M83's Show Is Superior

How engaging a band are on stage is often the penultimate, if not the deciding, factor in a show's greatness. Thursday night presented a study in contrarian approaches to live music. There were two talented acts, albeit one with far more experience, but both talented nonetheless. One drew the crowd in and the other left me feeling a little flat.

Brooklyn's School Of Seven Bells, formed by former Secret Machines member Benjamin Curtis, have been garnering their fair share of breathless adulation lately. I can understand why after listening to the band, and it speaks volumes that the group had sold out of their CD.

The rather frail-looking trio delve pretty deep into the shoegaze guitars-as-buzzsaws aesthetic that I adore, but there's more to it than that. Their hook lies in the vocal interplay of twins Alejandra and Claudia Deheza, which augments the already melodious approach to a genre that can easily devolve into sludge if the band aren't keenly aware of the pratfalls of reverb.

Music aside, though, it was almost painful to look up at the stage and see three people who looked positively terrified to be playing music. I'm unsure if it was a purposely done but overzealous "we're too cool" affectation or if they were just hiding behind a wealth of bangs and offering little more than the occasional lean to the left (sometimes even to the right) because that's all they're able to do. Their music is so full of personality that their lack of the same on stage was a bit perplexing.

The mood swung to the extreme opposite even before M83 took the stage. M83, who's technically just lead vocalist and multi-instrumentalist/laptop ninja Anthony Gonzalez, culled together a talented trio of players for his current tour. The ethereally voiced Morgan Kibby (of Los Angeles-based The Romanovs) is included in that group. Many of the best songs on this year's Saturdays = Youth were recorded with Kibby.

The tenor of Saturdays=Youth's '80s-inflected set pieces translated far better than I could have hoped for in a live setting. The mid-set one-two punch of "Kim & Jessie" and "We Own The Sky" ramped the crowd and the band into as near a frenzy as you're going to find in Toronto. And when Kibby shed her glasses, closed her eyes and leaned into the mic, foot pumping to the beat, breathing the cathartic "It's coming, it's coming now" repetitive coda to "We Own The Sky," I (and many others) was smitten with a brand new rock 'n' roll crush.

Like much of M83's music, the show went in ebbs and flows, but never once was it boring. Whether showcasing newer material or treating everyone in attendance to songs from Before The Dawn Heals Us like "Teen Angst," Gonzalez and his crew pulled off the herculean task of recreating the multi-layered nuances of M83's records with admirable precision.

The band exuded a gravitational-like pull on the crowd and didn't relinquish their hold until the final moments some 85 minutes later. I suppose that's the simple, almost too obvious, difference between a decent show and a fantastic show.