Zoe Explains It All

In Newcastle tonight for Zoe Explains It All, a two-woman show riffing on education, employment, and interpersonal relationships. Zoe is very clear from the start that she's not going to explain it all, because that would take too much time.

Zoe—just Zoe—is a character portrayed by a comedian whose real name I cannot seem to find on the Internet. It's a characters she's portrayed for, appearently, 13 years—and in such time she's had the opportunity to flesh Zoe out into a real enough person that you're not sure, at first blush, whether the whole thing is real or not. This lays the groundwork for taking the audience on wacky bits just beyond the pale of belief.

Bits aside, the character is internally consistent but unpredictable, which makes for compelling Riff Comedy. She's quick and clever, naïve but confident and charming, wrapped in a dog-print fleece and dog-print leggings that don't feel like a gimmick. She has a sort of extremely opinionated worldview that encourages tangents and invites you in on the joke. It's almost as if she's portraying a pastiche of a certain self-interested gammonish type of person—but she plays it with such infectious authenticity that you come around to her side whether you want to or not.

She's hosting a quiz next week and we've already signed up.

Wasn't impressed, which was surprising! We saw the RSC's Taming of the Shrew a couple years ago, and Romeo and Juliet sometime in the interval since, and thought they were both dynamic, modern interpretations of Shakespeare. Good job, RSC, keep doing what you'e doing.

This one felt stale. The stage was mostly bare, but for a giant rotating cube that the actors could climb on top or inside of. Costumes were generic, the whole cast clad in modern-day dress in shades of grey and beige with no indication of rank or status, which didn't help to distinguish senators from proles or, indeed, Caesar from anyone else. The ghosts of dead characters came back in lively colours, but I couldn't discern the meaning of this. Significant scenes were questionably punctuated by industrial music and the whole cast coming together for a bit of rhythmic dancing. I'm not sure what the meaning of this was either, but it robbed the performance of inertia.

A couple of other complaints: rather than red blood, conspirators marked Caesar with a thick black ink when they pounced—but the black ink didn't stand out against the characters' black-and-grey outfits, and the inkstains stuck around for the rest of the play. I get the sense that the director was trying to indicate, Macbeth-like, that the stain of murder was upon them, but it just made the cast look shabby—not bloodstained.

Finally, I'm not sure if this is the fault of the directing, the acting, or the play itself, but everything that comes after Caesar's death felt messy, muddy, unclear. I get that the play is just trying to tie up loose ends after the intermission, but the play seemed to be doing its utmost to shed my attention.

Back in Manchester for the Mountain Goats show at The Albert Hall (no not that one). I said it last time and I'll say it again: Manchester is probably the best city in the UK. The best one in England at least. It has the busy feeling of something happening everywhere that you get in the big cities—which I love—but there's always a little nook that you can escape to if you feel overwhelmed. You get the sense that through every door, there's a fractal of interior life waiting to be explored and experienced.

Anyway, after dinner we made our way over to the venue (by foot; Manchester is very walkable) and found a spot. The Albert Hall has a regular pit-type area, level with the stage, but it also has a horseshoe-shaped mezzanine above the stage, with tiered seating. No assigned seats—everyone just sort of plonked down wherever space could be made—so we had to meander about for a little while before we found a spot to park ourselves. I haven't been to a seated gig for a while, but it was a welcome change of pace!

The Mountain Goats, predictably, have a sort of mid-2000s indie energy that's very catching for people of Sam & my vintage. Think: bootcut jeans, crumpled sport jackets, glasses, bouncing up and down while playing an acoustic guitar. John Darnielle has a commanding stage presence—he's got such a distinct voice and vibe that you can't help but look in his direction, even if he sort of looks like Death Cab meets John Oliver.

I think the real standout of the night was multi-instrumentalist Matt Douglas, who filled out the sound with keyboard, saxophone, electric guitar, and backing vocals. The Mountain Goats have a very distinct sound, courtesy in no small part to Darnielle's voice, but Douglas did a fantastic job of adding complexity and surprise throughout.

