Kevin Devine

Few singer-songwriters are okay to wear their influences on their sleeve like ex-Miracle of 86 frontman Kevin Devine. Walking out to the homemade laptop skitter of The Books’ ‘The Lemon of Pink’ on Thursday, he sat down, wiped the hair out of his eyes to mutter “I don’t think I ever woke up today”, and started a song that sounded exactly like Bright Eyes’ ‘Landlocked Blues’. It really doesn’t get more bedroom than that. Devine seems very aware in his role in indie-rock, a minor artist who sinks into the post-Elliott Smith era like a comfortable couch. He rests in the familiarity of reliable chords and puts himself across with a boyish charm. Occasionally, Devine finds a guitar hook or an arresting falsetto phrase, but he lets them pass by, content to use once and throw away rather than hammer home like a dominating refrain.

Devine’s live show is unsurprisingly awkward: he lost his place a couple times and even forgot a lyric. He bobs his head like Ben Gibbard, which looks especially out of place when he plays seated with no backing band to ‘rock against’. Some (tipsy?) girls in the back shouted “I want to do you”-type stuff all night and his visible embarrassment suggested a rare instance of groupie-manipulating-sensitive-songwriter instead of the other way around. He covered both Nirvana (a strained ‘All Apologies’, almost identical to fellow weakling Gibbard’s recent version) and Elliott Smith (‘Miss Misery’, totally within his range, done as sensitive-mush karaoke), so I hope he’s not planning on developing a hard drug habit anytime soon (he’s already got titles like ‘Noose Dressed Like A Necklace’, so don’t push him). But then he also covered non-suicide-prone Brand New’s ‘Jesus Christ’, a tune unknown to me by a band I kind of don’t care about, and it had rang with more verve than most of his own tunes, so go figure. It’s too bad he kept killing these rare bits of momentum with Death Cab outtakes that went “I’ve got a wolf’s mouth / I’ve got a wolf’s mouth”, ad infinitum.

When he wasn’t given too-big shoes to fill, his songs divided up half-and-half. Last year’s ‘The Burning City Smoke’ was a triumphant folkie-stomp actually worthy of I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning. ‘A Billion Bees’ was his big sexy ballad, where he just wants to “watch the sun swap with the moon”, and live, he came real close to realizing its dick appeal until some girl shouted “That’s genius!”, to which he politely disagreed. So befit the contradiction of a folksinger who barely seems to care to change his laundry, much less the world, and quite content to resign to the margins.

Devine has talent, with a voice that rises from a soothing whimper to a hormonal rage that seems well-equipped for his emo background. His music often resides somewhere between pretty and boring, and his protest-folk is always better than his sad-bastard-folk. Sappier tunes like ‘Just Stay’ could’ve been edited from his too-long set to leave barnburners like ‘Yr Damned Old Dad’ more resonance. When he delivery the latter’s big climactic lines, “Fuck this town, son / I wanna make ‘em crawl again”, it didn’t quite explode the way it should’ve, but it was striking how the impish dude on a stool in a t-shirt made his voice so massive for just that moment. He could’ve used a few more of those.