of Montreal + the Blow // the Showbox // 9 February 2007

The Blow open with an a capella rendition of “How naked” which much of the crowd mistakes for a sound check. After a few minutes, her intensity picks up and most people get with the program and stay with it for the rest of the set. That is, the people on the floor pay attention while chatter can be heard from the bars.

Tonight, the Blow is just Khaela Maricich alone since Jona is too busy being Yacht to provide live backing. Because of this, she sings along with pre-recorded samples, but it works very well.

The spaces between songs are filled with brief breathless confessionals that develop into a narrative describing her motivation for writing music in the guise about running between karaoke bars in jeans and nighttime visitation by visions of asshole drivers. Her set follows an arc beginning with angst, then to songs of longing, and later onto celebrations of ambiguity. The audience frequently claps along and she peppers her monologues with riffs on karaoke standards as illustrations. Oh, did I mention her dancing? It is amazing and fearless — the sort of thing that people do when they think that no one’s looking. But there she is on stage, setting a hard to beat example for the rest of the crowd. “Eat Your Heart Up” and “Pile of Gold” lead into “Parentheses”, the catchiest and most melodic, and the only song she says she’s written about open hearted love. Closing with “True Affection” she asks and the whole crowd is waving together, back and forth, creating a little ocean above all of our heads. An ocean with a lone lighter flickering above it all.

::

Immediately after Khaela leaves, the mass of people in the all ages section contracts for maximum density and proximity to the stage. Of Montreal are a band whose set-up crew even wear sequins. They arrive in garish costume variations — one wears a ushanka, another has a pleather vest, a shiny blouse, a Buddha statue, and so on — stepping out to the sounds of gladiator entrance music with flashing industrial lights clipped on various pieces of equipment. Behind them are three large screens dedicated to mandala projections, with one of them spinning screen-saver style. “Requiem for O.M.M.2″ * kicks off the set.

From this explosive start, about half of the set is danceworthy, which is really what the teenager-enhanced, out on a Friday night, hoping to stretch their curfew before mom and dad pick them up, came here to do. It’s also a pretty fair reflection of the texture of the Sunlandic Twins and Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer and the band alternates fairly regularly between floor shaking pogo parties to the less bouncy selections. Not that the onstage slowdowns particularly daunt the most dedicated factions. A whisky-drenched pack of kids with [possibly fake] Australian accents have moves for every song, bumping into each other, throwing hand signs, and employing fancy footwork, tempering the intensity slightly when the heavier power chorded numbers came up on the rotation. Amid such boisterous enthusiasm, it was easy to lose track of whether the set was technically perfect. [Some argued that it wasn't. But they were back in the bar drinking.]

The rotating videos occupying the center screen occasionally give way to footage shot from onstage cameras, giving us a better look at, for instance, the keyboard player’s fingers or the back of Kevin’s head on the big screen. On the two smaller screens, projectors show sets of weird late-seventies era slides that looked like they were picked up at an estate sale and only occasionally seemed to go along with the music. Unless there was something about quiet interior monologues, exercise training, or a series of doorways embedded deeply in the vocoded lyrics. Some were kind of fascinating if not particularly spectacular.

As the night progresses, the biggest hits are along the lines of “I was Never Young”, “Heimdalsgate Like A Promethean Curse”. Kevin changes costumes several times, starting in shimmery blouse, later returning in a flowing kimono. A few songs are performed in ten-foot tall dress and feathery headdress requiring a ladder. At the end, he’s shirtless, wearing only tiny Brazil-themed shorts and a costumey championship belt. A Norwegian flag is passed through the crowd for “Oslo in the Summertime” building enthusiasm through “The Party’s Crashing Us”.

The band leaves and holds out for a while everyone claps. One kid bites his tie and screams like his life depends on it. They come back, in the aforementioned Brazil hotpants and cover the Fiery Furnaces’s “Tropical Iceland”, “A Sentence Of Sorts In Kongsvinger”, while cradling a plastic owl, and finished with “Suffer for Fashion”.*

No, they didn’t play “Wraith Pinned to the Mist and Other Games” (or the Outback Steakhouse version [... life will still be there tomorrow.])

* now that I’m typing this, maybe it was “Suffer for Fashion” at the beginning. Complicated titles, bad memory, and not really standing still for the whole show made keeping a setlist a pain.