How Was The Show - Dosh, Kill the Vultures, P.O.S. at First Avenue

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Dosh with P.O.S. and Kill The Vultures at First Avenue on 6/27/08

Dosh - Photo by Stacy Schwartz

It was Dosh’s night, but I’ll admit we didn’t stick around for the whole set. Dosh’s unique vision of music, the blend of electronics and live sampling is one that I’ve found requires a sense of intimacy that First Avenue’s Mainroom did not afford him. Not to say that watching Dosh isn’t a worthwhile experience—it certainly is. Dosh can keep audiences in rapt attention, as his sold-out shows at the Walker Art Center this spring can attest to.

Finishing up his tour (accompanied onstage by Mike Lewis, also of Fat Kid Wednesdays) Dosh seemed relieved to be back home and a little exhausted, saying that he wasn’t going to talk, but play a grouping of songs and then “check back in with us.” And then he got to work. There is an organic timbre that comes from his playing the insides of an organ, live drums and saxophone that provides a vital and insistent drive that is often lacking in so much other electronic and sample based music. It makes perfect sense to me that my favorite place to have seen Dosh was at the First Amendment Gallery, because the live performance aspect of his work is so intriguing. He’s like a Rube Goldberg machine, with drum solos.

Opening for Dosh were two of the Twin Cities finest hip-hop acts, Kill The Vultures (MC Crescent Moon and DJ Anatomy) and P.O.S., rocking solo spoken word and iPod beats. There is a good familial connection between these acts, and I can imagine that having hip-hop open is a bigger draw than a jazz combo is, and was an effort to contextualize Dosh’s solo work to a larger audience. Plush, Dosh produced a track for P.O.S.’s new record, freshly turned in to Rhymesayers.

Kill The Vultures - Photo by Stacy Schwartz

P.O.S. was ebullient throughout the night, and spent a lot of time doing new material and spoken word, which was pretty much his regular frenetic flow, just without backing beats. He was gracious, telling everybody that they needed to stick around for Dosh, sharing the stage with Doomtree cohort Mike Mictlan for a song, and generally being warm and fierce. There is always a danger that canned music turns a performance into soulless karaoke, but he kept his energy up, and it didn’t hurt to have the whole crowd screaming.

A select few screamed along with Crescent Moon from Kill The Vultures, but that didn’t seem to faze anybody. Crescent Moon and Anatomy are something of outliers, an old hand in a scene that sees massive turnover, dark poets and musicians with light eyes. The noir jazz breaks from Anatomy and hard-boiled raps from Crescent Moon form something of a jeremiad, an assault on our dark tendencies, our consumption, rage at rage. Still, Crescent Moon dances like he’s divinely inspired to move, laughs. He tried to auction off his hat for gas money and danced his way under the stage. P.O.S. later said from stage that from Crescent Moon is where he learned to rap and you can tell—here’s the nakedness that gets Minnesota music pegged as some of the best, most honest around, and why the people involved in it should get so much more attention. It’s like when Jeff Bridges asks Bob Dylan in the film Masked and Anonymous, “When are you just going to let it all hang out?” and Dylan replies, “I thought it always was.”

Location Info: First Avenue
Artist Info: Dosh, Kill the Vultures, P.O.S.

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