[This is from that hip music 'zine I write for sometimes]:
Having lived in D.C. for five of my formative years, it’s hard to believe something so soulful could come out of that place. I’m not sure how a city so Blackberry-powered and pinstriped could produce someone like Citizen Cope, but I’m glad it did.
I hadn’t seen Cope, a.k.a. Clarence Greenwood, until he played at the Wiltern last week, so I didn’t really know what to expect when he sauntered on stage in an unassuming hobo trench and his characteristic man-bun. He started out solo with “Salvation,” which sounds vaguely Southern, both in its arrangement and with lyrics like “Say Judas came up to D.C. He’d been down in Georgia for a while. He drove a 944…” You can hear the Memphis in Cope’s gravelly voice, and if you close your eyes he almost sounds like an aging gangsta rapper instead of a dewey-eyed white dude.
Greenwood’s back-up band joined the musician on stage for the remainder of the set, and he switched to electric guitar for a twangier feel during classics like “Let The Drummer Kick.” Citizen Cope is one of those rare performers whose songs are diverse enough to keep you guessing but similar enough to form a unifying rhythm for the entire show. “Bullet and a Target” is a perfect example of Cope’s range—a groovy and nearly upbeat melody belies a song about heroin, amputees and conception in a pickup truck.
Overall, the music is rich with Cope’s blues and r & b influences, and it carries occasional flourishes of reggae thanks to a pretty talented keyboardist. Speaking of reggae, one of the audience members in my section felt all too taken in by the Rastafarian scene Cope had set for us, so he decided to enhance the concert – uh – herbally.
And that’s not such a great idea in the Wiltern, because even though the offending smoker fled the scene, he left a cloud of pot smoke in his wake. And that raised the ire of the security folks, who decided to keep order by shining a flashlight at my section for a vast chunk of the concert. Ahem.
But it was alright, because soon afterward Cope brought out songstress Alice Smith, who could put an opera singer to shame with her powerful pipes and plaintive melodies. If the concert wasn’t already a secular religious experience, a Christian rock show without the Christ, she took it all the way there.
Cope didn’t play “Brother Lee,” but he did “Healing Hands,” from his new Rainwater LP and the head-bopper “Son’s Gonna Rise,” which had everyone pointing at the stage in that, “yes, that’s what we want” fashion.
At the end, he did the yoga namaste hands and wished us much peace and love. Mission accomplished.