Dance Me to the End of the Tour: Sons and Daughters in Toronto

This past Wednesday at Lee's Palace in Toronto I finally got to watch Glaswegian four-piece, Sons and Daughters, perform live. I became a fan in 2004 when I first heard their debut Love the Cup, however, I lost track of them over the last few years and missed the release of their second album The Repulsion Box. I became aware of them again last year as they began getting more and more attention for their latest album, the Bernard Butler-produced This Gift. When I finally took a listen to This Gift, I marvelled at the difference between it and Love the Cup, a much slower and folkier body of work. I can still reconcile the two by the thread of call and response vocals of Adele Bethel and Scott Paterson and the Celtic lilt of their garage rock, but I was curious about how the live show would go down. I was truly impressed by the energy and unadulterated joy they project on stage. Adele, looking like a cross between a disco diva and Wonder Woman in her blue eyeshadow, gold sequins, purple hotpants, and knee-high gold boots, stomped her feet and brandished her tambourine, leading the band through a breathless aural assault that had the energy of a punk show.



Notably, they played almost exclusively songs from their last two albums The Repulsion Box and This Gift, including opener Gilt Complex, Hunt, Dance Me In, Chains, Flags, Rebel With the Ghost, Taste the Last Girl, Iodine, Rama Lama, Goodbye Service, and The Nest. The only song from Love the Cup to make an appearance was Johnny Cash, and it was re-tooled into a faster piece from the version I remember, naturally to fit in with the newer sound. Their encore included a blistering performance of This Gift followed by the raucous House in My Head. Highlights included Chains, which shuffled along like a rockabilly song, propelled by Scott's "whoah-oh-oh"s, Dance Me In, which felt like a Celtic jig played on speed, and the absolute insanity of House in My Head, where I was certain my own head would be shaken loose. Adele spun around, whipped her microphone cord and flung herself toward the audience, careening like a pinball into all corners of the stage, and at one point, she stood in a playful salute posture. Scott, in his sparkly black shirt and quiff, played his guitar in true guitar hero fashion, his face contorting with passion as he crouched and lurched or ran to the edge of the stage for solos. Bassist, Ailidh Lennon, was more reserved in her black dress and boots as she hung back and kept the rhythm pulsing like a racing heartbeat (her reserve could have some connection to her being sick with flu) while drummer, David Gow, kept a crazy pace through the entire set, heavy on offbeats, forcing you to dance, clap your hands and swing your head. Scott and Adele's vocals are perfectly matched and blend in both sweet lilting and wild yelping. For a band who mentioned their love for Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash and Leonard Cohen, this newer incarnation doesn't quite mesh with those influences anymore. Perhaps they never truly did. Oddly enough, seeing them live, I could now recognize The Smiths in some of the songs like two of my favourites, Darling and Iodine, and Taste the Last Girl - there was something Marresque about the guitar and melodies.

Adding to the overall charm of their show, Adele and Scott talked to the audience in between songs, revealing genuine down-to-earth personalities. Adele prefaced Dance Me In by telling the audience that it was an answer to Leonard Cohen's Dance Me to the End of Love and how excited she was that he was touring again, and she introduced Taste the Last Girl with mention of a rubbish ex-boyfriend. She also joked about how the night before they played a song so fast she almost had cardiac arrest (with the alacrity they played this particular night, I could definitely see how that could happen). With self-deprecating humour, Scott prefaced Rebel With the Ghost with the fact the song was quite easy because it was all "nah-nah-nahs." Close to the end of the show, both Scott and Adele talked about how happy they were to be heading home now because this was the last gig of the North America tour, leading into the catharsis and tour-end celebration of House in My Head. The band I loved in 2004 has changed, but they have convinced me to fall in love with them all over again in 2008.

