Jarrod Baker is working a hard gig: one part musician, one part comedian.  It’s challenging because in order to pull it off, you have to be fully developed and skilled at both.  His show is a series of deeply nerdy – in the best possible way – songs about various ways the world will end, from global warming to divine wrath over gay marriage to the dolphins’ final revenge.

All the songs are original except for one, and they span many genres, from Vanilla Ice-style rap to Johnny Cash country ballads.  And Baker hits the hallmarks of each style brilliantly.  He plays with how he builds his songs: some are pre-recorded, while others are made of loops of melody that are played live and looped onstage.

Baker’s performance is stronger during the pre-recorded songs; there’s more direct engagement, more eye contact, and more – for lack of a better word – gusto to his performance.  A Tom Jones-ish anthem about the brain parasite toxoplasmosis gandhii is masterful: full of passion, clever rhymes, unexpected endings and served up with a layer of camp enthusiasm that makes me want to sing along. 

I wish I had the same enthusiasm for the live-looped songs, but they feel under-rehearsed, and Baker spends a lot of time looking at the pedals on the floor or the song lyrics rather than engaging with his audience.  There’s also some skill that needs to be built here. 

Part of the joy of watching someone do live looping on stage is the complexity of building each song, and how it changes over the arc of each song.  There’s an edge of danger here; how many layers can you pile up and how quick can you respond to your own creation before it all falls apart? 

At the moment, Baker’s live looped songs are all set down before he begins singing and remain unaltered until they end.  The endings are uniform: shutting the entire thing down with one step on the pedal. 

The lyrics are engaging enough that I want the music to match.  Instead, this lack of shape musically limits what can be done in performance – the rhythms grow tiresome and constrain tempo and phrasing, making the looped songs feel longer than they are.  I like the idea of this type of comedy and think Baker has plenty of room to grow into it, but it has to be way more polished than it is to get buy-in. 

Baker’s comedy is strange and nerdy, and the more he has to scramble to bring different ideas together, the more I enjoy it.  One of my favourite songs of the night is the result of a Facebook poll about how the world will end, and it involves Justin Beiber and the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man in some of the finest musical storytelling this side of Weird Al Yankovic.  It is truly bizarre and enjoyable.  I only wish the rest of the matched it.

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer