Chemistry Set: The Swell Season @ the Moore

Some people take to relationships like a cat to water. The Swell Season's Glen Hansard sounds nice enough, friends all over Dublin, bit of a hippie -- but give him a girlfriend's ear and he's prone to red-faced verbal jabs, depressed miseries, and emotional archery. He can't keep up, or won't try.

We made a choice and we knew we would pay / for stealing the joy and trying to escape / from the arms of this low

Nervously garrulous onstage, giving each song its setting, he tells the story of how his beat-up guitar -- the soundboard worn through, splintered -- had just returned from its home, Japan. At an interview, its maker showed up and presented him with a brand-new one. Overwhelmed with gratitude, Hansard learned the man was mainly embarrassed to see one of his guitars in that condition. "I took it," says Hansard, clutching his faithful old transitional object, "but I'm not gonna play it!"

You begin to see why a girlfriend might leave him. "And how in the world did you come / to be such a lazy love?" he sings with Cat Stevens' flair for passing judgment, or pleads for time with a barbed hook on the line: " Maybe if you slowed down for me / I could see you're only telling / lies, lies, lies."

It's hard to talk about The Swell Season without talking about the movie Once because that's where we heard 17-year-old Marketa Irglova achieve the incredible -- harmonizing with Hansard. It's strange to see them on the Moore's stage, as if reality was flowing backwards. ("Even flow, thoughts arrive like butterflies..." clowns Hansard, adding with gleeful awe, "The Moore in Seattle!...I saw the video of Eddie climbing the wall here!")

In Irglova's songs a cello waltzes morosely with a gypsy's stuttering violin, the piano teaching itself a melody. Her voice still carries an Eastern European tuning, and it winds easily around Hansard's stressed tenor.

It's not that she's a dewy-eyed optimist -- her steely resolve could give Hansard's melancholy lessons. But their unlikely, downbeat chemistry raises hope almost without meaning to. "Things are going in a very nice direction," says Hansard, with genuine surprise. The audience is full of young bearded men with newspaper boy caps and holey clothes, young women with an Eastern European cast to their cheekbones, their straight brown hair's bangs pulled diagonally across their forehead and secured behind an ear. The encore includes a cover of "Into the Mystic" and closes with everyone chanting softly:

Star star teach me how to shine shine / teach me so I know what's going on in your mind

Concert photo courtesy Flickr user Ken Eisner.