Friday Night begins with an encore, and that’s not even the weirdest thing about this unlikely live album. It follows Will Butler’s solo debut, last year’s Policy, an eight-track, one-man rumination on his place in the world and possibly in the Arcade Fire. Those songs mimicked the scale of that band’s biggest anthems, yet kept the stakes aggressively personal, as Butler revealed his dire worries over his family, his country, even his eternal soul. He called out God Himself, demanding that the Big Man account for His actions.After that, he spent a week writing and recording a song a day based on headlines from the Guardian, then he released a new version of Policy containing them. It’s clear the guy likes a risk.
From anyone else a record like Friday Night might be a bit suspect, an easy way to milk a few songs or get a little closer to the end of a record contract. But Butler has always been a compelling performer, a guy who claims—in song, no less—“I have never been drunk and I have never been stoned” but seems to lose himself on stage. So he’s much more comfortable in front of the crowd at Lincoln Hall in Chicago than he ever was in Electric Lady Studios, which might explain why the live album is nearly twice as long as the studio album. Even with comedian Jo Firestone acting as his hypewoman and the great Abbi Jacobson providing Magic Marker artwork, much of the show has a you-had-to-be-there vibe. But there are also moments when Butler’s music sounds more jagged, more hapless, more violent, more paranoid than it has in years.
Now, about that encore. Butler opens the track by giving a shoutout to the sound guy, which is a nice gesture but not a “This is the first song off our new album!” kind of moment. Then he explains that they’ve never played “Tell Me We’re All Right” before. “I mean that literally,” he clarifies, right as he’s launching into some piano chords practically quoted from Queen’s “You’re My Best Friend.” Butler forgets the lyrics at one point, cajoles the audience to sing along (which they don’t seem to do), adds a lengthy bridge during which he rap-introduces his backing band, and finally plays the song right into ground. What makes the performance so remarkable—and probably the entire reason it’s at the beginning of the show rather the end—is its by-the-seat-of-their-pants momentum, the feeling that the whole thing might just fly apart at any moment, leaving the band defeated and exposed up on that stage.
Butler obviously lives for those moments of musical risk, when he can either fall on his face or subsume himself into something larger. He prizes spontaneity both in writing and playing, which adds a rambunctious energy to “Son of God” and punk abandon to “II”. It gives him license to explore every style and genre that comes into his head, and the new songs point in some directions Butler might go in the future: the raw heavy metal riffing of “Public Defender,” which is simultaneously bracing and ridiculous; the homemade ‘80s soundtrack rock of “Sun Comes Up,” which sounds like a Moroder sequencer held together by duct tape.
But that quest for pure spontaneity can reveal the cracks in Butler’s craft. Penned for the Guardian, “Madonna Can’t Save Me Now” meanders for four and a half minutes with no memorable hook and only a smug sense of its own cleverness to sustain it. It’s an indie-rock song as hastily typed Facebook post, which can’t be what Butler intended, and it shows just how ugly the results can be when his seat-of-the-pants approach actually fails him.
