Moby rocked the house

Jen and I saw Moby perform at the Wiltern Theater on Saturday. It is always great when electronic-focused artists can produce an amazing live show. We saw him at a free Boston Hatchshell outdoor concert in (1999?) right before Play went bonkers on the airwaves. I keep forgetting how small he is, too.

He performed songs from all over his history, so you had new stuff off Hotel and songs from Play of course, but also old favorites like "Go" and other bits of his earlier driving techno. This time around, Moby has an incredible female backup singer (a quick search of the Internets say her name is Laura Dawn) who performed live renditions of most of the female vocal samples from his music, especially the blues stuff. This was by far the most amazing aspect of the show.

We were also treated to a great opening act, always a bonus. Buck 65 (more expensive than 50 cent?) is described as a rap artist from Nova Scotia, and I guess that's his pedigree. Jen and I decided he was more of Tom Waits with a turntable and David Byrne's stage presence/antics, producing a sound we can only assume Soul Coughing would be doing today if they hadn't imploded. He would describe his next song as, for example, "a mix of Charlie Parker, Kraftwerk, and ZZ Top", hit play on his system to get the beats going, and launch into a great beat poet rendition of new lyrics, and mix in some well done scratching. I couldn't tell if his songs are actually constructed from the samples he hinted at, but it was pretty funky and original. I declare this my first exposure to a new genre called electronic post-folk.

There was only one annoying story. We arrived semi-early, so we hung out against a dividing wall between sections of the general admission floor. When things filled up, this presented an opportunity for jerks to crowd us a bit, especially this one idiot. He was obviously wacked out on ecstacy or something, and is the type who can only dance by throwing elbows around. After getting knocked about, and becoming generally annoyed by his need to have full conversations with his companion, I finally poked his shoulder. Explaining how he was pushing me against the wall and too much in my face and would he please try to step forward a little bit must have harsed his mellow, because they moved to a different section. Score! Jen pointed out that this works two ways and I will probably be the asshole in his story about the show today, but feck 'um.