Aside from Victorian novelists and silent-film actresses, it’s hard to find skilled practitioners of the art of the swoon.
But for Joe Cassidy, creative guru behind the band Butterfly Child, cascading emotions and tortured melodrama — the ingredients of a good old-fashioned swoon — are the raw ingredients of his expertly crafted orchestral epics.
As someone once said, the Celts are the race whom “God made mad, for all their wars are happy and all their songs are sad.” Cassidy, a Belfast native, proved at the Double Door on Thursday night that wars between lovers can be the source of musical epiphanies that make the heart soar and break at the same time.
Just with drums, guitar and bass, the instrument combination with which the band began, the Butterfly children managed to create a moody, dreamy feeling, with guitars reverberating and cascading around the sweet melodies sketched by Cassidy’s yearning voice. At their best, the songs subtly complex structures and moody atmospherics combined to evoke the grandeur of midcareer U2 and the driving romance of classic Van Morrison, fellow Irishmen skilled at finding the beauty in melancholy heartbreak.
At one point, Cassidy jokingly called his swirling songs “music for the next millennium,” but, if anything, they look back to the expertly structured pop psychedelia of the Beatles and Brian Wilson. “Drunk on Beauty” isn’t just a song title for Cassidy, it’s an aesthetic. When a string quartet joined Cassidy’s band part way through the set, one got a clear idea of his ambitious artistic vision, as surging strings and yearning vocals lifted his songs like waves buffetting a storm-tossed ship.
But within the confines of a rock club, it was tough for Cassidy’s band to re-create the lush, multilayered magic of the most recent Butterfly Child album, “Soft Explosives.” Short of enlisting either the Chicago Symphony Orchestra or one of the CSO’s sonically friendly concert spaces, a certain amount of failure was inevitable: The band was destined to come up against the sonic challenges of a boxy, smoky rock club where the acoustics favor the bold rather than the subtle. As the band played “Drunk on Beauty,” Cassidy’s high-pitched voice was nearly lost beneath the heavy thudding of the bass and drums, and the strings, also buried in the mix, often competed with his voice rather than complemented it.
During “Number One,” my wishful thinking transported the band to an imaginary chapel; such a small, sacred space would have been perfect for the sentiment of the songs and the intimate nature of the music. One got the impression that much of Cassidy’s music is like certain specimens of fine art — it’s dangerous to transport such delicate creations out of the studio.
Perhaps as the band works out the kinks in its live shows — this was, after all, one of Cassidy’s first Chicago concerts with a full backing band — the sound mix issues will be resolved and his taut sonic confections will truly come to consistently shine in live settings.
Still, as the set progressed, Cassidy was able to achieve rapturous beauty. Backed only by a rhythm track, and bathed in the tiny, spinning lights of a glittering disco ball, he gently sang “The Sound of Our Love Breaking Apart.” Though the lyrics etch portraits of hellish pain, the sound was pure heaven.
