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Damon & Naomi are sweet, nice, beautiful people who make sweet, nice,
beautiful music. The thought doesn't seem that staggering until you
play context-seeking rock-journalista and look around the rest of the
pop-cultural canon and find how few folk such qualities actually
apply to. Released as half of a two disc CD/DVD set that also
features Naomi Yang's genial video tour diary, this recording of a
show played Live in San Sebastian finds Damon & Naomi, diffident live
performers at best, in absolutely sterling form. They deliver a set
largely populated by tracks from their brilliant Damon & Naomi
With Ghost long-player, with Ghost's own Michio Kurihara on hand
on tour to lace his limber electric-guitar playing over the pair's
misty, majestic melancholia. In this setting, Kurihara serves as a
catalyst, helping to draw the folkie duo out of their shy shell. The
insularity of their quiet craft often seems an exercise in indulgent
romanticism, but with Kurihara stoking the psychedelic spirit that
Damon & Naomi made their name from as the rhythm section in Galaxie
500 and then Magic Hour, the gentle sparks of this collaborative
union keep the set smoldering glowingly.
As is their practice, the set revolves around "The Navigator," Damon
Krukowski's ode to the vagaries of live performing, which was the
band's first single before turning up again at the centre of their
third album Playback Singers. The pair manage to reaffirm
one's faith in the humble wonder of their weepy, winsome, soft-pop
evocation of acid-folk. In this version, songs like "The Great Wall"
and "Tanka" use Kurihara's guitar to great effect, unfolding into
heaving psychedelic mantras born only from two guitars and bass.
Without drums, the pair march forward on the percussive qualities of
Krukowski's acoustic strums, whether they ring ragged as bold rhythm,
or just softly tread through the chords, as on his impassioned
version of Tim Buckley's "Song to the Siren," in which Yang joins in
vocal harmony so resplendent it serves as the set's titular number,
the song's sentiment a summation of the pair's oblatory musical
sentimentalism.
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