there, the night they first played “Monster Eyes,” and you were.

For the band, this first public rendition of what’s instantly become their hit song is the moment when time stops its hectic flow and earth’s atmosphere expands, just a little, to make room for something new, embodied by themselves. It’s the moment when they realize that rather than being as good as they’d always hoped, or even better than they hoped, they’re simply as good as they are , no hope required. Enshrined behind the even newer songs—“Dirty Yellow Chair,” “Secret from Yourself,” and the others resulting from the sheaf of titles Lucinda presented in Bedwin’s apartment—“Monster Eyes” no longer seems, to the band, in any important sense new. It’s a fixture in their lives, a given. They can’t remember where it came from because the truth is that the song was there all along, waiting to be given the air, allowed to breathe. The song represents the band’s nature impatiently asserting itself: here’s what we sound like, already!

The rest of the set is gravy. The audience rolls over for the grinding, staticky “Hell Is for Buildings,” which the guitarist furls right into the cheers for “Monster Eyes,” as though to urge the band past any possible complacency. “Secret from Yourself ” goes over too, the singer animating the lyrics with Kabuki theatricality, making them a remonstration of the audience’s own failings, then forgiving them, barely, in the final verse. “Canary in a Coke Machine” makes light relief, gets a little sloppy and lets everyone off the hook. Then “Shitty Citizen” and “Nostalgia Vu,” which build in their way rather nicely to “Actually Quite Funny,” which had become, while nobody was looking, a show closer. Afterward there’s no place to hide during the applause and shouting for more, no curtain to drop, no backstage, though singer and bassist do step to one side while the guitarist sits nodding on his stool and the drummer mumbles “Thank you” several times into her mike. Someone—Jules Harvey? the interns?—locates the light switches again and kills the purple spots, so the band is left represented by the connect-the-dot glow of their equipment’s power indicators, while the vibrating crowd is illuminated only by the answering glows of their cigarette tips and the oceanic moonlit blue leaking through the windows. Into this dark the crowd roars. Then lights come back up, and bassist and singer scoot back to their places.

What’s left for an encore? First, “Sarah Valentine,” if only because it would have broken their hearts not to play it. The other three members suspect the song of being prehistoric, some acoustic ballad the guitarist penned in high school and smuggled into their company. Tonight, who cares? The singer dips his mike stand to where the guitarist sits on his stool and the embarrassed guitarist warbles the last chorus, possibly a future ritual invented on the spot. Then, the song finished, someone in the crowd yells out “Monster Eyes” in the thick of the cheering. Other voices laugh recognition, and the cheering grows louder. The band members meet eyes and accept a plan without speaking, the guitarist mutters “Thank you” now as the familiar chords strike up again. Those two words being the only words the band has spoken from the stage all night, and now it’s too late to adorn them, let alone to banter. Apparently they were to be the taciturn sort of band, who knew?