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photo by oliver j. lopena: oliverlopena.com

i got tickets for this well over a month ago, before the eagles decided to turn their season completely around and ended up hosting a wild card game against the hated new york football giants on the same night. it was a toss-up between sitting under a blanket in my warm house eating snacks & yelling at the TV and standing in the rain outside the first unitarian with the type of kids that stand outside in the rain at the first unitarian, but hey - it’s emily freaking haines and i’m still kicking myself for missing metric last winter.

emily is touring in support of the late 2006 release knives don’t have your back, one of my favorite releases of the year. despite it not being the best introduction to her voice (i overheard someone say “she sounds like that girl from sixpence none the richer!”) and suffering from a kind of sameness and defeatism throughout, it’s a great counterpoint to the her striking presence on the metric albums.

opening were brooklyn’s tall firs. i hadn’t heard them before and thought they were decent, liking about half their set. the songs were slow and jammy but at the same time they were nice and short, just building to a crescendo before ending. they were much better between songs, leading monica to say, “i wish the music was as charming as they are.”

a quick setup later, emily haines and her backing band, the soft skeleton, took the stage to the strains of pink floyd (?). there was an LCD projector on emily’s CP70 that displayed the album cover on three oddly arranged canvasses in the corner, which changed to haunting scenes from a black and white film as they opened with “our hell”, the first track off of the album. later, emily revealed that these were scenes from guy maddin’s the saddest music in the world, which may be the only environment that this film works in, yuk yuk yuk.

EH + the SS went on to play the album in its entirety (and to my recollection, in order as well). a second keyboard/sample player filled in for missing strings and horns and the band as a whole did a perfect job of recreating the sound of the album. there were a few musical wrinkles thrown in here and there, most noticeable in the bowie-esque “nothing & nowhere”, which drew out the verses and gave the song heartbreaking pauses and an even more end of the world feel. obviously, the focus and highlight were on haines. while her attempts at serious sentiment and/or commentary between songs were only greeted by nervous laughter, listening to her live is a must-hear experience. breathy and breathless, pained and beautiful, her voice just hovers and floats above everything else in the room. cringeworthy lines like “bro’s before ho’s disagree on the sideline” actually work when she sings them. despite the lack of an encore, this was a show that deserved every bit of its standing ovation. catch her if you can.

song list (to the best of my recollection, this is pretty much the track listing of the album as well):

our hell
doctor blind
crowd surf off a cliff
detective daughter
the lottery
the maid needs a maid
mostly waving
reading in bed
nothing & nowhere
the last page
winning