Amanda Palmer @ The Concorde 2, Brighton, UK 01.09.11

This isn’t Kasabian. This isn’t bloody Beady Eye. This is a party in the Church of Palmer. It would obliterate any posey white boy laddishness it encountered in an explosion of mascara and sass and spangles and pansexuality, like matter meeting antimatter.

This isn’t really about the music, how clever or pertinent it is or is not. It’s about the moment and the magic and the goddamn show.

Oh, OK, if you must: it’s about LOVE.

And sex, of course. That too. Neither love nor sex sticks to one genre. Love is as present in Palmer’s Weill-inflected punk cabaret moments with their clustered piano chords and smokey-eyed clattery Modernist dramatics (‘Girl Anachronism’; ‘Missed Me’; ‘Mrs O’:) as it is in her renditions of the shouty rock-out numbers from Who Killed Amanda Palmer (‘Leeds United’; ‘Guitar Hero’) that stick their tongues out at the world and dare you to disapprove. Love’s there in skyfuls in among the extravagant crashes of ‘Astronaut’, bruised but still aloft, and caught in the throat of ‘Delilah’’s aching swoops; there’s love for life in ‘Oasis’ (banned by some radio stations for mixing  giggles and teen popfandom with the topic of abortion, as if any experience, no matter how grim, could possibly be encompassed with one reaction) and love spilling out of  ‘In My Mind’, which reduced me to tears at the Concorde.

Love for the world and love for performance, no matter the kind of music running through her heart.

Amanda Fucking Palmer is truly some kind of new-minted goddess. You’d better love her too.

Related posts: Song of the day – 377: Amanda Palmer (Nirvana cover)

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by Lucy

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