Live Review: Liam Finn @ Bowery Ballroom 9/3

Liam Finn's an extraordinarily talented man, with skills honed in an unlikely place: New Zealand. Better known for its sheep and Lord of the Rings set tours, the Pacific island nation also produced his father (Neil Finn of Crowded House) while its larger neighbor to the south, Australia, is responsible for the younger Finn's bandmate, Eliza-Jane Barnes. And with one album, I'll Be Lightning, under his belt and some formidable critical praise to his name-- including a spot among Paste's Best of What's Next-- Finn's live performance more than lives up to the buzz.

Flitting from guitar to drums and vocals, the pop auteur looped up a storm of beats and melody between himself and E-J, whose searing, operatic vocals stabilized Finn’s British Invasion falsetto. His ability to arrange so many loops with punctuated chronological precision puts his timing on par with air traffic controllers and birth control pills, creating complex blueprints of loops upon loops recorded and echoed effortlessly throughout the set.

Midway through, a formula emerged wherein Finn would coax a vocal line out of his mic and follow up with a fuzzy riff, cementing the track with his staccato drum rolls. The entire routine would have bordered on novelty if not for the fact that the tunes being constructed were just as good as the album they appeared on. The live set was extremely faithful to Lightning, with especially rousing renditions of tracks “Second Chance” and “Lead Balloon” livened by the loop wars he raged back and forth against E-J.

Things only unfolded toward the end of the two-hour set, when the sampling became one step short of masturbatory, the recordings no longer from a particular song but just random beats and vocalizations.