Great guitar tone, horrendous lyrics: Marc Ribot @ City Winery, NYC.
It always seems tacky to complain about a gift, so we’re hesitant to say anything unkind about the free concert by guitarist/composer Marc Ribot Tuesday evening at the City Winery.
Hesitant, but not completely averse.
On the plus side, Ribot’s guitar sounded great, as usual.
On the minus side, he seems to have entirely forgotten what to do with that sweet sound.
Ribot, in fact, slipped from dully annoying to wholly unbearable after his ironically un-ironic deadpan introduction of a song called “Death of a Narcissist”: a song that somehow exceeded its title in terms of klunky, teenage-studyhall noodling meets too-much-time-at-University navelgazing, beat poet aloofness.
Maybe the distracted, ran-here-after-work vibe and drippy, city humidity of this parking lot concert just made us crankier than usual, but we’re pretty sure Ribot isn’t blameless.
The last time we saw Ribot play was at the hallway disguised as a music venue known as the Stone. That venue was hotter than the devil’s latte steamer, but Ribot was infinitely more tolerable then than he was on Tuesday which, all things considered, probably isn’t exactly a glowing endorsement.
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CONCERT PHOTOS: Yeasayer Glows at Pier 54
CANCELLED: Aerosmith Cans Tour After Tyler’s Big Fall
