13 March 2006

Magnet/Stars

Magnet was pretty good; his instrumental style I liked--wandering and dynamic, kinda like Mogwai or Dave Bazan or, in fact, Stars themselves. Usually wasn't very interested in his voice, though.

Stars, though--ah, Stars! oh, Stars! Great show. amy millan's voice is wonderful--a little like Björk in her gentler moments. Torquil Campbell reminds me a lot of James, the frontman for a'tris, plus twenty years and a lot of drugs. (He took the spastic drugs and Amy took the floppy drugs, it seems.) Stage setup was pretty cool--a shitload of equipment and instruments--there were nearly as many guitars as songs--plus four ugly, boring, almost colorless living room lamps. The lamps would dim and switch lineups occasionally (which I think one of the guitarists was cuing--took me forever to figure out what he was doing), and then before the encore, they ran through this sequence which was pretty easy to predict, at the end of which the band came out again. (They sure did make us work for our encore, too.) The glow was really lovely, and was a good contrast to the usual garish stagelights.

Brilliant show. And I have the hoodie to prove it. Sadly, Torq said they probably wouldn't be touring again any time soon--wonder what that means, are they breaking up?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Torq is an actor, and may be wanting to get back to focusing on that aspect of his career. Look him up on imdb.com...he had a reasonably busy career of TV appearances before Stars. He was even on Sex and the City.

Moreover, Amy is also in Broken Social Scene, which has a fresh album out, and her solo album is coming in May, so between those two she'll likely have a full touring schedule. Maybe Stars is just on touring hiatus until the promotion of those other projects is done.