Opening band, Bodies of Water, didn't disappoint and definitely deserve mentioning. Having listened to a few of their tracks in advance, I was excited to witness their sound live. For only four people, they create a choir of voices, filling the small venue with waves of beautiful sound. Their songs are long and meandering, switching time signatures several times before ending, but it never gets tedious; instead, you feel like you're accompanying them on a journey that no one has mapped out yet, but is bound to be filled with serendipity and wonder. Styles seamlessly moved from gospel to reggae to latin to operatic epic. Keyboardist and vocalist, Meredith Metcalf, hit spine-tingling heights in vocal range during It Moves - I will always remember that. They have that powerful organic feel of several people functioning as one like Arcade Fire or Broken Social Scene, but they accomplish it with far less people. They deserved far more than the small crowd that hung back from the floor in front of the stage. Truly impressive.

Darling - Sons and Daughters

Chains - Sons and Daughters

It Moves - Bodies of Water

Dirty and Sweet: The Raveonettes in Toronto

This past Good Friday was indeed good with The Raveonettes' gig at The Opera House in Toronto. I've never had the privilege to see the Danish duo live before, and I'm very happy I got to witness them on stage. Sune Rose Wagner and Sharin Foo filled the vaudeville stage with incredible swathes of sound and intricately crafted noise, the stagefloor littered with effects pedals. Their guitars chirped, chimed, buzzed and bounced throughout the relatively small venue, producing a hybrid of a 50's prom and a space age rave.

Image is just as intrinsic to The Raveonettes as the music - they are a fascinating combination of Europe and Americana. They come across like the aloof cool kids who somehow ended up presiding over a 50's prom in the future. Their symmetry on stage is perfect - Sune stands stage right and Sharin stands stage left, leaving a fairly large gap between them with the androgynous female drummer standing in the middle of the gap towards the back of the stage. And the drummer does stand - she bangs away at the drums like one would in an orchestra rather than sitting behind a traditional drumkit, all to a perfect visual effect. Seeing her sticks come down on the drums in such an obvious way, further emphasizes the classic Ronettes drumbeat that runs throughout most of their songs.

Sune and Sharin contrast but match at the same time - he is slight of build with dark hair while she towers above him on high heels and sports a platinum blonde pageboy haircut. He looks fragile in his Endless Summer t-shirt and skinny jeans, while she looks austere in her sequined black and silver dress. At the same time, they both have the same aloof look on their faces as they stare out over the audience with their kohl-lined eyes. No matter how fast and danceable their music gets, they stay nearly motionless behind their microphones as their hands move in a blur over their guitars. Sometimes this stance is broken as Sharin gently sways her head to the beat and Sune backs away, sliding his pointy shoes around the stage, as he performs a guitar solo. But they always come back to formation, a repressed tension filling the space between them and crackling along with their reverbing guitars. None of this distance makes them appear rude or arrogant - when they speak to the audience in between songs, they appear quite soft-spoken and gracious; instead, they seem to have an inherent, effortless coolness that makes you envy them because you know they're untouchable. You can't take your eyes off them in their mesmerizing detachment.

The Raveonettes' fusion of distortion and Spector-like walls of sound and drums makes them undeniably like The Jesus and Mary Chain, especially the Psychocandy period. Other obvious reference points are 60's girl groups like The Ronettes and the distortion of Sonic Youth; however, their light vocals meld into each other so gently that they sound like one androgynous, dreamy voice. It never ceases to amaze me that they can create as many songs as they do with the same sound, same chord progressions, same drumbeat patterns, but with distinctive melodies that constantly update their 50's and 60's simplicity with something intangibly original. Their songs have the magic to transport you back to an America of milkshake fantasy and arrested adolescence while creating an excitement and a spacey atmosphere that belongs to a future as imagined by the 1960's.

