Concert Review: Greta Gertler & the Extroverts at Mercury Lounge, NYC 8/13/07

Expat Australian keyboardist/singer Greta Gertler’s imagination knows no bounds. Tonight she ran amok, trampling every convention, leaving no good idea unexplored. She’s a shapeshifter: the first album she recorded was orchestrated rock, the second a richly layered pop record, and her latest, Edible Restaurant blends art-rock and ragtime (see our very favorable review). Tonight saw her doing completely rearranged versions of some of her pop gems, including Martin’s Big Night Out (“They danced to this in Australia,” she told the audience encouragingly, but the impressively good Monday night crowd was rapt and stayed put), and Everyone Wants to Adore You. Radiant in a shimmery blue dress, she mined the depths of her Nord Electro keyboard for some of her favorite, 70s-inflected settings: echoey Fender Rhodes, Arp synthesizer with a watery flange effect, and the classic, slightly trebly Yamaha electric piano tone that seemingly every band from Supertramp to the Boomtown Rats were using late in the decade. She’s a fine player, but what really comes across live is the strength of her writing and how counterintuitive it is: just when you think she’s going to settle into a standard verse/chorus/verse progression, she goes off on some wild tangent that sounds like something from early, Peter Gabriel-era Genesis, or Shostakovich, or some bizarre English dancehall song from the 1920s.

Her backing band, including Beaver Bausch on drums, Hazmat Modine guitar sharpshooter Michael Gomez and the reliably high-energy J. Walter Hawkes alternating between muted trombone and ukelele, stayed with her and held up their end. Gomez is a fiery, bluesy cat: after he took a particularly evil, tersely minor-key solo toward the end of Veselka, Gertler’s tribute to the East Village kasha-and-pierogies institution, she followed his lead, closing the song with an ostentatiously eerie, monster-movie run down the scale into a cold, echoey pool of noise. They also played a new one about the komodo dragon in a zoo who recently experienced spontaneous oogenesis (or immaculate conception, if you prefer), as well as a slightly abbreviated take of the new album’s bustling title track, and the strangely captivating If Bob Was God, which does double duty as Dylan tribute and sultry tale of longing and determination to bring it to a crescendo, if you follow my drift. They closed with a deadpan, oompah version of the AC/DC karaoke standard It’s a Long Way to the Top If You Wanna Rock N Roll – deadpan until Hawkes took a long, completely silly, completely over the top heavy metal ukelele solo. By the time he finally got to the top of his tiny little fretboard, everybody in the house, the band included, couldn’t stop chuckling. All in all, this was pretty typical of what you can expect from a bandleader – and band – with a boundless sense of fun. What a great night!

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