Last night at Chop Suey my friend was nervous about Toronto’s Still Life Still, fearing that they wouldn’t be as good live as on their debut album Girls Come Too. But that anxiety was for naught. Still Life Still nailed it at their first Seattle show, playing most of their album, as well as a new song with a disco bassline. The Broken Social Scene comparisons are apt; even the time signatures are pure BSS. My friend described them as a Broken Social Scene with more blatant sexual anxieties, as evidenced in the song “T-Shirts,” which features the recurring line “I don’t mind your blood on my dick.” But by the time you get to the end of the song, and that line is followed by “it’s love, it’s love, it’s love, it’s love,” you get the message, and it’s almost sweet. Not caring about the little things is love after all.
Meanwhile, Britain’s Wild Beasts have a surprising number of fans in town. With a set drawing from their two albums, Wild Beasts changed things up with both vocalists trading off singing duties as well as sharing guitars and synths. In my opinion, the songs featuring both Hayden Thorpe’s falsetto and Tom Fleming’s tenor were most successful (see their performance above of “Hooting and Howling,” a couple days ago in Portland). But even Fleming was able to let the occasional falsetto rip, as on the soaring “All the King’s Men.” They closed their encore with “Cheerio Chaps, Cheerio Goodbye,” sending the crowd off into the warm Valentine’s night. Cheerio to you chaps too.