Just a Gwai Lo - fun within prescribed limits

Rachael and I attended Feist's Vancouver stop on a tour which has her playing later with her old band, Broken Social Scene as well as playing with Bright Eyes (who I either don't understand or who I think sucks). At one point she stopped the show as one of the fans up front passed out, but she seemed to recover with good humour. Also she was adamant that the crowd sing louder the parts she wanted it to sing, and I guess it was at that point that I realized that bands often use the crowd's singing along as another instrument to accentuate the experience both for the fans and for the performers.

She did her usual trick of recording a few bars of her singing, then recording harmonizing over her singing, and then singing over the looped harmonizing. At one point she recorded then looped her playing guitar, playing guitar of that loop. She is better suited to a club like the Commodore, as she felt more comfortable with the crowd than she did at the Vancouver Folk Festival.

The logical extension of her trick is for a single person to record a bar or two of each instrument live in front of the crowd, then sing over the instrumentation. (The first person that comes to mind who could pull this off is not Feist, who can play the drums—she's not very good—but Dave Grohl.) The logical conclusion however, is for a single artist to record the loops onstage including vocals, then join the crowd and do whatever physical activity the type of song necessitates (moshing for loud rock/punk, dancing for funk or electronica or just something upbeat, sway mindlessly to 'alt-rock', etc.).

The opening acts, Jason Collett and New Buffalo, generally had nothing near the quality of Feist. Let's put it this way: the drummer for the former, when it wasn't Feist (who as we've established, is not very accomplished), was the best part of the opening acts

We didn't know it at the time, but we ended up sitting behind a booth with 4, for lack of a better term, annoying bitches. I'm all for girls-nights-out and having a good time at a concert, but drinking too much before the main show even starts, trying to sneak smoking a cigarette with security looking over your shoulder not once but twice, and clapping to a beat that's definitely not the one coming from the stage is something you should have quit doing by the time you graduate high school.