Hi-Tari Pop-Tari

(Photos: D. Armstrong)

One of the treasures of making music is that you don’t necessarily need to know what you’re doing to accomplish something of tremendous power. Some of its current overachievers – the crash scene tape music of Micachu or Lucky Dragons- are slaves to complexity of their recording devices and, resultantly, create rough-around-the-edges pop like no band before them. Tune-Yards, appellation of New England based wunderkind Merrill Garbus, is an awe-inspiring offspring of this: in journeying to simpler times, she creates a beautiful, if tricky, Delta Blues-pop, submerged beneath layers of dust and charm and coloured with tragic, mystical storytelling.

What Monday night’s performance at Cargo proved was that you don’t need to know how to plug a computer in to make the most of your talents. ‘Does anyone have any scotch tape?’ Garbus exclaimed mid-set, realising her sorry looking loop machine had finally thrown in the towel and was in need of repairs. To the astonishment of a palpitating young crowd, though, she managed to re-immerse herself, quite carelessly, into a sun-kissed version of Fiya; one of the big-hitters of last year’s Bird-Brains LP.

Fans - and there sure are plenty of those – were treated to a panoramic selection of key tracks, spanning Garbus’ Bird-Droppings ep with the moody, throbbing Real Live Flesh through to new, typically ancient soundings songs such as Powa and You, Yes You. Accompanied by the playfully economic bass string flirtations of Nate Brenner (who has groundings as a jazz musician in the proficient Oakland based jam band Beep!), it became both instantly and joyfully clear that Garbus is musician of tremendous natural capability.

In surrounding herself with beat-nick high hats, battered analogue gadgets and mic’d up wood-planks, Garbus becomes her own, fully functional live band onstage. Off-kilter rhythmic arrangements and a wailing, Afro-American blues voice became the key themes of the night, and the three hundred strong audience’s reaction was more than just electric; fro-ing in sweaty tidal surges by the midway, and screaming along to the choral mantras of Sunlight by the triumphant close.