Word: christiansen
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...probably didn't say Eggs at the Middle East last Sunday. Your loss; this Arlington, VA trio--singer/ guitarist Andrew Beaujon, bass second guitarist/trombonist Rob Christiansen, plus a rotating corps of helpful temporary drummers--has been touring up and down the East Coast for a couple year now, wowing tiny rock clubs (or at least the people who stand around in them) with an ever-varying mixture of instrumental comedy and soulfully complicated pop. They've also been releasing records, largely on the DC label Teen Beat; their latest is a multifaceted opus called Exploder. We (the columnar "we") caught...
Moreover. Eggs were already kinda sorta well-known for their oddball instrumentation--live, and on their previous records, Rob Christiansen some-times plays bass, and sometimes instead plays trombone. But that's nothing compared to the "Day in the Life" style piling up of styles and timbres on this album: a smoothly anachronistic analog synth (could it be a Mellotron?) pops up in several songs, and so effectively each time that by the end of the 66-minute Exploder opus you'll probably have moved from wondering how anyone could use a Mellotron sound on a rock record...
...also, in excelsis, a show about connoisseurship, not block- busting. It was scrupulously and intelligently put together by Keith Christiansen, curator of the museum's department of European paintings. His aim, as far as possible, was to concentrate on narrative painting -- stories from the Bible, mainly -- instead of the static images of the Madonna in which Sienese painting abounds. Because these narratives are usually found in the small scenes around compound altarpieces, they have been scattered from Budapest to Melbourne in what museums euphemistically call the "dispersal" -- the dismemberment by thieves and dealers -- of big church paintings...
...catalog essays by Christiansen and Carl Brandon Strehlke are a fine guide to the social background and doctrinal meaning of these religious comic strips. Packed with meaning, reasonable in size, this is the kind of show that the Met used to do superbly -- and now does not do often enough...
Also pacing the attack for the Bulldogs are junior center Matti Christiansen (27.43--70) and senior left wing Tom Herzig...