With a crowd of more than 150 people tossing about like salt-lipped waves and Jay Purdy, lead singer of The Extraordinaires, baring the whites of his eyes and shaking his beard like Ahab on the hunt, one wonders: “What do you do with a drunken sailor later in the evening?”
The beauty of The Extraordinaires is that the group has become so adept at steering through a stormy set of rock that catching the band live is more like a trip through the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Walt Disney World than an Atlantic cruise. Everything is vivid, almost cartoonish, in detail and sound, and would feel silly if the crew of the S.S. Extraordinaires weren’t so committed to their ship. The only way for an audience to enjoy itself as much as the members of the band is to commit whole-heartedly to their fantastic narratives, which is precisely what last Thursday’s enormous crowd at the Tea Bazaar did.
 The Extraordinaires packed the Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar for a night of memorable madness last Thursday. |
Of course, there’s an ocean of difference between being earnest and buying in. Staunton-based opening act Nelly Kate and her guest Wes Swing ran through a handful of entrancing, somber pop songs and a few Eastern-tinged incantations, but many of the songs fell under two minutes in length—catchy enough to command attention but too short to gratify it. Swing and Kate are exceptional at pairing potent lyrics with the gauzy atmosphere of cello and acoustic guitar, but the promising pair’s songs invited more attention than they could reward.
Second act Tavo Carbone was quite the opposite, a songwriter that repopulated early blues tunes and country waltzes with unsavory characters and sang with a voice that owed as much to Bessie Smith as Bobcat Goldthwait. Following one song, an audience member turned to me and asked, “Isn’t that what Tiny Tim sounds like?” Yet beneath a voice that might’ve seemed repellent were endearing lyrics about uncomfortable people, including a girl that “laughs in a way that drives lemmings from a cliff” and a second that danced “like a dog in May/ When the hydrants are out of range.”
I spent The Extraordinaires’ hour-plus set perched in my crow’s nest atop a chair while the most massive crowd to witness a concert in the Tea Bazaar swayed, swelled and burst at the group’s command, often at the provocation of focal point Jay Purdy. Wearing an airbrushed Batman t-shirt and a hairdo from Eraserhead, Purdy opened the set clutching his classical guitar—painted and amended to resemble a blue swordfish—with one arm and conducting his crew with the other, guiding the vessel of the Tea Bazaar through songs of lazy exploration (the riotously paranoid “The Neighborhood Watch”) and violent retribution (new tune “Man Versus the Whale”).
The Extraordinaires do right by their narratives of demons, cacti, ghosts and war, digging through genres like tackle boxes and finding nothing but hooks. Live, each chorus was simple enough to attract attention and each melody, drawing on everything from Beach Boys and Boston to The Unicorns, was familiar enough to command it. The Extraordinaires’ final anthem, “The Warehouse Song,” felt like finding land, the validation of some ill-planned, wildly entertaining journey launched long ago: “We never do a single dish./ We like our house the way it is.” So do we.