Fewer than seven days have passed since I was last in the Nouveau Casino, and with my Monday nights usually reserved for debating what I'm going to do with my Monday nights, I amble back along for a second helping of the bright and poppy Colors Music Estival series. This time around, we have the intriguing combination of Chris Garneau and Holly Miranda, two American artists, both based in Brooklyn, who have been making waves recently. I was primarily there to hear Miranda in a live setting, having greatly enjoyed her recent solo album, "The Magician's Private Library". At the time, I wondered how the dark, heady mixture of bitterness and love would translate onto a stage. In the flesh, I assumed that Miranda would plump for a largely stripped-back solo affair. How wrong was I...
But first of all, to Chris Garneau. Initially, the most striking thing about this set was that, despite going on stage at 8pm - about the time that most Parisians settle down for their dinner -, the room was packed. And it was clearly for Garneau. Shy and retiring on stage, he has an endearing presence about him and his particular brand of quirky baroque pop goes down well with the crowd. Whilst many artists open with fan favourites (or at least tracks already heard) to get the crowd warmed up, Garneau not only rolls out four new tracks - "October October", "Winter Song #1", "Winter Song #2" and "C'est Pas Grave", which is also sung partly in French - but he does the first two with nothing but his own piano accompaniment. Joined on stage by a small string and brass section, Garneau launches into "Winter Song #2", a crisp, gentle waltz that swells energetically with brass and delicate strings. A bittersweet song that burns with a beautiful intensity, it also features Garneau's slightly odd vocal delivery, a mixture of fragility and depth that almost threatens to falter at certain points. Musing through the initial songs in the set, I am reminded more than once of another intriguing American troubadour, Sufjan Stevens, particularly on the preceding effort, "Winter Song #1". Bearing more than a passing resemblance to "Concerning The UFO Sighting Near Highland, Illinois", found on Stevens' "Come On Feel The Illinoise!" album, part one of Garneau's winter offerings is more stately, a frosty story of family sadness. Beneath the winding lyrics and earnest delivery, the sense of narrative is not always easy to grasp, but the occasionally uneasy picaresque atmosphere and at times flamboyant cabaret tones serve to produce quite a heady experience.
Despite being previously unacquainted with the majority of his repertoire, Garneau's songs have an addictively poppy element that makes for an pretty enjoyable set: the catchily peculiar "Dirty Night Clowns", shorn of its rattling percussion and voluptuous orchestration, was a particular highlight, propelled along by a dark fidgety piano line and sweet and sour tales which careen wildly from people being "buried alive/in their suits, in their ties" and "model planes and cuppycakes". "No More Pirates" features triumphant trumpet and a majestic climax as Garneau, in iconoclastic mode, tells us that religion demands we pray "for the ones you love/and pray for all the ones you hate", announcing heretically that "I don't want the lord to come again". Surprisingly provocative for pop music, even in an increasingly secular and decreasingly practising society such as France.
Garneau's literate engagement with the audience is borne out in his French language version of "Fireflies", a contrapuntal mixture of harum-scarum piano and breathlessly-delivered soothing lyrics of calm ("C'est pas facile/prends ton temps"), as well as another new song, "Pas Grave", which falls into the more mournful category of Garneau's psyche. "Relief" takes minor key piano and melds it to a tale, which swings between hushed and distraught, of a lover and an abandoned friend. It's rather beautiful - not even a solo trumpet ringing out in honour of the couple's sadness, like the Last Post bugle call, can push it over the edge into mawkishness - even if the emphasis is on the feeling it evokes rather than the meaning it holds.
The final shot, and only real "bémol" in the set, comes in the form of a cover of Elliot Smith's "Between The Bars". It's another brave choice, particularly given the esteem in which Smith is held within the music fraternity, but ultimately a little foolhardy. It's well-received by the crowd, but the song, all romantically bleak lyrics of potential never realised and Smith's corroded, almost broken, voice, is a step too far for Garneau, whose piano and curious vocal delivery fail to gel with the gravity of the original.
