This Summer in downtown Seattle the "Out To Lunch" concert series has free shows on Wednesdays and Fridays. Last Friday my daughter and I walked over to Harbor Steps from my office for lunch and watched Hey Marseilles put on an excellent show, the first Out To Lunch show I've seen.
I've seen Hey Marseilles several times with last year's Bumbershoot show on the Broad Street lawn probably my favorite. They did a cover of "Love Insurgent" that was brilliant, and their own material was excellent as usual.
The Harbor Steps are a nice venue for an outdoor show as long as the weather cooperates, and we had reasonably nice weather so it worked out well.
Hey Marseilles is a pretty large band with 7 people and includes a somewhat unusual variety of instruments - usually a violin, cello, accordion, bass, electric guitar, acoustic guitar, bass and drums; sometimes they throw in some keyboard or a horn, or additional percussion, and they have guests on occasion too. Their singer has a very nice voice, distincitve and clear, it reminds me a bit of Colin Meloy with a similar range and timbre.
This video includes three guests adding backing vocals - you can see them on the left, reading the lyrics from a piece of paper. The stage ends up mildly crowded.
I like the extended string section that closes out the song, nice touch.
The next video has a quiet mostly vocal intro with the acoustic guitar backing, then more instruments slowly adding in. It builds slowly, adding some drama by bringing more instruments in and playing them a little louder as the song continues without messing around with tempo.
The guest vocalists have moved over to the right on this song. The kid with the colored scarf dancing around is pretty precious too.
I'm having trouble downloading stuff form my SLR camera, apparently the flash memory is having corruption problems, so I only have videos from my Flip to post.
The last video is interesting, a couple of extra band members play percussion during the intro - one on a bass drum and the other pounding on the drum set's cymbals while the drummer pounds away too.
I actually have several more videos from the show, I've posted them to my youtube channel if you want to see them.
Fun show in an interesting setting. The crowd passing by was a little noisy and distracting on occasion but that's a small price to pay for such a pleasant setting.
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The guests were Melodie Knight, Mychael Cohen from Campfire OK and Bryan John Appleby. All incredible vocalists/musicians in their own right. You should check them out!
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