of Montreal, Noot d' Noot
Granada Theater
May 24, 2010
Better than: the last show I saw at Granada.
Quite the spectacle last night from of Montreal at the Granada Theater. Not quite a repeat of the band's highly theatrical 2008 show at House of Blues, but, still, the Athens, Georgia-based band put on one heck of a show.
It started on a high note: As the stage curtain raised, the band launched into "Suffer for Fashion" from 2007's Hissing
Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? Immediately, the crowd responded with yelps of excitement and even some started dancing.
Then frontman Kevin Barnes--clad in a white T-shirt, a scarf, jean shorts and blue leggings-- shimmied onto the stage to join his bandmates.
And the room? It erupted.
And, from there, things only got bigger.
Large monitors behind and on either side of the stage displayed all kinds of
madness--illustrations, sketches, live video, you name it. The band's clothing, meanwhile, was quite fun, too, with each
member was sporting something florescent.
But it wasn't maybe, what fans have come to expect from the band's live show. There were no major costume changes, and, even
more shockingly, Barnes never took his clothes off.
There were some real treats, though: The
band gave the crowd a sneak peek into False Priest, its lastest album
that is set to drop this fall, playing a new track called
"Coquet Coquette." The crowd, unsurprisingly, ate it up--right along with everything else the
band served up last night.
During the band's two-song
encore, someone dressed up in a pig costume walked out onto the stage,
all the while the words "Nitro's Art Show" were displayed on the
projection screens behind the band. Then out rolled two mounds of material, two
pieces of what was presumably Nitro's (the pig's?) art work.
The band then
encouraged the audience to "boo" at the art, even calling it "shit art".
As if that wasn't surreal enough, immediately after the pig was
escorted off the stage--by another pig--the projections abruptly flashed to images of Jesus on a cross with
gnashing teeth protruding from his chest and spinning occult pentagrams
on his sides.
It was somewhat astounding: Only minutes earlier, the screens were lit
up with multi-colored, blinking scribbles of "I love you."
"Thank you for letting us be ourselves", a sweat-drenched Kevin Barnes
shouted into his microphone at that point, as feathers, illuminated from the glow of
the stage lights, cascaded around him.
Later, finished off it's night with a song from both Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? and Skeletal Lamping--"Beware Our Nubile Miscreants," followed by "She's a Rejecter." At the end of that latter song, Barnes was tied up
and dragged off the stage by two enormous skeleton-masked specters,
presumably never to be seen again (in Dallas at least) until the tour
for the band's upcoming album, False Priest.
Not as theatrical as the band's last show, no. But still pretty darn theatrical nonetheless.
Earlier in the night, soul-meets-funk act Noot
D'Noot warmed the crowd up quite
nicely, even persuading some to dance along to their music.
Critic's Notebook
Personal Bias: I'm one of those people gets annoyed when people screw up the difference between "of" and "Of" in the band's name.
Random Note: I can't remember the last time, if ever, I heard screams that loud for an encore at the Granada. It was seriously as loud as it could be--without being that horrible shrill sound of teenage girls at a Disney pop-star concert.
