Owen Pallett was received quite reverentially from the seated crowd last night. I enjoyed the show immensely despite it not living up to the Electric Picnic set but that’s inevitable as it’s a hard task to transplant an audience in a festival mindset to a Dublin venue on a sit down post-work Tuesday night.
Pallet played some material from the forthcoming Heartland, one song which sounded quite menacing and dare I say, experimental. “Hey Dad” segued into “The CN Tower belongs to the Dead” wonderfully and I was delighted to hear him do a custom rendition of “The Penalty” from Beirut’s The Flying Club Cup on which he guests. The cover versions at the end, Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy” and Bloc Party’s “This Modern Love”, are essential to his sets at this stage as they remind you of how versatile he is with a violin. The former song started with a Miracle Fortress song (who supported last night – album Five Roses is fantastic – get it!).
Pallett was also trying out some quadraphonic sound setup but my ears couldn’t grasp it from where I was (Huge thanks to Loreana, Darragh and Ian for the seats!). I do think a combination of a seated show and a massive stage affected his performance somewhat. He also had trouble with the monitors.
I was also fascinated with his Cadence Weapon t-shirt. It had a drawing of Ghostface Killah being attacked by a shark with the tagline “Swim, Starks, Sharks!”. Amazing.
In the pub after the show, we wondered what stringent classical music lecturers would think of his modern approach to a classical instrument and his popular appropriation of modern pop songs? No doubt, he needs little affirmation from such a sect was the outcome of our ponderings.
Everyone is probably aware by now but just in case – Owen Pallett will be joining Jens Lekman tonight and is the special guest at Girl Talk on Thursday.
Niall Byrne is the founder of the most-influential Irish music site Nialler9, where he has been writing about music since 2005 . He is the co-host of the Nialler9 Podcast and has written for the Irish Times, Irish Independent, Cara Magazine, Sunday Times, Totally Dublin, Red Bull and more. Niall is a DJ, founder of Lumo Club, club promoter, event curator and producer of gigs, listening parties & events in Dublin.
[quote post=”937″] a sit down post-work Tuesday night. [/quote]
you don’t fuckin work
It’s not all about me Mike!
great gig, i was sitting at the back and after a while I understood what the deal was with the ‘quadrophonic sound’. If you closed your eyes you could definitely hear that the different layers were panning across the stereo field- pretty cool for a live gig. Music tech geekiness aside it was still really enjoyable, one of those new songs had an almost Bjork-ish experimentalism, a bit like ‘Army Of Me’, industrial kind of vibe.
The Jens Lekman gig last night was pretty damn savage. Owen Pallett played violin on 3 songs, and you could have cut the atmposphere with a knife. The gig was an absolute triumph from start to finish. Great stuff.
he was brilliant at girl talk too
soo chilled out, totally at home on stage
really impressed me
girl talk started off brilliantly and there was a full on stage invasion! whilst it was a high energy uptempo full on party vibe, i did feel that it got a bit samey after a while, with too many chanty generic hip hop numbers to the fore
that said the crowd were loving it! still though i’d love to see him push the boat out a bit more and play a few more off the wall cuts like his brilliant mix of grizzly bear’s ‘knife’ (he played a snatch of it early on but could’ve done with a few more like it after that)
still though, an enjoyable gig
Miracle Fortress is the brainchild of Graham Van Pelt, a Montreal-based multi-instrumentalist and vocalist who’s equally at home constructing wall of sound.. woW)
I’m pretty sure the Beirut song he sings on is Cliquot, not The Penalty, iTunes fucked up the track-listing for The Flying Club Cup!
Sweet as a nut regardless.