Catching up on some recent concerts I saw… I decided at nearly the last minute to see Jens Lekman last Monday (March 31) at Logan Square Auditorium. Even though the show was supposedly sold out, some tickets were available when I checked Monday afternoon. I really like Lekman’s early collection Oh You’re So Silent Jens and some of his other recordings, but last year’s album Night Falls Over Kortedala drifted too far into cheesy lounge-rock territory for my tastes. Still, I always hear such great things about his live show, so I decided it was worth seeing. And he did put on an awfully good show. Maybe having the string players live on stage keeps the cheesiness factor at a minimum. And Lekman has such a nice, quirky personality.
One of the opening acts was a strange Swede going under the name Honeydrips, who sang along with a laptop playing backing tracks. The dude strapped on Jens’ guitar but never actually played it, and whenever one of the songs entered an instrumental passage, he just stood there, barely nodding his head in time to the music. It was funny for a while, sort of like an extended Andy Kaufman joke, but the shtick got old pretty fast. And the music was just OK.