Blowing through a set that mainly consisted of songs under three minutes, they played many songs off their latest album Lust Lust Lust, opening with Hallucinations, and going on to play Dead Sound, Blush, Lust, Black Satin, You Want the Candy, and The Best Dies. Faster songs like Blush and You Want the Candy soared through the venue propelled by drums and sweet melodies, and Sharin's vocal on The Best Dies in tandem with Sune's lazy lullaby of guitar strumming were entrancing and hypnotic. Sune, staring into the middle distance and flickering his eyelids in an idiosyncratic blink, often strummed while holding the whammy bar as his hand moved up and down the frets with a careless ease. In breaks from vocals, he would hunch over his guitar and lurch in time with the downbeats. Sharin, seeming to be channeling the spirits of Debbie Harry, Nico, and Agnetha from Abba all at once, strummed her guitar with the same abandon and characteristic staccato strums Sune did. They would trade off melodies and effects, taking turns holding down all the strings with one hand while shredding furiously up and down with the other hand. In addition to newer material, they played songs from Pretty in Black, Chain Gang of Love, and their EP Whip It On, including That Great Love Sound, Let's Rave On, Noisy Summer, Love in a Trashcan, Attack of the Ghost Riders, and My Tornado. After the show, a bemused fan couldn't get over the fact that Sharin had actually knelt next to her effects pedals to readjust the calibre of her "noise." The pink and black colour motif that The Raveonettes often use is a perfect one to represent music that is both sweet like bubblegum and dark with dirty distortion, dissonant chords and Velvet Underground-like lyrics of decadence.

The climax of the show for me was the final song of the set proper: the first single off their latest album, Aly, Walk With Me. It's droning darkness and the chiming dissonant guitar chords paired with their nearly monotone vocals makes the song both beautiful and unsettling live. At the end of the song, Sune and Sharin both turned their backs on the audience and hunched over their guitars to make a blazing cacophony of white noise. Their encore was a tender performance of Love Can Destroy Everything followed by a rendition of Twilight, which finally saw Sune and Sharin close the physical gap between them by facing each other and creating a mirror image as their hands flew over their guitars.

I have to mention the opening band, Black Acid, just because they were so terrible. They looked like an identikit indie hipster singer backed by four homeless men. I've never seen a more disinterested band in my life. The singer, wearing red pointy shoes, skinny jeans and a dinner jacket over a t-shirt, was probably trying to seem cool by being indifferent to performing and to his audience, compulsively drinking beer as he walked around the stage in lieu of playing an instrument, but instead he just came off like a boring jackass. His voice was so low in the mix that I could only catch snatches of it - good thing since he sounded like a chipmunk caught in a combine. And the songs they played were so repetitive and endless, I was ready to claw my way out of my own skin. In all their efforts to be as cool as The Raveonettes, they just ended up being their antithesis. And proved that The Raveonettes know what they're doing.

All of my photos from this gig can be viewed via an album on my MySpace page.

Aly, Walk With Me - The Raveonettes

You Want the Candy - The Raveonettes

That Great Love Sound - The Raveonettes

The Alternative to Real World Is Just Time For Me and a Fantasy

Here's one more old gig review. This is the last one. From now on there will be fresh ones as I go to more gigs (doing a Masters Degree takes up valuable portions of my time). I promise.

I'm also including the bonus track on the UK release of The Alternative album - the splendid string version of Spit It Out. I wouldn't have thought it would work, but it becomes both ethereal and haunting.

The Alternative to Real World Is Just Time For Me and a Fantasy

An hour before doors opened at The Mod Club for the IAMX show back on October 20, I was just a tired, relatively introverted Masters student sitting on a hard bench, listening to my ipod. And Chris Corner was just a shy, diminutive man in sunglasses and a white jacket scurrying away from soundcheck with a quick nod to acknowledge my wave and "hello." But when the show started a few hours later, something changed...

For those who don't know, Chris Corner, formerly of the triphop band Sneaker Pimps, is now at the helm of a brilliant darkwave electro project called IAMX based in Berlin. With its glam flourishes and ambiguous, often deviant sexuality, it's fitting that his project is based in a city that was known for its outrageous cabarets and the excesses of the Weimar Republic era. It's also fitting because Berlin itself used to have a split personality between East and West.

