December extravaganza, part 2

After Karkwa's excellent show on Thursday, we were eagerly awaiting the triple bill of Austra, Young Galaxy and Tasseomancy on Saturday 3rd... not to mention Feist! We first saw Tasseomancy in April supporting Timber Timbre; I was impressed by them then. This time, the songs were still excellent (I've since listened to their new album Ulalume, which is superb) but their dreaminess seemed a tiny bit lost in Ritual.  They had a reasonable reception but I'm not sure how many concertgoers were familiar with their stuff.

Young Galaxy

In my mind Young Galaxy were equally as big a draw as Austra. Definitely an eagerly awaited set after muptiple spins of Shapeshifting! Like Tasseomancy, Young Galaxy were limited to 30 minutes of performance; starting with 'Blowminded' and 'Long Live The Fallen World' certainly charged up the crowd! The rest of the set included songs like 'Peripheral Visionaries', 'We Have Everything' and 'Cover Your Tracks'. 

Both Tasseomancy and Young Galaxy suffered from technical problems. Something was amiss: Ritual were late opening doors (this meant that Tasseomancy perhaps had a smaller audience than they may have otherwise); and the bands didn't seem to have fully soundchecked as there were a lot of queries back and forth about mikes and stage monitors. Tasseomancy lost their guitar halfway through the set as well.

Austra

 

The problems seemed to have been mostly sorted (although at a much increased volume) when Austra came onstage. I wasn't familiar with her works before, but in quite a few ways Stelmanis' classical background comes through the electro-indie-dance sound. Excellent vocals from Stelmanis and Tasseomancy (sisters Lightman provide backing vocals). Within the around 45 minute quality performance I heard references to bands like Bat for Lashes, Goldfrapp, Ladytron, Ladyhawke; plus the combined spirits of Kate Bush and Stevie Nicks permeated through the Austra and Tasseomancy sets. Result: bands, 10, venue, -3. Ritual, please up your game.

Moving onto Monday 5th and a sold-out performance by Feist at the National Arts Centre. Going with the norm, the show started prompt at 8pm and quite a few people missed the start of Bry Webb's support slot. Having seen Feist's stage setup, a pared down duo made sense for support, but I found Webb's songs solely revolved around one idea. OK for one or 2 songs, but by the end of the set they were getting rather samey.

Feist

 

Huge cheers for Feist and co when they came onstage for an outstanding set just shy of 2 hours. New material from Metals included 'Undiscovered First', 'How Come You Never Go There', 'A Commotion', 'The Bad In Each Other', 'Graveyard' and 'Bittersweet Melodies'. Sadly there were quite a few 'amateur' concergoers in the crowd who really only wanted to hear the hits. The 'time machine section' (to quote Leslie's banter) part way through did include Reminder hits such as 'I Feel It All' and 'My Moon My Man', as well as 'Mushaboom' from Let It Die. The whole thing was done well and with some live twists. Again, 10 for the musical content but I would have preferred to have been standing (somewhere like Wolverhampton's Civic Hall, maybe); the amateurish getting up, leaving early, yo-yo-ing behaviour of some concertgoers may then have been less obvious. Backing singers Mountain Man got their solo slot too, which was very good but not really my thing.

Local photoblogger Ming (PhotogMusic) has some great photos from all of the December extravaganza bands; Ottawa Citizen's review of Feist is available here.

One final note on Thursday 1st's discovery, I Spell It Nature - I downloaded their selftitled EP, which is free on their bandcamp site; it is brilliant.