Jeremy Messersmith enchanted his audience at Czar last night

Jeremy Messersmith with the Invisible World
Czar, Kansas City
Tuesday, July 9, 2014

Jeremy Messersmith needs a bigger stage. It’s not that the Czar Bar’s setup was too crowded (although it was), but the Minneapolis singer’s sound was too big for its constraints. Hailed by Time last year as one of this year’s 14 most promising artists, Messersmith is Ben Gibbard and Guster, a little Andrew Bird, a dash of Simon and Garfunkel.

After an opening act by Invisible World, a home-grown, ponytail-sprouting alt-rock band whose loose, loud sound frequents Czar, Messersmith took the stage quietly, and his first song, “I Don’t Trust That Boy,” was quiet and slow enough to bring an absolute hush over the crowd. The rest of his songs, drawn mostly from his new album, Heart Murmurs, were arguably better performed live than on their recordings.

Messersmith, a singer-songwriter by nature, eschews the singer-songwriter label — in the vocal reediness and dark, single-mic coffee-shop shows it conjures up — to become someone whose brand of indie is still something more than that, walking the line between off-kilter authenticity and the accessibility of mainstream sound. He’s not so esoteric as Bird’s eclectic compositions, not as commercial-pop as Death Cab for Cutie.

Instead, Messersmith’s is an easy, earnest and honest sound that’s easy to fall in love with, and the audience at Czar was under its spell. Ninety percent of the audience packed into the 40 percent of the space closest to the stage, to better hear Messersmith and let his sound wash over them. And when Messersmith said he had a tab open at the bar and jokingly asked someone to ring up some whiskey on it, no fewer than three shots were crowd-surfed over to him. He accepted one and passed two to his band members with a look of astonished delight. “Can we just stop the whole show while we drink?” he asked, before launching into “Franklin Avenue.”

It might have been the whiskey talking, but he loved the audience as much as they loved him, as he proclaimed halfway through the set: “Kansas City, I think I’m falling in love with you.”

Messersmith also has a unique presence onstage, one he highlighted in several songs where his bandmates left him to be alone on the stage. He’s not so much a novice that he’s genuinely self-effacing, but he’s as honest about shows as he is about his music, and pokes fun at the whole process, from writing to the encore of a show. Heart Murmurs was an album about love, he said, but when he sat down to write it, he realized that he didn’t know much about the subject at all (not that you’d be able to tell from the pulling-at-the-heartstrings-and-maybe-tear-ducts lyrics of “I Want to Be Your One-Night Stand”).

He didn’t wait for an encore, either: “Look, we’ll play a song; you applaud like crazy; we pretend like you’ve been applauding for 10 minutes and not go stand in the kitchen, and then we’ll come back and play some more.” After that, the audience was finally treated to “Ghost,” one of his standout pieces, as the 18th song.

Time is right: Messersmith is going to be big. Maybe not this year, but he’s not going to be in spaces like Czar for long. “Ghost” is practically single-ready, and after signing to Glassnote (home to Mumford and Sons and Phoenix), it’s not hard to see him breaking into bigger venues. And if he can keep that honesty and genuineness that the Czar audience fell in love with last night, he’ll be here to stay.

Set list:

with full band
I Don’t Trust That Boy
Tourniquet
It’s Only Dancing
Lazy Bones
Knots
Franklin Avenue
You’ll Only Break His Heart

solo
One-Night Stand
Love You to Pieces
Beautiful Children
A Girl, a Boy, and a Graveyard

with full band
Novocain
Dillinger
Organ Donor
Deathbed Salesman
Heidi
Hitman
Ghost 
Violet
Someday, Someone