Review: The Low Anthem @ The Allen Room
Situated on the sixth floor of the Time Warner Center on Manhattan’s Upper Wide Side, lies arguably the city’s best kept secret of a music venue – Jazz At Lincoln Center’s Allen Room – a venue which typically caters to a more affluent audience, than its downtown rock club peers. Set up like an amphitheater, it boasts easily the most amazing views you’re ever going to get at a concert hall in an urban environment with its gigantic floor to ceiling glass windows, that directly overlooks the passing traffic going around Columbus Circle and a stretch of 59th Street that you can see clear all the way to the East Side.
Last night, the Allen Room played host to the kick off concert for Lincoln Center’s thirteenth season of its American Songbook Series, with a show from folk-rockers The Low Anthem. Dressed liked they had just stepped straight out of Greenwich Village’s pass-the-hat folk circuit circa-1964, and surrounded by a mix of both familiar and slightly obscure, and long forgotten instruments, which included a gigantic church organ they had specially brought in just for this show, graciously paid for by the folks at Lincoln Center. The band took to the stage to a mesmerizing view of glowing head and tail lights, and flickering lights from the posh apartments that surround Central Park West.
The Providence-based act, fresh off their second appearance on The Late Show With David Letterman the night before, used nearly all of their hour and a half-long set to showcase the songs from their upcoming studio album Smart Flesh, which is due out on February 22. Ben Knox Miller & company set the tone for the night by opening with the hushed To The Ghosts Who Write History Books from their critically acclaimed sophomore album Oh My God Charlie Darwin
READ ON for more on The Low Anthem’s show…