Once Chris Corner hit the stage, it felt like a gothic circus had taken over the venue. I was swept up in the pounding beats and riffs of the opening "The Alternative" and mesmerized by Chris Corner's alter ego, who moved about the stage like a possessed marionette, his kohl-rimmed, sequin-teared eyes often hidden by a glittery gold hat. He encouraged a feverish reaction by cocking his ear toward the crowd and beckoning to them, wanting to hear more screams. I admit that I screamed and sang like Chris Corner was pulling on my vocal cords, a master puppeteer of the entire audience. His extremely slender body, encased in a skin-tight, black bodysuit with yellow sequinned straps slung over it, alternated between fluidity and robotic movements. The chorus resulted in an explosion of jumping and arm pumping as the pure tones of Corner's voice soared over the heavy, driving beats. The boundary between performer and audience dissolved in a sweaty madness and everyone began reaching out to him, the keyboardist, and the guitarist. In the frenzy, for some reason, Chris Corner chose to take my hand in his and hold it for a moment, but I almost forgot about my hand as the music and his hypnotic dark eyes dragged me into an underworld completely of IAMX's creation.



As the show progressed, the band kept almost exclusively to upbeat tracks mainly from the latest album The Alternative ("Kiss and Swallow" and "Skin Vision" from Kiss and Swallow also made appearances). The entire band sustained an inhuman energy that rippled throughout the crowd. I lost myself so entirely, I can't remember smashing my elbows on the monitor and giving myself bruises. What I can remember is actually grabbing a hold of one of Chris Corner's high black boots and having the song "Venus in Furs" fly into my head. Other members of the audience, boys and girls, reached out and ran their hands over Corner's legs, and he rocked his body so violently over the edge of the stage, his sweat rained on the front row. His bodily convulsions continued as he constantly fell to his knees and twisted through jumps in the air. He wielded the microphone cord like an S&M whip, nearly strangling the guitarist, and hanging it between his teeth. The band threw themselves into every song even though the pace never slackened, and Chris Corner's voice cajoled and pleaded, dripping with dark purpose and freewheeling hedonism.

The encore was "Attack 61," a song from the soundtrack for the French film Les Chevaliers du Ciel, an album that Chris Corner produced, and "Song of Imaginary Beings." When the show ended, I was drenched in everyone's sweat and genuinely understood what "After Every Party I Die" meant. Though the drummer and the guitarist hung around the venue after the show (the former eventually changing into track pants and the latter no longer bare-chested) and talked with the fans, Chris Corner had disappeared from the venue and into the tourbus before anyone had even gotten outside. I completely understood why. He had just prostituted his entire being for the fans and needed to shift back into reality. I, too, had to shift myself back into my own reality. If you never came down from all that, you'd probably go insane.

One of the girls I met after the show (while waiting for the manager to get our stuff signed by Chris Corner) asked if I would be interested in seeing IAMX again in two nights in Detroit. She wanted someone to split the gas money with her, and the trip was doable since Detroit was about four hours away. A large part of me really wanted to experience that incredible feeling again, that feeling of completely losing yourself in the music and performance - that was my own Mr. Hyde's desire. The Dr. Jekyll, sensible side of me said that I had class the afternoon before the show and that I should be doing all the weekly homework required by a Masters Degree, so I should just forget about it. However, by the end of Sunday evening, Mr. Hyde won out and I followed IAMX to Detroit.

The Detroit show was at an even smaller venue than The Mod Club called The Magic Stick, and the crowd was also disappointingly smaller. I actually worried that the crowd wouldn't be enough to support the alternative universe of IAMX properly. And in my crazed state, I somehow fancied myself a crowd leader. My metamorphosis happened all over again the second that IAMX took the stage, Chris Corner this time sporting a silver hat. Screaming like I was trying to exorcise my average persona, I couldn't stand still and felt myself dancing in imitation of Chris Corner's erratic movements, unbeknownst to me, smashing my knees into the stage in front of me. I have a feeling he may have recognized me from the Toronto show because he grabbed my hand multiple times and kept grinning at me, a twinkle in the event horizon of his black eyes. Even in my mind's eye, his direct gaze in combination with his smile takes my breath away. After I had touched him, the rest of the crowd seemed more comfortable with doing the same, and the connection between the band and the audience grew with each song. At one point, Chris Corner grabbed the head of a guy who had also followed IAMX from Toronto to Detroit, and he roughly ruffled his hair. To the waltz beat of "President," the audience swayed together like a pendulum, pacing out the perversity and drowning in the decadence of Chris Corner's cadences, his voice wracked with desires that were tearing him apart.


