josé gonzález // the showbox // 7 october 2007
(more photos, including some of openers tiny vipers [flickr])

José González at the Showbox is just that. A Swede with a guitar in the spotlight playing quiet and beautiful songs for a little over an hour to a (mostly) silent, utterly captivated audience. Standing there, squeezed a couple rows back from the edge of the stage, I spent most of the set trying in vain to comprehend how all of the music was coming from a guy with just one duct-taped instrument and a microphone on the floor to capture the occasional foot-tapping as percussion. With no knobs or pedals to be seen, I couldn’t help but start to wonder if rock guitarists are getting off too easily in light of the exceptional possibilities of six gently plucked strings.

The other question that occupied me was just how long it would take for González to play the big hit and whether it would come before people started calling out requests. Luckily, after a lengthy bit of meandering tuning, he dispatched with the inevitable “Heartbeats” before any rowdiness ensued, leaving everyone was happy, content then to listen as new material from the recently-released In Our Nature was woven into a set that included “really old”, very pretty, and earnest [pfork], Kylie cover “Hand on Your Heart”.

Despite heeding his own the “four songs left” warning, chants of “José” inspired by an abandoned guitar brought a return to the center of the stage and its ever shifting spotlights (at times it felt like the lighting designer was worried that we’d feel cheated by anything other than an undersea lava lamp experience to keep us from getting bored) for an encore that concluded with striking renditions of “Crosses” and, after a quick tuning-related stutter, “Love Will Tear Us Apart”. Again, cementing at the end of the show the enduring amazement by somehow managing to play all of the parts on one instrument while reinventing Joy Division before ending the show with a smile and a wave.