Bon Iver at the First Direct Arena in Leeds was the biggest show I’ve been to in a good long while. The First Direct Arena is massive and almost totally characterless: plain concrete and lowest-bidder amenities abound; a pint of beer sets you back the nearly-unbearable (and doubtlessly market-analysis-optimised) price of £7.50. The interior is roughly one-third an ice hockey arena, maybe like everything from the blue line backwards.

The band, however—and here I was struck for the first time by how much Bon Iver isn’t Justin Vernon on his own—put on an excellent show. Vernon’s got great stage presence and the banter was welcome in a sort of faceless way (although his outlook might be a little granola for my taste; there were frequent Lennonesque exhortations to love and be good to one another).

Vernon also called out his crew a couple of times over the course of the show (including a comical vignette about riding on the ferry and the homely band being confused with the dashing crew), with good reason: the staging, the lighting, and the sound were absolutely on point. There was this movable lattice of reflective panels edged with lights, used to great effect throughout the show—sometimes undulating like waves, sometimes retracting into a massive dome, sometimes pulling in close and reflecting light across Vernon’s face to create an air of intimacy. Whoever came up with those panels needs some kind of recognition.

On the sound front, I’m used to smaller venues that overwhelm with noise and leave your ears ringing. Part of the reason that I like going to gigs is the opportunity to be obliterated by noise. But maybe because this was more commercial, more broad-market (half the audience was seated!), the noise was a bit more restrained and the sound quality was dialled in. The drums sounded louder than life; I could pick out the individual instruments with ease. The fidelity of the noise felt realer than life, somehow.

All of which gave the impression less of a live concert and more of an immersive multimiedia recording. I know that this is probably because the show’s been fine-tuned to oblivion, that the musicians are all absolutely at the top of their craft, because the music is sort of progressive-adjacent without being challenging—that they’re just really good at putting on a show!—and an immersive recording’s no better nor worse than a poorly optimised live show. Just different.

Now that I’ve seen them live, I don’t think I need to see them again—maybe in years and years if they’re still going. I took a couple of videos and a couple of recordings and I think that’ll be enough.

Destroyer at Brudenell Social Club in Leeds tonight—a remarkably intimate affair! The concert space was small, the audience pushed right up against the edge of the stage. I don’t think I’ve been quite this close to a band since The Dear Hunter in Orlando years and years ago.

Technical complaints to get out of the way first: maybe it was just because we were right up at the front, but Bejar’s vocals got all lost in the noise. You could tell it was him—his throaty voice is recognisable basically anywhere—and you could hear the notes, but you couldn’t really understand what he was saying.

Bejar also wasn’t much of a showman—Colin Meloy and The Decemberists set the bar pretty high pre-pandemic—but I don’t think I expected him to be, and I didn’t hold it against him. Meloy’s got a sort of cheery theatre-kid dynamic but Bejar, like his lyrics, breeds a sense of cool mystery, an uncle with a richly sordid past. He left the microphone stand at its lowest limit and leaned on it like a cane during certain songs the way that a crooner leans on a grand piano. He finished every song by kneeling down, replacing the microphone, and closing his eyes, as if taking a moment for himself. His stage presence was electrifying even in the absence of stage banter.

The live band did a fantastic job of elevating intimate songs to wild heights—which I wasn’t expecting. A lot of Destroyer’s modern music is immaculately poised but the band brought a raw rock’n’roll energy that confounded expectation. Near the end of the show, one of the band members performed a cool experimental drone piece on the trumpet, layering notes into a wall of noise and then modulating it into waves of catastrophe. The rest of the band sat down and listened and we all got lost in the sound.

Opener Ashley Shadow delivered as well—that sort of quiet chamber pop vibe always finds a happy listener in me. Shout-out as well to Josh Wells, drummer for both bands (and producer, as it turns out!), who Pitchfork describes as bringing “delirious high drama to every thwack of the snare” and who got me headbanging w/o reservation at the drop on “Tintoretto, It’s For You”.