Northern State/Tegan & Sara, Bloomington, IN 10.9.2005

Sunday night at Bloomington’s Buskirk-Chumley Theatre provided the unique opportunity to witness two female-fronted musical acts that exist under the specter of very similar and enormously popular groups to exist before them.

New York’s Northern State has found it essentially impossible to escape their “Beastie Girls” image, mostly because they seem to revel in the shambolic frivolity of their influences’ first album. The three-member group certainly brought a large amount of energy to their performance, but still, even after several years of practice, seem transfixed that people actually want to watch them perform. They made constant reference to the fact that most of the audience hadn’t heard their album, and introduced at least two songs with the (paraphrased) preface of “we don’t know if you’ll like this, but we really do.” They asked those taking pictures (I include myself in that group–I figured out the camera, finally–although without the ugly flash, it’s hard to capture movement in a dark setting) to e-mail them to their website, because they “love looking at pictures of themselves on stage.” Their entire live presence seemed to be based on dorm-room fantasies of rock stardom rather than any sort of desire toward a decent live musical performance. And the music? Well, it never gets past the quotidian subject matter and constantly overlapped, traded vocal delivery method that the Beasties mastered in 1987. Their songs typically sputtered to a stop under the burden of their unrelated chatter, sometimes with the audience, sometimes with each other. But MC Hesta Prynn is hot, so, well, there you have it.

Tegan and Sara exist in the long shadow cast by the Indigo Girls, whose music, fortunately, the duo transcends and to a large degree, exceeds. They’re twin sisters, and don’t make any attempt to disguise their likeness, sporting similar ironic chick mullets–Tegan’s with slightly shorter bangs–and cute as all get out little button noses. Personality-wise, Sara was this evening’s Lennon to Tegan’s McCartney, working blue and telling bizarre jokes between songs while Tegan feigned frustration, apparently through the haze of the cold that has befallen most of the band. I have to admit to being a neophyte with their recorded output, only knowing 2004’s So Jealous at this point–however, my lack of experience with many of the songs gave me the opportunity to assess Sara’s unique voice, which contains elements of Cyndi Lauper at its best, and her face which contains elements of Sissy Spacek (eyes) and a young Frances McDormand (mouth). The crowd of mostly younger, definitely hipper, and probably gayer than me fans paid rapt attention, singing along to “Living Room,” “Walking With a Ghost,” and “You Wouldn’t Like Me” with the devotion I’ve previously seen applied to Ani DiFranco, who attracts an identical demographic to her shows. The encore, which, through research, I’d learned could include Prince’s “When U Were Mine” or Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark,” offered the latter, and a young man from the crowd attempted (with a measure of success) to recreate the Courtney Cox-career-launching video dance, before being shooshed from the stage mid-song by Sara. The band’s musical chops are not in doubt, nor is their symbiotic relationship to its fans.

Filed under: concert  Northern State  Tegan & Sara