Live review: David Byrne & St. Vincent spellbinding at Segerstrom Center stunner

David Byrne & St. Vincent plus horns in Costa Mesa. Photo: Kelly A. Swift, for the Register. Click for more.

You certainly notice right away the multitude of horns that punch up Love This Giant, the dizzying new result of a slow-soldered mind-meld between legendary innovator David Byrne and experimental upstart Annie Clark, who does business as St. Vincent. The expansive brass band gathered for the duos project announces itself from the get-go with introductory single Who, spitting forth the first of an array of squiggly riffs that 45 minutes later has run the gamut from heady Afropop and feverish JBs funk to mood-yoking motifs la Gil Evans.

Yet regardless of how dominant they may seem on record and even more so when you witness Byrne & Clark & Co. in concert, like their superb performance Friday night at Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa, which replayed tonight at the Greek Theatre you can just as easily get caught up by how the albums other forces sinuously helix with those horns into one multifaceted strand.

Those forces, to be exact: 1) Byrne, that restless musicologist, never less than intriguing since parting from Talking Heads at the end of the 80s, yet whose imagistic, philosophizing pop has rarely been so sublime and stately as it has been lately. 2) Clark, the curly-haired wisp from Manhattan, who via three remarkable St. Vincent discs (Marry Me, Actor and Strange Mercy) has emerged as one of todays most inventive and important new talents. And 3) drum programmer John Congleton, whose various stuttered patterns prove essential to making this synthesis so smooth.

Byrne (60) and Clark (30) are naturals together, like an eccentric, visionary godfather and his eclectic, virtuoso niece. You can feel their creative camaraderie even in Love This Giants iciest moments, but it was even more palpable in the gracious glances and gestures they gave one another inside the opulent Rene and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, a three-tiered jewel rarely used for amplified performances like this. Their voices are such a perfect blend of chilly and warm, futurism and earthiness, its a wonder they arent biologically related.

But Congletons beats, every bit as textured and syncopated as the adorning horns he helps propel, provides just as much punctuation to these organically developed tales of nature vs. technology, inner peace vs. outer cataclysm. Byrne believes every strain of it intertwines into something distinctly new. I think he might be right.

Whats arguably even more daring an enterprise, however, is what he and Clark achieve with this fusion on stage and with almost entirely different musicians from those who appear on the album.

Though its a minimalist, somewhat black-and-white night filled with stark shadows and martial choreography, people keep coming out of performances with minds blown because they dont often see such invigorating imagination at work, even in these supposedly more sophisticated times of so many other duos (the xx, the Kills, Sleigh Bells, Crystal Castles) concocting engulfing sounds out of sparse situations.

This, though, is an altogether more hypnotic experience, not least because of the mesmerizing eight-piece brass and woodwind ensemble that powers the group with layers of sweetly cacophonous trombone and alto sax, effective interjections of French horn and flugelhorn, all anchored by some of the heartiest Sousaphone blowing outside of New Orleans. Theres no electric bass involved, just those impressive horns, a keyboardist and drummer kept clear to the corners, and whatever guitars are added by Byrne (usually on acoustic) and Clark, whose shards of frantic, distorted leads on her Gibson SG are becoming a signature all their own.

Hello, people of Orange, Byrne deadpanned at the outset of what I believe is his first appearance in O.C. since his 1997 tour behind his fourth post-Heads effort Feelings, which played San Juan Capistranos Coach House.

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Live review: David Byrne & St. Vincent spellbinding at Segerstrom Center stunner