Ian McCulloch (acoustic solo set) @ Webster Hall

Normally when you enter Webster Hall on a Friday night (the stage floor, not the club section), you can reasonably expect to find three things: cheap hipster beer, some scuzzy, hype-riddled hipster band, and hipsters themselves. This can be explained for a few reasons, the most prominent of them being the close proximity to three NYU freshman dorms. Last Friday night, I encountered two of these three things, and it was the presence of Echo & the Bunnymen’s Ian McCulloch that made that Friday feel much different than most Friday nights at Webster Hall.

To be honest, McCulloch’s surprisingly short set—I didn’t time it, but it couldn’t have been longer than a half-hour—felt more like a party where one of your talented friends happens to have brought a guitar with him and decided to play some tunes, rather than a concert. So much so that at one point he had to actually ask the crowd to stop talking so loudly. However, despite the crowd noise, McCulloch excelled in this intimate setting, putting on a short but sweet set which mixed some of the Bunnymen’s newer stuff with some of the classics extremely well.

I’ve always thought that Echo & the Bunnymen were some of the best songwriters out there, but I always thought that all of their albums (especially the earlier ones) suffered from the same tinny early 1980′s production that ruined a lot of good albums from that era, so it was refreshing to hear these songs so clearly with just McCulloch’s acoustic guitar.

A slowed-down version of “Rescue” off of Crocodiles opened the show and set the mood and tone for the rest of the night, as most of the arrangements were slowed down to fit the mood. The weirdest (but also most interesting) arrangement was “All My Colors,” off of Heaven Up Here, which should have suffered without the pounding tribal drumbeat that accompanies the song, but managed to sound surprisingly new and different. McCulloch closed out the short set—predictably, but still entertainingly—with “The Killing Moon,” a song that from now on should only be played with just an acoustic guitar and McCulloch’s baritone, which might I add still sounds exactly the same as it did in 1981, providing a rousing ending to an intimate and enjoyable show.

[Review by guest contributor Jonathan Eiseman.]

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Also: Interview with Ian McCulloch of Echo & the Bunnymen