Gigz (the return of table format)

[petronia]

Done! Finally!

	Florence + The Machine	Bebel Gilberto	Owen Pallett
Date	November 1, 2009	November 29, 2009	February 20, 2010
Venue	Cabaret Juste Pour Rire	L'Astral	Theatre Outremont
Cost	$20	$30	$20
The Opening Act	Her keyboardist, wasn't it? Remember thinking it was rather good but details are fuzzy at this point.	DJ spinning worldbeat/loungey/house stuff. Remember thinking it was rather good but details are fuzzy at this point.	Tall one-man-band dude with zebra leggings and rainbow unicorn synth stand. IDK there is some fount from which they (Pallett, PWolf etc.) spring perhaps... I didn't hear most of his set as had arrived late-ish and was stalking the merch table instead, but what I heard was all-right first-indie-album stuff. What was awesome was the musical intro to the main set, which I'm pretty sure was Mariah Carey.
The Audience	Sympathetic. I'd imagined a crowd rather like Patrick Wolf's - glitter teenies, fedoras and scarves, the odd disruptive coked-up hipster - but there was a broad cross-section of ages and gig-going types, and it was more casual than try-hard dressy. The vibe was that people had turned up as they were in order to pay attention to a band they liked, and Florence held them wonderfully, like a bird cupped between her hands - I think even she was surprised. Did spot quite a few familiar faces (you know the people who seemingly stand in the same place in the same row at every other show you attend, until you start wondering if you should start a conversation?)	Didn't pay much attention, to be honest: the venue was darkish and very, very crowded. I assume the Brazilian diaspora had turned out, as they always do, but there wasn't nearly as much dancing as there could have been. Something to do with the song order, perhaps?	Strong family resemblance to the Grizzly Bear crowd. Sororial unit said she met like five people from law school... I have attended many for-real classical concerts where the audience was worse-behaved and less aware of applause etiquette. Drinks were not allowed in the room itself, and one could see why when some yokel committed the heinous faux pas of dropping a beer bottle during a quiet moment. LOL HOPE FOR GEN Y AFTER ALL
My Appearance	Leather jacket + rose-patterned romper + fake pearls, IIRC.	My paper bag dress (one of my best indie ensembles); the venue was not the sit-down jazz supper club I'd imagined from the outside, though.	Dark jeans and Fantasia t-shirt, the same outfit I wore to Worldcon. It fits me well, I felt like death (more on this) and it was Owen Pallett ffs.
My Location	Third row or so, slightly left of centre. Good view, close enough to get flowers when they were tossed out for the finale. Cabaret is always enjoyable as a rule, being intimate and well-tended.	Balcony, eventually - we (Andrew and I) started off at the bar, which had the only seats left in the house, but it was hard to see over the heads of the crowd. It then transpired that it was just as hard to see from the balcony, because there are huge pillars blocking the view! This is the newest venue in town. :/ How do you intentionally design an interior as a jazz concert hall with huge pillars blocking the view.	Balcony nosebleeds, due to late-ishness (I'd mistakenly given sororial unit an earlier time; she was not amused XD;). Luckily the venue was 1x proper old-fashioned sit-down theatre with gilded shell plaster moldings etc. and sight lines were perfect everywhere. We agreed to come back to see a play sometime.
The Band's Appearance	Fuzzy on the backing band at this remove but do remember appreciating the thought they put into it, so there must've been some. Florence was garbed in a fluttery black columnal number, flowing red locks and bare feet. Very Pre-Raphaelite priestess of Astarote (when you have a turn-of-century tinted postcard physique you may as well work it). Or, yanno, Kate Bush.	Nothing much to say. XD; Paid attention to people: Masa Shimizu, Bebel's guitarist, whom I look forward to seeing nearly as much at this point... No Forro in the Dark, more's the pity. I do remember when Bebel took off her shoes; wish I could've done the same.	Last I saw Brooklyn Vegan used a cap of Ramza Beoulve to represent Owen Pallett, but he isn't blond these days. XD He was wearing a nice cardigan and a hat so I couldn't tell what precisely was happening with his hair, it looked OK though. Thomas (Gill? the drums/guitar dude) was dressed in the normal way of things.
The Staging	Enchanted forest backdrop + bouquets of carnations and roses and daisies fastened everywhere to mike stands and equipment; "You've Got the Love" was like one of those old Smiths videos on the Youtube with the daffodils. Florence LOLed hard at her keyboardist toward the end when she stuck a daisy behind her ear and the stem pointed out like a sideways antenna.	Very similar to that of the third album tour, i.e. Bebel invites you into her living room: the table, the lamp, the chair and glass of wine... But this time I wasn't close enough to appreciate it. The circle of enchantment doesn't extend to the far end of the venue, which I'd never had the occasion to realize. Or maybe it was just the venue's own lack of atmosphere.	I put Owen Pallett in as "celebrity crush" in the other meme, fault of another, but he's not a crush (...nor precisely a celebrity, truth be told). Dude is the only artist/band whose gig I'd attend while thinking about the impact the staging choices are likely to have on the fanfic I plan on writing once I submit their album to effing Yuletide.* The theatrical language of it: Owen and Thomas each within their discrete illuminated space, able to watch each other and communicate but seemingly not touch. How Thomas wanders out of Owen's sightline but not vice versa. Not that they were acting out the characters, at all, but thought had to have gone into it because Pallett overthinks.** XD; So much is made of Heartland's constructed fantasy universe, but it's the worldbuilding of a play; alarums offstage, asides. The lyrics are dramatic monologues because the Owen addressed never answers, not even when he's pushed off a cliff. Then Dischism; then lampshading of continuity error...
