Like Four Excited Spiders

of Montreal @ Highline Ballroom 1/26/2010

Suffer For Fashion / Mingusings / Forecast Fascist Future / Du Og Meg / Lysergic Bliss / Disconnect The Dots / Spike The Senses / And I’ve Seen A Bloody Shadow / Plastis Wafers / St. Exquisite’s Confessions / Heimdalsgate Like A Promethean Curse / Teenage Unicorn Fisting / An Eluardian Instance / Oslo In The Summertime / Every Day Feels Like Sunday / A Sentence Of Sorts In Kongsvinger / She’s A Rejecter // For Our Elegant Caste / I Want You Back (with Solange)

First off, this is what you want to see, right?

Moving on.

As you can see in the setlist above, this brief tour is not a try-out period for new material as I had expected. There was one new song in the show, a groovy rock number provisionally titled “Teenage Unicorn Fisting,” but this was pretty much a catalog showcase featuring big hits along with a handful of deep cuts. The presentation was relatively stripped-down, and they cast aside the programmed percussion in favor of live drums for the entire set. In addition to Solange Knowles once again teaming up with the band for a cover song, Susan Sarandon popped up onstage during “St. Exquisite’s Confessions” to spank some pig-men. You know the old show biz saying: “If you can’t get a horse, get Susan Sarandon.”

of Montreal “Plastis Wafers”

I’ll be honest: I was vaguely dreading this show. I was aware that it was a totally irrational thing, but I’ve actually taken the band’s music out of rotation in recent months to get away from its emotional content, and I’ve had this strange paranoia about the next OM album not being as good as the last few. (This is very unlikely!) I lucked out with this show. Not only did the self-imposed OM hiatus make me even more excited to hear the songs in the moment, but the band were kind enough to not perform the handful of songs bogged down with too much personal baggage for me to handle at the moment. (It’s not as though I asked, but either way: Thanks!)

“Plastis Wafers” was the big revelation of the night. It was leaner, tighter, faster, funkier. This could be a matter of projection for me, but it seemed much sadder than usual. What had once sounded like pure desire now felt more like hopeless desperation. When Kevin sang “You are such a fucking star,” it was like admiration mixing into resentment. The song sounded like an elegy for something that was dead, or dying. “It’s so painful when they amputate the ego.” No kidding, man.

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