Review: Cigarettes After Sex at Paradise Rock Club, Boston, MA – April 6, 2018
Outside, a cold almost-rainy night kept spring at bay. The tattered body of that season which refused to return hung like a shredded shroud gently waving in the wind. Into this evening, a smoky stage coalesced as the quartet that comprises Cigarettes After Sex sent a melancholy musical missive into the air, and the sold-out crowd at Paradise Rock Club embraced the group for the only Boston stop on their current tour.
Drummer Jacob Tomsky was good enough to say a quick hello before the show started, and as he pointed to the place where the microphone stood he said, “Watch that space. It’s brilliant what he does,” and he was absolutely correct. Greg Gonzalez, the quietly-intense lead singer and founder of the band, exudes a Zen-like calm, then holds the audience completely rapt from the first words he gently coos. His vocals can sound deceptively female, and Gonzalez himself has cited Julee Cruise and Connie Francis as singers whose sound he has occasionally emulated. The band as a whole betrays an almost-shy stage presence, putting the music first, letting the melodies and the lyrics speak and act out the emotional stage-craft that seduces the soul and bruises the heart.
Early in the set they showcased their 2015 cover of ‘Keep On Loving You’ giving the REO Speedwagon hit a transformative and almost unrecognizable reinvention, allowing its plaintive promises to come into crystalline focus. The rest of the evening consisted mostly of songs from their wondrous 2017 eponymous album, and that’s precisely what this crowd wanted from them.
The juxtaposition of the sweet melodies and acrid lyrics of ‘Young & Dumb’ read more powerfully in person, the words given delicate treatment in the tender delivery of Gonzalez. He holds them with such precision you almost forget the bite of a gloriously seething senorita known as the ‘patron saint of sucking cock.’
Keeping time in super-human metronomic fashion was Tomsky, who managed to take the sparse beats of a gorgeous song like ‘Opera House’ and propel it forward just as he teased and kept pulling back, lending a tension that perfectly rendered the brittle and earnest lyrics: “If I abandoned love I’d be a man without dreams/ I’d rather be out there staring death right between its eyes now.”
By the end of the evening, as Gonzalez moves across the stage for perhaps only the third or fourth time, they have conjured an amorphous phantom of a character with their haunting music. More than a mood – though moods are important – and more than a feeling, this is meditative music, the spare lyrics providing a poetic panoply of ambivalence, desire, bitterness, longing, and, yes, love.
An exquisite finale of the fan-favorite ‘Apocalypse’ had many singing along, and we demanded an encore. They obliged, bringing a rare set of brief smiles across the band as they returned. Gonzalez’s delicate voice caresses ‘Nothing’s Gonna Hurt You Baby’ ~ “When we’re laughing in the microphone and singing/ With our sunglasses on to our favorite songs” and he brings the room into one. Together, we sway in the dark, and I’m reminded of the transcendent experience that some bands can craft with a cohesive set-list, a transfixing focus and four musicians on top of their game.
The mesmerizing performance enthralled the audience, casting its spell with the lush melodic grooves of dreamy pop effectively staged with an economical use of lighting and shadows that mirrored the hide-and-seek emotions of the music. It revealed as it concealed, the way many of the lyrics could be read as genuine, earnest love or double-edged razor-sharp derision.
As quickly and unobtrusively as they arrived, they were gone, dissipating like the most fragile of smoke rings, but what they left behind – a mood, an evocation, a magical moment – kept haunting those of us lucky enough to have listened.
Shows are selling out quickly all over the world, so check out their schedule and get your tickets before they’re gone. (Last US performance is May 1 in Phoenix, Arizona before they head to Europe.)
