Deer Tick
This Providence, Rhode Island five-piece performed together like a bunch of loveable, college outcasts.
After playing “Houston, TX,” the heartbreaking tale of when frontman John McCauley was about to split up with his ex-fiancée, he pointed to someone in the crowd after cracking open a beer.
“That was a special request for some guy over there,” McCauley said, blowing a kiss to the mysterious song requester.
Shortly after, someone inaudibly yelled another song request, to which McCauley said “soon, Mister.”
It’s this attentiveness to people and emotion that makes this group so attractive. With most songs written by McCauley, they speak of heartbreak, regret, and loss with a deep humility that goes beyond the “my woman did me wrong” trope of country and folk.
Finishing their set with “Ashamed,” a group of average 20-something bros threw their arms around one another, stomped their feet, and it was apparent that this was one of their personal anthems, a dramatic monologue that their postfeminist masculinities could not otherwise convey. And it was beautiful.
The London Souls
Aesthetically, and I mean literally aesthetically, they don’t make sense. The effortlessly cool frontman and guitarist Tash Neal looks like a young Lenny Kravitz, drummer Chris St. Hilaire looks like the lovechild of Robert Plant and Blake Anderson, and with a long auburn beard and black Blues Brothers fedora, bassist Stu Mahan is unclassifiable.
Perhaps this clash of styles can be attributed to the heterogeneity of their New York City home base, or maybe it’s the refusal to become co-opted by the genre du jour, which now seems to be grunge and EDM.
Luckily, The London Souls refuse to subscribe to these overindulged sonic categories, and have instead opted to pay tribute to the canonical classic rock greats. They play a mean “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road” from the Beatles’ The White Album, but it was depressingly absent from their Ottawa setlist.
I was obviously the only one whom this mattered to, as the crowd grew and grew, and the cheers and whistles became louder. For the Bluesfest purists who complain year after year about the sheer dearth of blues music, The London Souls were satiating.
Lady Gaga
It didn’t even matter that she was 20 minutes late to the stage.
Stefani Germanotta, more famously known as Lady Gaga, brought her hefty mezzo-soprano vocal range, four costume changes, and her slew of backup dancers to the Bell Stage to a crowd she led into profanity-laced revelry.
Opening the show with ARTPOP, the title track of her most recent album, Gaga resembled her early electronic superhero persona in the days of her 2008 sleeper hit “Just Dance.”
But most of us know she is not just a mediocre prop used to sell records. She professed this self-conscious worry of hers to the audience before she began to pay “Gypsy,” her encore song from her latest album.
“I’m so glad to have you as my fans, and you believed in me,” the born and bred New Yorker told the excited crowd. “You tell everyone that I’m not just a popstar, but that I’m a musician.”
There’s a deep humanity to Lady Gaga, and I cannot have been the only one with tears in my eyes when she said this. And it wasn’t the first time Gaga made people cry that night.
More than halfway through the show, and shortly after a costume change where she donned a patent leather bralet with a strap placed diagonally across her waist, she found a letter by a fan onstage. She read it, a heartbreaking thank you for inspiring the letter’s the author to be himself, and admitting that tonight, he was the cool kid. Upon finishing the letter, she walked off the stage and hugged him, asking him if he would like to come backstage after the show.
Naturally, this was not the only fan to be briefly befriended by Gaga. During “Applause,” the chanteuse noticed a fan who was wearing almost exactly what she was wearing: a see-through PVC dress with neon pink and green details an a cybergoth wig made of pink and green dreadlocks.
“I hope you’re 18, that’s all I have to say,” Gaga said, after bringing her costume dopplegänger and friend to the stage.
Although she blew through most of her vast repertoire, playing most of her latest album from late 2013, the Gaga many of us love is the one who thrashes away at the piano keys, showing us the Stefani Germanotta who has been classically trained, and who can play alongside Elton John. But I understand. A lot of her populism has been informed by her style rather than substance, and she knows her audience well.
