petronia

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	Pet Shop Boys	Kings of Leon	Fever Ray
Date	August 29, 2009	September 16, 2009	October 1, 2009
Venue	Metropolis	Bell Centre	Metropolis
Cost	$50	Free	$30
The Opening Act	None, but PSB were divas and made us wait for an hour.	Glasvegas, which was why it was free - as a number of marketing books have noted, people will do funny things for "free".	Missed her, apparently, so she must've been on for like 20 minutes.
The Audience	Capacity crowd of 50-year-old securities commission analysts and human resource directors who looked like they'd all come directly from work. Lots of straight couples, but very few singleton women.	You know that girl Saint Etienne should've told their friend to lose because on the radio she turned the disco down (in one of their charming conflations of musical taste with moral character)? She would've turned Kings of Leon up. It was like the matching pendant to the PSB crowd - all roving gangs of Crescent St. girls x 8,500, or 60% of the arena without the blue sections. This review was delayed for a month while I tried to produce a Frank Koganesque analysis of why I irrationally hate/fear these girls as The Other, without success.	Surprisingly under-capacity crowd of Pop Montreal-going hipsters in all their finery - not the American Apparel electrodouche sort, the Urban Outfitter P4k boho sort.
My Appearance	Does aiming for "space age disco" while everyone else aimed for "client-facing corporate" count as underdressed or overdressed :/	Overdressed - was in quirky indie gala best while everyone else was in t-shirt and jeans, though distinct overall impression that this was not because they normally wore t-shirts and jeans but because they were at a Kings of Leon gig.	Underdressed - was in t-shirt and jeans while everyone else was in their quirky indie gala best.
My Location	Balcony, first row, stage left. The good news about a 75% dude crowd is that the ladies' room is sparsely attended. The bad news about a 75% dude crowd is that everyone in front of the stage is taller than you. However I was standing next to a het couple for whom this was clearly THE GIG OF A LIFETIME so was not dancing like an isolated dork at least.	Halfway up the reds, second section to stage right. Suspect this area and the one opposite were where all the corporate freeloaders were concentrated, as most of them/us remained seated despite Caleb Followill's increasingly shrill exhortations to not be soulless pussies unmoved by the spirit of rock'n'roll or whatever. Finally he told us to fuck off. This was the dude in a good mood too: he claimed he was going out to paint the town red afterward. Crescent St., I can only imagine, although given how performative the entire shtick was it could've been sushi and litchi martinis at the Kaizen.	Balcony, first row centre, directly behind a bunch of seats that had been roped off as a VIP section. The best overall view in the house but continually distracted by the presence of the bouncer throwing unauthorized audience members out of said VIP section. As per all advance warnings there is a trade-off involved, because good luck seeing more than dark shapes looming in billowing dry ice if you're more than five rows back from the stage, but the bass notes can move mountains. I gazed at the giant speakers before the gig started and decided I'd rather preserve what was left of my hearing. Also the balcony gave one the best angle for the laser show, and Metropolis's lasers are BOSS.
The Band's Appearance	Loads of costume changes. Chris Lowe had his own booth and only emerged from it once, and with everything else happening on stage one tended not to pay constant attention to his corner, so it was a constant surprise to glance back at him and realize the outfit had changed. XD; "Hey, where'd the discoball tuxedo jacket come from?!" At one point they covered "Viva La Vida" mashed with "Domino dancing" and Neil Tennant swept out dressed like the King of France. You get the idea.	They wore plaid shirts and...... look, I can't get around this: it was like looking at the Jonas Brothers from an evil alternate reality. Girls were screaming. I DON'T KNOW OK. I could feel it, too. Even at this remove I find myself somehow compelled to inform you that IMO Nathan was hottest (yes, I managed to learn their names). If you have an explanation, don't hesitate to enlighten me.	~~Dark shapes looming in billowing dry ice~~ 19th-century Masonic cabal meets Bronze Age shamanic sacrificial rite. While, uhh, playing synth keyboards. Masks and feathered cloaks and strangely peaked hats. Band members beating on tom-toms, stamping and shaking staffs with what looked vaguely like voodoo dolls attached to the top. I couldn't tell if they were just doing it in time to the music, or if the staffs were actual percussive elements. Cooler than maracas, anyway. You never get to see Karin Dreijer Anderssen's face properly.
