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Galactic
Just as at this year’s South By Southwest Music Festival, audiences at ACL have embraced musicians from New Orleans with a special warmth. That certainly proved to be the case with Galactic, the quintet that has taken the Crescent City’s brass band and funk traditions into the 21st century.
Fans at the AMD Stage saw a new incarnation of the band. Its last release, “Ruckus,” came out in 2003, and its vocalist departed the group the next year. Since then, Galactic has reconstituted itself as an instrumental ensemble.
The lack of a frontman hardly seemed to matter. Saxophonist Ben Ellman, guitarist Jeff Raines and keyboardist Richard Vogel kept up a witty, ever-evolving dialogue through songs such as “Moil,” “Shibuya” and the ironically-titled “FEMA” while bassist Robert Mercurio and drummer Stanton Moore held down the bottom.
Like all the best New Orleans musicians, the group’s members manage to hit with a crunch, but still swing, as evidenced by their two covers, funkified versions of Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” (they used to perform “When the Levee Breaks,” but perhaps that hits a bit too close to home these days) and “Manic Depression.”
Heretofore, the band has gone out of its way to welcome guest musicians onstage, and its ACL set was no exception; Leo Nocentelli, the guitarist for the Meters (Galactic’s central influence) hopped onstage for a pair of tunes, including an appropriately funked-up rendition of the Meters’ “Africa.”
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By Ben
September 17, 2006 11:54 PM | Link to this
Good review but you give two false impressions: 1- That Galactic “reconstituted itself as an instrumental ensemble” after Theryl’s departure from the band; in fact Galactic has always been primarily an instrumental ensemble and Theryl was really just a permanent “special guest” who would only sing during aprox. 1/3 of their set. 2- “When the Levee Breaks” was in fact only included in their setlists post-Katrina and was in fact played at the late night show at Jovita’s.