Emily Haines and The Soft Skeleton
As front-woman of Metric, Emily Haines is a charismatic performer and hyperactive force of power, dissatisfaction and sweat. As a solo artist however, Haines is at her most enigmatic.
Rather than stationing herself front and center at the Crocodile Saturday night, she does her very best to stay out of the spotlight or just on the edge of it. She enters stage-left, quietly takes her seat in front of the piano and begins playing. She is positioned near the edge of the stage, allowing plenty of room for her band, The Soft Skeleton. But our eyes are on her. We get the feeling that she would like to have hovered into the room, unseen by the people out there, beyond the lights. She would love it if we'd blinked and missed her. But we've been watching for her -- anticipating. We've even held our breath a little. Try as she might, she cannot creep into the room like something small and shifty. She is too enchanting a performer to succeed at blending into the shadows.
Haines' first song, Our Hell, begins as many of them do -- with a simple piano movement, the notes of which seem to be gestures all their own, eventually inviting the shy attendance of the guitar, the lazy beat of the drum and the atmospheric (at times intrusive) digital effects. Though we would have been perfectly happy if it were simply Emily and a piano up there, these additions worked to lend a sense of color and complexity to each song.
By the end of Our Hell and as Haines introduced the opening notes of Doctor Blind, -- probably the most haunting and lovely song about prescription drugs ever written -- we knew for sure we were in for a beautiful night.
Except for sneaking in a cover of House of the Rising Sun, Haines stuck mostly to the songs from her debut solo album, Knives Don't Have Your Back and as far as we could tell, she pretty much played them in the order as they appear on the album. There's something to be said about seeing and hearing an entire album performed live. It's familiar, it's comforting and it lends legitimacy to the fact that every song on Knives is brilliant and deserving of a live audience.
Accompanying Emily Haines and The Soft Skeleton was a collection of cinematic imagery from the films of director Guy Maddin. The images were projected onto three white screens above Emily's piano and when we paid close enough attention we could see that they were mixed quite purposefully to compliment the music and they did so wonderfully. During Nothing and Nowhere for instance, scenes from Maddin's The Saddest Music in the World were shown with repeating frames of Portuguese actress Maria de Medeiros looking skyward -- teary-eyed, despondent and utterly gorgeous, like the music itself.
*mp3: Doctor Blind