The Staging	A designer's dream. 3ft white cubes, stacked and continually reconfigured in an elegantly minimalistic solution to serve as props or decor or screens. Ever-morphing flash animation projections, as per the videos. Four primary-colour-coded dancers in Daft Punk-meets-Martin Margiela outfits. (Apparently Margiela is AWOL from his own brand? Inspiring Lady Gaga can do that to a high-strung soul, I guess.) I thought there was only one hitch - when they brought the lights up for "The way it used to be," which killed the momentum somehow. Apparently this was the first show of the North American tour, though, so maybe they were still fine-tuning.	Like a Budweiser commercial (with less guys in the audience), which maybe signals that I don't attend enough mainstream rock concerts, because I've never had that feeling of being stuck in a Budweiser commercial before. The modern plague of unconscious self-segregation, right - "who are these Republicans of whom you speak," etc. Who are these Razorlight or Simple Plan fans? I'm not oppressed by the majority, I just don't know the majority. Actually, I am friends with one Razorlight fan that I know of, and one KoL fan. XD; No Simple Plan fans to date have emerged from the flist.	They lit about ten sticks of incense. I thought the lampshades were a particularly effective touch - they glowed orange and dimmed in accordance with the beat, eerily, like an effect out of Utena or Mononoke. The light show was, as aforementioned, totally boss.
Finally, The Music	Loads of medleys, which I gather is how they attempt to get as much of the back catalogue in as possible. Pretty much all the good songs from the most recent album. Insofar as I can remember, they didn't play anything from Fundamental, alas as I quite liked "Integral" and "Fugitive". But this was one of those deals where everyone would get something they wanted and no one would get everything they wanted, e.g. I would have swapped "Left to my own devices" (the one track that bored me at first on Discography) for "A red letter day," but who died and put me in charge. They played "Two divided by zero," of all things (Chris Lowe dances!), and "King's Cross". I was mostly just happy to hear "King's Cross." XD	After all the anguished alienation I have to say the band's decent. XD;; I did keep an open mind as I knew exactly one song by them going in (or thought I did; it turned out to be two). They can quite obviously compose and play anything they want, from blues-rock stompers to punk to pretty Arcade Fire-esque indie to widescreen U2 rips. I guess the part that was hard to deal with was basically Caleb Followill being a douche. Dude told us endlessly how they were Kings of Leon keeping it real and not caring what anyone said because the kids knew they meant it and all they ever wanted was to play rock'n'roll and do their part to keep the shitty music off the radio (crowd cheers). And I was just like, dude, 50% of your audience also seem to be Lady Gaga fans who think you're hot, you realize this, right? It's that sense that no one was actually listening that messed with my head. I keep thinking I'm coming down too hard then remember that bit about YOUR SEX BEING ON FIRE (what, with gonorrhea?), which is the worst turnoff lyric since MY LOVELY LADY LUMPS (schedule a biopsy!). Also I do not come down nearly as hard on them as Pitchfork, who clearly hate/fear Kings of Leon as The Other, rather than their audience. Being mostly dudes, I guess. IDK there is something pretty unhinged about all this; I can see that I've written way more about them than either of the acts I really love and enjoy.	Extended and reordered performance of the album, basically, with bass and percussion cranked WAY UP to approximate the danceability of... The Knife, ahaha. The lack of encore was accepted with the most grace I've witnessed yet from a Montreal audience (for whom no encore is normally on par with losing at hockey), probably because logically speaking there were no songs left to be played.
Overall Vibe	Twinks! In! Space!	Nega-verse Jonas Brothers concert. If you're thinking of linking me that one incestuous KoL + Jonas RPS fic on LJ, well... I found it already. >_>	Trick o' treating at Karin Dreijer Anderssen's house must be a barrel of jokes.