"the people here are kind and artsy without being pretentious": A Fine Frenzy, Sean Lennon & Rufus Wainwright @ the Moore

Fate, karma, kismet -- call it what you will but the week before A Fine Frenzy came to town a friend in Switzerland sent us a YouTube video of her song "Rangers." We listened, found the album, and two days later noticed she was coming to town that Sunday. Here is the video, just so you can follow along:

(And here is YouTube's A Fine Frenzy catalog.)

What we didn't know at the time was that 21-year-old Alison Sudol is a Seattle native. She mentioned it at the show, and on her MySpace blog:

today was a delicious day of exploring my birthplace, seattle. it's a strange and wonderful thing to look at the place one formed one's earliest memories in and have formerly inexplicable idiosyncrasies suddenly make sense. i feel like a camera that's taken fuzzy pictures for years only to discover the packing film still covering the lens. not that i've been half-functioning my whole life or anything like that, but i've had this rich inner life filled with forests, farmhouses, lakes, birds, golden meadows and rain and an outer life largely lived in sunny, plastic, palm tree-heavy, sparklingly seedy los angeles.

She's got a big voice, red hair, a piano, and 12,992 MySpace friends. The sound is lush indie piano rock, the songs are mysterious in a friendly way, more evocative than representational. During her 25-minute set, she spilled her tea on the piano keys, swept it away, and moved on, closing with "Almost Lover" (which has to make you think of that "Goodbye My Lover" song from the British guy, James Blunt) and then "Rangers."

Next up was Sean Lennon, also with a 25-minute set, but in his case his mic made him sound like a teacher from Peanuts, and he ended up singing the first song over once a new mic was run out. That meant we actually heard a total of three songs, which is not really enough to form a firm impression one way or t'other. However, as he pointed out, Friendly Fire is available for free download. "Why buy it?" he asked ironically but genially. "It's there on BitTorrent or some shit."

Really everyone was there for Rufus Wainwright, who put on a show so perfectly entertaining that we almost feel like why talk about it? If you were there you know, if you weren't, jesus, we can't really sum up the whole black lederhosen, the Judy Garland numbers, the 3-piece brass section, the choreographed encore in a stunning drag ensemble -- and what about the unmiked version of "Macushla," which the Irish tenor John McCormack made famous? Although, you know, one odd thing is that he made us think of Vaughn Monroe, the Big Band-era baritone whose "Racing with the Moon" never seemed to have that many syllables, all of it just pouring out -- their voices are not all that similar, but all night we were listening to Rufus's breath control and his concern for phrasing and clapping like crazy.