But it's just a matter of minutes (well, thirty) between the mild disappointment of an otherwise entirely enjoyable set and an explosive torrent of hackle-raising rock. Yes, stripped of the Dave Sitek influence that hangs over the album, Miranda's songs of despair, pain and anger, coupled with a few choice covers, burst out in a raging squall of feedback and thick pulsing bass, whilst still retaining that fiery intensity so evident on the album. "No One Just Is", all fizzing hi-hat and throbbing bass in the beginning, bridles with an ominous tension before opening out into a raw and decidedly jagged home stretch, shot through with a guitar sharp enough to cut glass. It's marvellously invigorating, the sort of rock that, cooped up in the relatively small confines of the Nouveau Casino, feels like someone's replaced your hairdryer with a jet turbine and taped it to your face. Same goes for "Waves", which sees towering guitars crash where ethereal organs once burbled and flickered. If you think Miranda burns with a feverish energy on the album, you should try her live. The line "It doesn't need to be" sees bittersweet yearning replaced by anguished cries and roaring wall-of-sound guitars, before launching headlong into "Slow Burn Treason". A disturbingly beautiful track on the album, the seething fury and brooding synths are squeezed through a blender before being spewed back out in a maelstrom of driving hi-hat and fierce energy. If the overriding sense on the album is one of a stewing victim, live Miranda becomes a fire-and-brimstone avenger. And my, does this revenge sound good.
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Indeed, where the album simmers, the live versions froth and boil. Even the covers - Yoko Ono's "Nobody Sees Me Like You Do" and Eta James' "I'd Rather Go Blind" - enter perfectly into the mood of the evening: the former's a rougher reworking - the original taken from Ono's "Season Of Glass" 1982 album - that becomes woozier as it progresses, whilst the latter ably displays Miranda's bluesier side. Having announced earlier that without a set-list the band will be flying a little by "the seat of their pants", the band hop between songs at their leisure. The deconstructed dream-pop of "Secret Identity", from Miranda's previous The Jealous Girlfriends, even gets an outing, with Miranda announcing cheekily, "it's technically my song".
And from the old to the new, we get a couple of previews of next album material, in the form of "Pelican Rapids" (dedicated, in not so many words, to all those who want to marry whom they wish) and "Mark My Words". The former in particular is intriguing, hinting at a slow-burner of looped canon vocals before erupting in torrential downpour of screaming, shoegaze-tinted guitars and shuddering bass. The band strolls off in a blaze of feedback, leaving what's left of the audience (bafflingly, half the paying public pretty much disappeared after Garneau exited the stage) to hum the melodic canon they've just heard. It's even enough to coax the band back on for an encore. Miranda rounds things off with a solo piano vignette, "Hallelujah", which puts to bed once and for all every doubt I may have had regarding the roles of Sitek and Miranda on "The Magician's Private Library". Short and sweet, it's nevertheless enough time to show us the full range of her voice, and leaves the crowd musing on what could be in store next time she settles down to record.
In my album review, I talked about drawing back the electronic veil that cloaks much of the album. This performance gave us a view of what lies behind those drapes: it may not have been as hypnotically intoxicating, but it was easily as furious and as stimulating as anything I've ever heard her produce before. Clearly the Miranda brand is addictive in all its forms.
Chris Garneau set-list
1. October October (new song)
2. Winter Song #1 (new song)
3. Winter Song #2 (new song)
4. C'est pas grave
5. Baby's Romance
6. Relief
7. We Don't Try
8. Dirty Night Clowns
9. No More Pirates
10. Fireflies (French version)
11. Blue Suede Shoes
12. Hands On The Radio
13. Things She Said
14. Between The Bars (Elliott Smith cover)
Holly Miranda set-list
1. Just Is
2. Waves
3. Slow Burn Treason
4. Nobody Sees Me Like You Do (Yoko Ono cover)
5. Mark My Words (new song)
6. High Tide
7. Everytime I Go To Sleep
8. Secret Identity (Jealous Girlfriends "cover")
9. I'd Rather Go Blind (Eta James cover)
10. Sleep On Fire
11. Pelican Rapids (new song)
12. Joints
13. Hallelujah
Chris Garneau on MySpace
Holly Miranda online
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