The set was virtually the same as the Toronto set, but this time the encore featured "Your Joy is My Low" instead of "Attack 61." At one beautiful moment, Chris Corner pointed directly at me as he sang the title line of the song. As ridiculous as this moment would seem from an outside perspective (and perhaps from my more rational brain), it was transfixing and enveloping while in that moment. And really all that counted was what was self-contained in that world of the stage.

Nursing knee-cap-sized bruises, I've now gone back to my unassuming, regular life as a quiet graduate student in Waterloo just as Chris Corner retires to his tourbus every night and hides his bewitching eyes behind sunglasses. We all need a little escape from ourselves to keep sane. I have no need to reconcile the willowy man silently fleeing soundcheck with the ringmaster of musical fantasy. The beauty is in the division.

Missile (Acoustic) - IAMX

The Alternative - IAMX

Spit It Out (String Version) - IAMX

Starman

Forgive me for using older reviews of gigs that I did for my myspace page for my initial posts, but I'm still trying to sort through how I want to set this thing up. And these reviews are no less interesting for being older. People of future generations will hail these reviews as classic. I am the Lester Bangs of the Digital Age. I am John Peel without a radio show. I am also fairly delusional.

Anyway, here's a review of the Patrick Wolf gig in Toronto this last October. It was a cracker.

Starman

A contingent of hardcore fans lined the front of the small, chin-high stage. They were encrusted with glitter - their hair, the bandit stripes across their eyes, the swirls on their shoulders. It could have been a Bowie concert circa 1972. But it wasn't.

No, this was a Patrick Wolf show at Lee's Palace in downtown Toronto last night. This fact makes it no less exciting. Nor does it make it any less mythical. For Patrick Wolf has already become myth at age twenty-four. He is otherworldly, much like a potent mixture of David Bowie and Kate Bush. He oozes both sex and childlike innocence and abides by no particular rules. His style changes just as much as Bowie's has; one day he wears stegosaurus trousers, the next he wears an impossibly tight pair of aquamarine shorts and suspenders. And of course he can pull it off with the aplomb of an unabashed original.

I, myself, have been a huge fan of Patrick Wolf for a couple of years now. His first album, Lycanthropy, full of distorted beats and wolf-like howls, and stories of captured children and Peter Pan, captivated me. Electronic sounds and drum machines are seamlessly mixed with violins and accordian. Wolf isn't his real last name, but it becomes a fitting moniker and persona for the fantastical being and his three albums to date. His second album, Wind in the Wires, retains the magic of his previous storytelling, but pairs it with a generally mellower and folkier sound. His latest LP, The Magic Position, his first major label release, is different yet again with its joyful gypsy-like songs. A theme of escape and heedless abandon runs through all three, a boundless energy that transports you from mundane realities into a fairy netherworld that exists in a twilight of dark deeds and festive flights of freedom. Needless to say, when I finally got a chance to see him live, I took it, three hours on a bus and all.

Even though I arrived more than an hour before the doors were scheduled to open, the glittering obsessives were already there, listening to Patrick Wolf songs from one of the fan's stereo purse (songs which competed with the actual soundcheck taking place just behind a side door). They alternately sprinkled glitter over each other and blew bubbles with mini-bubble-wands. One wore a headband that looked like some sort of Egyptian headgear at first glance; on closer inspection, it was a headband with a tiny giraffe stuck to it (the giraffe - like the unicorn - being one of the beasts associated with the Patrick Wolf mythology). Some fans actually brought a bouquet of sunflowers and others brought their own special effects - in addition to the bubble wands, they also had streamers and maracas. As I soon discovered, the fans would time each use of the appointed props to specific points in songs, having a bit of a Rocky Horror Show quality to it.