Finally, The Music	Most of the 2CD-version album, plus "Hospital Beds" because that's apparently her calling card on this side of the pond (I'd have preferred "Postcards from Italy", but it's not all about me). "You've Got The Love" ended the main set, leaving Florence's voice to give out with a vengeance just before "Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up)" in the encore. XD;; Unless she can't hit those notes live, but the rest of the gig would suggest otherwise. Lungs has grown on me lots. A mistake - not that it felt like one was given a choice - to wend the path of Yelpy Indie alongside Florence Herself, taking that as the basis and benchmark for her developing sound. It helps if I don't think of the final product as a big slab of Patrick Wolf renfaire pastede on over her original fuzzy guitar blues demos (difficult if one's ever heard "Cosmic Love" vs. "The Stars"). I only prefer the demo in one case, anyway: "My Boy Builds Coffins", the tune of which gets lost in the rippling-water go-nowhereness of the album arrangement. The vocals of "Girl With One Eye" are, if anything, more idiosyncratic on Lungs. I found my way into each song individually, at months' remove from each other, usually following the lyrics. If anything they remind me of the season I spent listening to Cocco, c. 2005 and Mirage of Blaze. Not that Cocco and Florence are anything sonically alike (though it's been a while... *hits up Youtube* ...yeah, not really), but they work the same emotional territory with at times the same metaphors. The difference being that early Cocco always seems like she's about to be submerged by her own crazy, wandering white-clad and distracted in her videos like Sadako-Ophelia; never more eerily, somehow, than in mellow, pretty mid-pacers like "Raining" or "Plumeria" (I admit I'm scarred forever by that effing Anno Hideaki movie tie-in). Whereas Florence owns her moods triumphantly. Why shouldn't she sing about mystic sacrifice or lycanthropy or gouging a former lover's eye out? I'm certainly not the one to argue.	In summary the experiential component of this was not great. While a Bebel concert could never be actually bad, this was compounded by the fact that I don't feel as strongly about All In One as I do about the three albums that preceded it. It's not objectively worse, or even appreciably different, but there's none of the emotional overflow I get with stuff like "August Day Song" or "All Around" even "Os Novos Yorkinos". It's like I haven't had occasion to chemically bond with it. In fact I suspect I hear it as most normals hear Bebel Gilberto: relaxing, nice. Bookstore cafe soundscapes. Nothing that could conceivably make one cry. It could just be that it's out of season. I took time to warm up to the self-titled, too, which was as decidedly wintery as All In One is summery (albeit not Montreal-wintery). Momento took a weekend in Venice. I could have grown out of the stuff entirely. In any case the jury is still out.	I has setlist from SHZine: 1. Love Song to an Empty Room 2. Midnight Directives 3. This Lamb Sells Condos 4. Flare Gun 5. The Butcher 6. Many Lives > 49 MP 7. Took You Two Years To Win My Heart 8. E Is For Estranged 9. This Is the Dream of Win and Régine 10. Keep the Dog Quiet + Mt. Alpentine 11. The Great Elsewhere 12. Honour the Dead or Else 13. Lewis Takes Action 14. Lewis Takes Off His Shirt Encore #1: 15. The Man With No Ankles 16. Fantasy Encore#2: 17. He Poos Clouds It felt quite short, although it wasn't. The thing I said to sororial unit was that one expects an Owen Pallett gig to be flawless, again in the same way one expects it of a classical concert, and it was. XD; Flights of meta-fiction aside, my experience of Owen Pallett's music is intensely personal, and I really don't know if it's idiosyncratic. I encounter anecdotes that suggest it's not: other ppl listening on headphones in bank teller queues, etc. Basically, the stuff is good at all times, but it really comes into its own against a background of low-grade misery. Daily drudgery and annoyance: overlong commutes, Wal-Mart checkout lines, bad weather (the slushy Canadian kind), sinus colds, ladycramps. The temptation is to reach for catharsis, particularly if one is into metal etc., even when none of it justifies the screaming. Or just turn the volume up to max and block out the world. But FF/Pallett's music - like Blur, like Eno - doesn't create a bubble: it faces outward and heightens the world, makes it look better. Defuses, scrapes away the gunk instead of papering a different mood right over. This despite or perhaps because of the passive aggression in the sound (largely eliminated in Heartland, anyway) and the miserabilism of the lyrics... Not gonna lie, I think it's an Ontario thing. XD; It's how I feel about the Junior Boys, too. The live show is about ingenuity of structure and virtuosity of performance, and none of the above stuff. And yet it's the exact same music.
Overall Vibe	Tennyson refashioned as London indie.	Mood not established enough to be arresting.	Orchestral score sold at merch table alongside heavy-weight vinyl.

* I'm sort of serious. XD; Perhaps this needs to be a coordinated effort? Someone else has to request it, after all.

** In particular re: subjects I find truly relatable despite never having articulated them (eg. the ontological muddle of being the avatar of an RPG/adventure video game vs. moving said avatar around according to the player's will vs. treating the character as an entirely separate entity for purposes of eg. perving -- surely PhD theses have been written about this -- Heartland is a natural extension of the premise of "He Poos Clouds" merely with a different controller interface, one conveniently transportable to concert stages, i.e. the narrative is not something that has happened, it is happening during Pallett's performance in the same way that the story of Link is happening whenever you boot up Twilight Princess), although that's less because Pallett is more articulate than because I'm... not all that bothered? I mean, do you ever worry about the possibility of your "muses" having a crisis of faith when they realize their life stories are flimsy excuses for dodgy authorial gay sex fantasy? And breaking the fourth wall to murder you in revenge? EVERY DAY, HUH?

In other words Pitchfork never actually grokked why "Final Fantasy" was an appropriate name for the project, although that's okay because I choose to believe Squeenix did.