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January 30, 2010 8:00 pm → Whitney Hall, KCA, Louisville

A special performance with The Airborne Toxic Event and Calexico

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Airborne Toxic Event, Calexico with the Louisville Orchestra
Jeffrey Lee Pucket
The Courier-Journal
January 30, 2010

There are a couple of ways you can go when pairing a symphony orchestra with a rock ‘n’ roll band – augment or enhance. Either choice has its merits but the vast majority of bands go with augmentation, simply adding power or prettiness, depending on the song. The rare band takes it to another level of partnership, using everything an orchestra offers. Saturday night at Whitney Hall, the Airborne Toxic Event and Calexico made sure that a hyped audience of 2,000 got plenty of both.

Calexico opened the night by setting the bar high. The Tuscon, Arizona, band has long made use of sounds and rhythms familiar to southwestern border towns, but has also incorporated a broad palette of Gypsy music, early rock, surf, jazz and Ennio Morricone. It’s no surprise they’d jump at the chance to work with an orchestra, thus adding several dozen more sonic possibilities, or that they’d excel at seamlessly bringing it all together. Their too-brief opening set was the finest example yet of what the BB&T Strings Attached series can be. Under conductor Jason Weinberger, the orchestra glowed as it navigated Jay Whatley’s arrangments, combining with the nine-piece Calexico to create a vibrant, unified sound that really needs to be recorded.

The Airborne Toxic Event is much more of a straight-up rock band than Calexico – just check out bassist Noah Harmon’s relentless posing for proof – and it used the orchestra more traditionally but just as effectively. ATE is all about building momentum and the sheer weight of the orchestra drove the band’s songs to new levels of high drama, turning ‘Sometime Around Midnight’ into a pounding opera and ‘All I Ever Wanted’ into a rush of emotion. ATE leader Mikel Jollett was clearly jacked up having an orchestra on his side, and his excitement peaked during an encore of ‘Missy’ where the song’s closing lyric – ‘But I swear, I swear, I swear I’ll never get sad’ – actually began to sound feasible.

IF BB&T Strings Attached can get away from the singer-songwriters and offer more nights of genuine inspiration like this one, a national reputation could quickly follow, and the orchestra shouldn’t hesitate to become darlings of the indie-rock set. Like the man said, roll over Beethoven and tell Tchaikovsky the news.

Note: All reviews are edited for length and spelling.