During the palpable tension before Wolf came onstage, one fan asked another, "Is this your first time seeing him?" The other replied that indeed it was. The first responded with "Do you think it will be strange seeing him for real? It's like he's not real." One fan was leaping and screaming in excitement far before Wolf was due to come on - it was as though he was exploding with Christmas morning anticipation; he also draped a sunflower over the monitor directly in front of Wolf's microphone.

Wolf came on stage wearing a blond, curly wig and a gold collar akin to a disco Jacobean ruff. His body was awash with the same glitter as his glistening fans, giving him a magical, alien presence. His short cut-offs displayed long, sparkling legs with knee-high, nearly invisible net stockings and feet thrust into turquoise shoes reminscent of children's shoes at the turn of the century. As the gig progressed, he lost most of his clothing, revealing the unicorn tattooed to his chest, and he ended up in just his shorts and stockings, his blond hair tousled and spiked with sweat. Someone in the crowd shouted, "Take your shorts off." Wolf smiled and replied, "I can't. I'm not wearing any underwear." Perhaps as gender ambiguous as Bowie in the '70's, Wolf is astoundingly even more beautiful in real life than he is in photos.

As far as the song choices, he stayed well within the realm of his more popular and/or released singles ("The Libertine," "To the Lighthouse," "Wind in the Wires," "Accident and Emergency," "Teignmouth," etc). He bounced from violin to ukulele to keyboards and back again, displaying incredible musical versatility. His accompaniment was an additional violin, drums, some programmed sounds, and an upright bass. It was a pleasant change to actually be able to hear a singer's voice and lyrics so easily over the music - no distortion at all. My only complaint (and it's a tiny one) would be that I would have liked to hear one or two b-sides and/or cover songs. I would have personally loved to hear him sing "Adder" or Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill" live. I will admit that I danced, and jumped, and screamed with the best of them, feeling like a reckless child - I'm paying for it today, but it's yet another price I'm willing to pay for Mr. Wolf.

During the final song (the propulsive "The Magic Position") of the set proper, fans fired streamers onto the stage and Wolf ended up festooned in them. The whole show was truly like one big celebration as Wolf danced and jumped as much as the fans and continually smiled and laughed. Sometimes he would sit or lie on the stage and peer from behind the monitors; other times, he stalked across the stage like his predatory namesake. Between songs, he would talk to the audience, often making them laugh, and several of the songs were prefaced with self-deprecating banter that made him seem like a shy child ready to perform a recital. At one point, he suggestively unfolded his lanky body across the keyboard. The constant flux between a joyful innocence and a sexy suggestiveness created a mesmerizing, disarming duality. When he sings, "Come get lost with me," you do.



He returned for two encores - the haunting "Magpie," duetting with Bishi (his incredible opening act who blends sitar with electronic beats - highly recommended) and "Bloodbeat" - and nearing the end, he wore a disco ball-like beret. However, even after "Bloodbeat" finished, Wolf seemed reluctant to leave the stage and skipped and cantered about singing snatches of Whigfield's "Saturday Night" and Gina G's "Ooh Ah" - bizarre choices that nonetheless fit with his boyish exuberance.

It may be a bit presumptuous to say at this early stage in his career, but I felt like I had witnessed something very significant, perhaps on par with Bowie's Ziggy Stardust days. With his versatility, charisma, and massive imagination, I'm betting that Patrick Wolf will be renowned in the years to come, and these early days will be looked back upon with envy by those who weren't there to see it firsthand.

When I left the gig at two in the morning, the sidewalk shimmered with both newly fallen rain and glitter, creating a path both urban and fairy-like at the same time. The mundane transformed into something magical.

Running Up That Hill - Patrick Wolf

Adder - Patrick Wolf