Features | Concerts
Laura Barrett / The Blankket / Final Fantasy
By David Ritter | 12 February 2008
Carl Wilson is a man who knows his moment. He has written likely the most talked-about book in 33 1/3, a series of small volumes celebrating prominent albums in the rock canon. After the initial double-take, his choice of Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love appears inspired and poised to pull off the greatest critical recovery since Justified. Luckily, it doesn’t end there; Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey To The End of Taste is also an autobiographical account of the author’s one-year attempt to understand the Celine phenomenon and a meditation on taste itself. All this was handily divulged during Wilson’s talk with Mark Kingwell, University of Toronto’s be-sneakered philosophy guru, that closed this meticulously kick-ass book launch.
The setting was Toronto’s fancy-pants, newly renovated, froufrou, arts district, used-to-be-scummy-so-it-has-lots-of-gritty-authenticity boutique hotel The Gladstone. Enter me, slightly hunched from the twice-a-year back spasms that make me research ergonomic chairs without ever buying one. The place is completely rammed, and I chalk this up to the combination of the setting that aches under the weight of its own coolness, Wilson’s job writing for the Globe and Mail (the Canadian fervour for its single non-conservative national paper is uh...fervent), Owen Pallett’s ardent following, and the anticipation of laughing at lots of Celine jokes (with a possible anti-French-Canadian undertone). There are so many of us, in fact, that as everyone is seated to the sounds of Celine mashups that are a bit on-the-nose, the chairs are soon taken. I don’t have the grapes to complain about either the line cutsies or the people saving six seats, so I submit my aching back to a seat on the floor. The video guy proceeds to step over, around, and into me all night. Luckily his kneecaps smell like cookies.
The night’s festivities began with a visit from Celine Dion…………impersonator Laura Landauer (that joke was awesome), who was utterly uncanny. Quickly getting over the return of the repressed, I watched with a mixture of awe and glee as she ran through an up-tempo number, explained her love for Rene, and taught us about the Celine chest pump. The highlight came during her rendition of "My Heart Will Go On" with the mid-song addition of sea-wind (i.e. a big fan) and a section of the ship’s prow. Landauer’s truly great impersonation, honed in her one-woman show "Celine Speaks!", transcended jokiness to some kind of sublime irony that’s difficult to parse. I’ll have to leave it at that.
After a brief visit from the launch’s congenial MC Misha Glouberman, the stage was set for a group of Toronto indie acts to take over. They were tasked, we were told, with performing one Celine Dion song and a second song that was related to her in some way. Laura Barrett, whose schtick is performing solo with a mic at her mouth and a kalimba in her hands, opened the evening with a cover of “Treat Her Like a Lady,” the last single from Let’s Talk About Love. Celine’s version brings a lot to the table, including Diana King and Brownstone. Rather than seeming overly sparse, however, Barrett's version was carried by her own creamy voice which maintained much of the original’s richness. Her kalimba was eerily intimate and lathered Celine’s track in a sort of quizzical, ironic intellectualism, like David Byrne singing “Put On a Happy Face.” In spite of how bad that may sound, the juxtaposition was deftly balanced and showed Barrett understood the event, which kept several balls of comedy, sincerity, irony, and emotion in the air. Her next choice, a cover of Weird Al’s “Smells Like Nirvana,” was a strange one. She attributed it to her inability to remember lyrics in performance and, naturally, forgot the lyrics. I enjoyed it (I could listen to Barrett sing anything) but would have enjoyed another choice a lot more.
Steve Kado aka the Blankett followed Barrett with a performance that involved a lot of talking. His creative interpretation of the assigned task involved two “songs,” the first a long spoken monologue, and the second a grunting death-chant set to his iPod’s noise track. He told it like it is: “talking is the new music. Put more talking in your music blogs.” Occasionally hilarious, Kado’s monologue about English Canadian colonialism and the difficulty of interacting with the Celine phenomenon blurred all the lines between useful, condescending, and annoying. He then maxed-out the violence inherent in Celine’s colonial context with a cover of domestic-abuse anthem “This Time.” I suspect that mixing 15% charm with about 85% absolutely irritating formed much of Kado’s intentional strategy so, Bravo.
