Just one night after Violent Femmes wrapped their most extensive recording sessions since 1998, the band brought rockabilly and heavy bluegrass to a set of favorites and obscure requests in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
The show on Tuesday, at the record store Rough Trade NYC, was significant for being the Femmes’s first performance to follow their longest stretch of studio time in 17 years. But it also underscored a stability and joy within the band not seen for some time. Tensions first fractured the original trio — frontman Gordon Gano, bassist Brian Ritchie and drummer Victor DeLorenzo — while touring behind The Blind Leading the Naked in 1986. Comebacks and subsequent records were fat with angst, and acrimony stemming from internal lawsuits led to a six-year split in 2007.
A reunion in 2013 for Coachella and a handful of shows went sideways when DeLorenzo quit that June. Viglione, of the Dresden Dolls, stepped in, and the new lineup played for the first time a few months later in Central Park — only to be rained out within 18 minutes.
Any lingering tension between Gano and Ritchie has all but evaporated onstage. With almost two years under their belt as a reformed group, the Femmes are now working on what’s shaping up to be their first album since 2000’s Freak Magnet. (They have eight songs so far.) But they avoided that fresh material on Tuesday; the set was intended for the faithful, and full of the dry, disturbing themes Gano has so deftly parlayed into punkish, campfire singalongs since the early ’80s.
“It’s a good one to be doing,” Gano said of the night’s first request with a smirk, “in a safe place.” Its spiteful, taunting refrain, “I hope you got fat,” fed the audience’s mutual taste for gallows humor. Later, they clapped and stomped along as Gano plucked a violin on “Jesus Walking on the Water.” And they brought “Blister in the Sun” to the faintest whisper before exploding in unison: “Lemme go hooo-ooooome!”
Viglione is by far the band’s most physical showman. He thrashed through a substantial solo on “Black Girls” from behind a snare, two cymbals and an upturned metal bucket. Ritchie attacked his mariachi acoustic with thick, deep thuds, occasionally swinging his long hair and vaguely grinning. His inner showman finally emerged on the encore, “Gone Daddy Gone,” when he switched to the xylophone and hammered the hell out of the bars.
For the first time in years, the Femmes are in recording shape, fit and energetic and playing with a refreshed jubilation. Their peak might be in the past. But it looks as though they’re finally getting past it.
