Critic's pick: Aimee
Mann/Ben Lee @ Cannery Ballroom (Friday, June 17, 2005)
by Marc Hirsh
originally published in
Nashville Scene, June 16-22, 2005
The Forgotten Arm
may be a concept album, but let’s not get carried away: Aimee Mann’s
not crazy
enough to play the whole thing from start to finish onstage. On her
latest
tour, she’s treating it like any other new release, fiddling with the
running order
while interspersing numbers from her rich catalogue. That doesn’t mean
that
she’s abandoning the album’s narrative, though, just that she’s a
little more
careful to explain the dramatic context of the individual songs. And
while it
ultimately doesn’t matter where the boxer or the small-town girl who
populate
her story are at any given moment, just telling her audience about them
seems
to relax her, and as a result, Mann has started providing some solid
stage
banter, which has been her Achilles heel to such an extent that she
used to
bring comedians like David Cross on tour to do the talking for her. No
such
problems for opener Ben Lee, who, after weathering Next Big Thing
status for nearly
a decade, has settled in for the long haul, working the trenches with
adult acoustic
pop like that found on his new Awake Is
The New Sleep. It’s one thing to survive being a teenaged
wunderkind; it’s
another to come out the other side still bright-eyed and enthusiastic.
– Marc Hirsh
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