Back pain, floor seat, bad choices, and worse lectures; I endured it all for the chance to hear Owen Pallett aka Final Fantasy cover Celine. Pallett exceeded even such vaunted expectations with a stirring take on “The Power of Love,” which somehow revealed itself as a great song despite all. Pallett spoke of his genuine enjoyment of Celine and his attempt to capture both the intimacy and the bombast of her performances. His cover began with a pedal-doubled pizzicato baseline over which he spread his shaking, choirboy vocals. Without a hint of irony he sang “I know I am frightened but I’m ready to learn / of the power of love” over his loops. The downbeat of the second verse brought the second layer of Pallett’s violin: mid-range double stops bowed tremolo to access the bombast he was searching for. He sung it straight all the way through, adding a third layer of upper-range tremolo to take the drama up a notch in the final chorus. Though Pallett himself declared the cover unironic, it would perhaps take another book like Wilson’s to delineate the various strains of self-awareness, recovery, reconstruction, and sincerity involved in Pallett’s cover, and to track the laughing voices and teary eyes in the audience. Suffice to say he took perhaps the most steaming pile of clichéd shit in the pop canon and made it truly mean something.
Pallett left after one sublime song. All of us took a breath, and then settled in to enjoy Kingwell’s interview with Wilson. Rather than summarize an interview that summarized a book (which is a great read), I’ll relate one final moment. After Wilson meditated on taste-as-distinction and acknowledged that recuperating Celine Dion may be the ultimate checkmate move in the “my taste is so untouchable I can even like ______” game, Kingwell noted the various layers of hipsterism involved in the night’s festivities. There we were in Toronto’s hipsterest hotel in a room full of hipsters listening to hipster bands, a hipster philosophy prof., and a hipster music critic; weren’t we, Kingwell asked, “just indulging in an orgy of distinction?” He certainly took the hipsterism up a notch with that little self-aware nod. What then, of my role as reviewer of all this indulgent classism? Is there any position I can take that doesn’t crown me as the king-mage hipster, protesting all the way about how much of a loser I am while I tell you I was there when? And finally, how do these various layers of bullshit shield, display, dampen, or destroy the one brilliant musical moment at the heart of it all?
Beats me. Ask, um, Karen O or some shit.
The setting was Toronto’s fancy-pants, newly renovated, froufrou, arts district, used-to-be-scummy-so-it-has-lots-of-gritty-authenticity boutique hotel The Gladstone. Enter me, slightly hunched from the twice-a-year back spasms that make me research ergonomic chairs without ever buying one. The place is completely rammed, and I chalk this up to the combination of the setting that aches under the weight of its own coolness, Wilson’s job writing for the Globe and Mail (the Canadian fervour for its single non-conservative national paper is uh...fervent), Owen Pallett’s ardent following, and the anticipation of laughing at lots of Celine jokes (with a possible anti-French-Canadian undertone). There are so many of us, in fact, that as everyone is seated to the sounds of Celine mashups that are a bit on-the-nose, the chairs are soon taken. I don’t have the grapes to complain about either the line cutsies or the people saving six seats, so I submit my aching back to a seat on the floor. The video guy proceeds to step over, around, and into me all night. Luckily his kneecaps smell like cookies.
The night’s festivities began with a visit from Celine Dion…………impersonator Laura Landauer (that joke was awesome), who was utterly uncanny. Quickly getting over the return of the repressed, I watched with a mixture of awe and glee as she ran through an up-tempo number, explained her love for Rene, and taught us about the Celine chest pump. The highlight came during her rendition of "My Heart Will Go On" with the mid-song addition of sea-wind (i.e. a big fan) and a section of the ship’s prow. Landauer’s truly great impersonation, honed in her one-woman show "Celine Speaks!", transcended jokiness to some kind of sublime irony that’s difficult to parse. I’ll have to leave it at that.
