Austin – I’m not sure how, but my review of this show completely vanished into thin air sometime in the last week. It’s annoying, too, because I thoroughly enjoyed it and put a decent amount of time into my writing. Anyway.
I had seen Final Fantasy once several years ago and remembered being pleasantly surprised by Owen Pallet’s music. It’s just him and a guitarist and several instruments on stage when he plays. He records the beat, which could be tapping against his violin or a few simple notes, and then layers other components of a song over it, along with vocals. It’s kind of hard to explain and I’m not sure how to do it justice. He also spent some time chatting with the audience, telling stories of other times he’d been to Austin. I tried to get some video but I spent a good portion of his set trying to shoot photographs around people’s heads, and ignoring a couple that was fighting next to the spot I finally settled on. At any rate, he has an album coming out on Domino records in January, and it’s definitely worth checking out.
Next up were the Mountain Goats. John Darnielle brought his full band, just like last year, back to Antone’s. He mentioned he had so much fun playing at this venue in 2008, he made sure to come back and play there. This only encouraged the crowd even more to shout out requests for favorites such as “No Children” and “This Year”, the former which closed the set with a singalong. A little more than half the set included the full band, the rest of the songs were just him on the piano. Owen also joined him on a few songs, one of which he had never played with the Mountain Goats before, which was humorous. Going to see the Mountain Goats can be a very personal and intimate experience, no matter how many people are in the audience, as the content of every song is written that way. Each one tells a story about a specific part of Darnielle’s life and it’s easy to relate to every single one. You can tell he genuinely loves to share his stories with fans; even though he wasn’t feeling well (which forced him to cancel a couple of shows this week), he gave his all. The set included songs from as far back as 1996 to several off the new album, “The Life of the World to Come”, which is out now on 4AD.
Final Fantasy plays Toronto’s Mod Club January 12th