It's potentially a refreshing combination on stage: a singer, a guitar, a 1970s shirt, a mike and a pair of laptops. You normally expect that kind of tech with the electronics and bulletproof vest brigade, not the good old-fashioned man with a guitar singing about his girlfriends.
Well, not so much singing about his girlfriends as exorcising the exes, some of whom seem to have gone into terminal decline since the break-up - "I'm not the reason you screwed up", "Your collapse is not my fault", "I hate your clothes and your hair". From the wry, knowing smiles Jesse Hartman gives to himself on stage, we are probably supposed to dig between the lines and find a deadpan wisdom. But "You hate those awkward breakfasts but that don't matter 'cause I hate them too" didn't reveal much in the way of inner truth, although "I have nothing to declare" had a good point. For one bloke in the crowd all was revealed when Laptop introduced one number by saying, "I wrote this song about this trip I've just taken" - "Ah, trip, that's why he looks so mashed."
There were some nice fusion moments that combined the guitars, electronics and voice in roughly the same proportions as Beck in tracks such as I'm So Happy You Failed. And his habit of doubling the voice through an octaver effect, which adds a ghostly lower version (as Squeeze used to do with real voices) works well to bridge the gap between acoustic and electronic in some numbers, but starts to sound like Lou Reed gargling at bedtime in the guitar-only tunes.
What makes it sound more like the Beck Shop Boys, though, is the New Romantic synth beats that the computers are churning out. It's not that there's anything especially wrong from a musical point of view, but why use a laptop? Hartman just hit "go" and left them to it, like a backing band on a hard drive. Even the gaps between songs were automatic - the machines just counted a few seconds and ploughed on. At times it felt like Bontempi for the 21st century.
If you're going to use computers as instruments, why not play them, use them to manipulate sounds live? Otherwise you might as well just stick on a backing tape.