After a brief visit from the launch’s congenial MC Misha Glouberman, the stage was set for a group of Toronto indie acts to take over. They were tasked, we were told, with performing one Celine Dion song and a second song that was related to her in some way. Laura Barrett, whose schtick is performing solo with a mic at her mouth and a kalimba in her hands, opened the evening with a cover of “Treat Her Like a Lady,” the last single from Let’s Talk About Love. Celine’s version brings a lot to the table, including Diana King and Brownstone. Rather than seeming overly sparse, however, Barrett's version was carried by her own creamy voice which maintained much of the original’s richness. Her kalimba was eerily intimate and lathered Celine’s track in a sort of quizzical, ironic intellectualism, like David Byrne singing “Put On a Happy Face.” In spite of how bad that may sound, the juxtaposition was deftly balanced and showed Barrett understood the event, which kept several balls of comedy, sincerity, irony, and emotion in the air. Her next choice, a cover of Weird Al’s “Smells Like Nirvana,” was a strange one. She attributed it to her inability to remember lyrics in performance and, naturally, forgot the lyrics. I enjoyed it (I could listen to Barrett sing anything) but would have enjoyed another choice a lot more.
Steve Kado aka the Blankett followed Barrett with a performance that involved a lot of talking. His creative interpretation of the assigned task involved two “songs,” the first a long spoken monologue, and the second a grunting death-chant set to his iPod’s noise track. He told it like it is: “talking is the new music. Put more talking in your music blogs.” Occasionally hilarious, Kado’s monologue about English Canadian colonialism and the difficulty of interacting with the Celine phenomenon blurred all the lines between useful, condescending, and annoying. He then maxed-out the violence inherent in Celine’s colonial context with a cover of domestic-abuse anthem “This Time.” I suspect that mixing 15% charm with about 85% absolutely irritating formed much of Kado’s intentional strategy so, Bravo.
Back pain, floor seat, bad choices, and worse lectures; I endured it all for the chance to hear Owen Pallett aka Final Fantasy cover Celine. Pallett exceeded even such vaunted expectations with a stirring take on “The Power of Love,” which somehow revealed itself as a great song despite all. Pallett spoke of his genuine enjoyment of Celine and his attempt to capture both the intimacy and the bombast of her performances. His cover began with a pedal-doubled pizzicato baseline over which he spread his shaking, choirboy vocals. Without a hint of irony he sang “I know I am frightened but I’m ready to learn / of the power of love” over his loops. The downbeat of the second verse brought the second layer of Pallett’s violin: mid-range double stops bowed tremolo to access the bombast he was searching for. He sung it straight all the way through, adding a third layer of upper-range tremolo to take the drama up a notch in the final chorus. Though Pallett himself declared the cover unironic, it would perhaps take another book like Wilson’s to delineate the various strains of self-awareness, recovery, reconstruction, and sincerity involved in Pallett’s cover, and to track the laughing voices and teary eyes in the audience. Suffice to say he took perhaps the most steaming pile of clichéd shit in the pop canon and made it truly mean something.
Pallett left after one sublime song. All of us took a breath, and then settled in to enjoy Kingwell’s interview with Wilson. Rather than summarize an interview that summarized a book (which is a great read), I’ll relate one final moment. After Wilson meditated on taste-as-distinction and acknowledged that recuperating Celine Dion may be the ultimate checkmate move in the “my taste is so untouchable I can even like ______” game, Kingwell noted the various layers of hipsterism involved in the night’s festivities. There we were in Toronto’s hipsterest hotel in a room full of hipsters listening to hipster bands, a hipster philosophy prof., and a hipster music critic; weren’t we, Kingwell asked, “just indulging in an orgy of distinction?” He certainly took the hipsterism up a notch with that little self-aware nod. What then, of my role as reviewer of all this indulgent classism? Is there any position I can take that doesn’t crown me as the king-mage hipster, protesting all the way about how much of a loser I am while I tell you I was there when? And finally, how do these various layers of bullshit shield, display, dampen, or destroy the one brilliant musical moment at the heart of it all?
Beats me. Ask, um, Karen O or some shit.