Better late than never. I’ve got a backlog after a few busy weeks.
I’ve oddly never had the opportunity to see Alanis live in the city I was living in since 2005, which is about the time I began to be able to see concerts on my own will and dollar. It’s been a while since she’s been at the peak of her popularity, but she’s clearly picked up some steam again and was able to fill (even if not quite sell out) one of the largest venues in Berlin.
Lùisa opened the night. She performed with a three-piece backing band to flesh out her singer-songwriter material into fuller indie pop arrangements. She played a couple new songs from an upcoming album, for which she put down her guitar and let the band and some backing tracks fill in the space while she sang and danced around the stage. Those songs had a distinctively more electronic dance sound. I found her music rather light but enjoyed it well enough, although few other details remain in my memory.
Before Alanis Morissette actually came on stage, a video played a series of clips from interviews and other promotional material to remind us how great she is. The band eventually appeared and then finally the star herself, just in time to dive right in with “Hand in My Pocket” from Jagged Little Pill (1995). That set the tone right there: the setlist leaned heavily on her first international album, with a good dose from her second-best-selling album, Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie (1998) and a smattering from her work that has come since. She ignored her first two teenage dance-pop albums as well as her most recent album, the ambient The Storm Before the Calm (2022). The newest song she performed was “Rest”, a non-album single from 2021. It’s hard to complain, as her picks largely overlapped with the songs I know and like best, but I appreciated that there were a few here and there from lesser-known albums that I didn’t recognize.
The classics still go hard, and she can still sing the hell out of them. Her voice is just as strong as ever and you’d barely notice that 30 years have passed since some of those songs came out. I was also impressed with how fluidly she would whip out her harmonica and blast out flawless riffs on it. (Definitely none of that loose and freewheeling Neil Young style!) She also played some rhythm guitar, but mostly let her band do the rest of the instrumental work. They were similarly tight, but that pointed to a problem it took me some time to put my finger on: there was no edge in the music at all. It was rather rote and too smooth and clean. They didn’t take any risks. Of course that level of professionalism makes for a solid performance, and I imagine most people got what they wanted, but I couldn’t help but feel that it was predictable and a little too easy.
The other aspect that bugged me was the visuals. After the embarrassing opening video, several songs featured projections that attempted to convey some sense of progressive, feminist empowerment. The messaging was kinda cringe and felt like pandering. The tone was deliberately inoffensive, middling, typical cishet white feminism rooted in 90s politics, and it was fairly clearly put together around 2022 and not updated since. The boldest messages were brief images of protesters holding signs with “Black lives matter” and “my body, my choice”. The lack of mention of Palestine or even Ukraine was telling. I know she’s Canadian, but the omission of anything about Trump, Merz, or any other demagogues was also odd. She barely spoke between songs, and the dissonance between her presence and the visuals made it seem all the more contrived. At best, it was simply distracting. The show would’ve been better without any of that.
About halfway through the set my enthusiasm was waning, but I liked that Alanis switched things up and switched to an acoustic setup for a few songs before returning to the fuller rock setup for the final three Jagged bangers of the set. “Ironic” felt obligatory, as if she knew that her biggest song has been the butt of plenty of jokes, and she tried to distract from that by inviting three people to sing the first verse. I’m guessing they were VIP ticketholders, which is a whole other beast that leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Unfortunately, the fans were barely audible so Alanis had to fill in most of it anyway. However, she changed the lyric of the last verse to “It’s meeting the man of my dreams / and then meeting his beautiful husband”, which was on point and the one antidote to my prior complaints.
The encore was also well-chosen, first with the City of Angels (1998) soundtrack single “Uninvited” to build tension and depth, and then the followup single “Thank U” from Junkie as a sweetly harmonious conclusion. It was perhaps a little on the nose, but inarguably the right choice to close out the evening. And then there was just the mad rush to return the cups and then get through the throttled crush to cross the moat and go home. I guess that’s the downside of seeing a band in a medieval fortress. (No bats this time, either.) Still a beautiful experience regardless!
I’ve oddly never had the opportunity to see Alanis live in the city I was living in since 2005, which is about the time I began to be able to see concerts on my own will and dollar. It’s been a while since she’s been at the peak of her popularity, but she’s clearly picked up some steam again and was able to fill (even if not quite sell out) one of the largest venues in Berlin.
Lùisa opened the night. She performed with a three-piece backing band to flesh out her singer-songwriter material into fuller indie pop arrangements. She played a couple new songs from an upcoming album, for which she put down her guitar and let the band and some backing tracks fill in the space while she sang and danced around the stage. Those songs had a distinctively more electronic dance sound. I found her music rather light but enjoyed it well enough, although few other details remain in my memory.
Before Alanis Morissette actually came on stage, a video played a series of clips from interviews and other promotional material to remind us how great she is. The band eventually appeared and then finally the star herself, just in time to dive right in with “Hand in My Pocket” from Jagged Little Pill (1995). That set the tone right there: the setlist leaned heavily on her first international album, with a good dose from her second-best-selling album, Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie (1998) and a smattering from her work that has come since. She ignored her first two teenage dance-pop albums as well as her most recent album, the ambient The Storm Before the Calm (2022). The newest song she performed was “Rest”, a non-album single from 2021. It’s hard to complain, as her picks largely overlapped with the songs I know and like best, but I appreciated that there were a few here and there from lesser-known albums that I didn’t recognize.
The classics still go hard, and she can still sing the hell out of them. Her voice is just as strong as ever and you’d barely notice that 30 years have passed since some of those songs came out. I was also impressed with how fluidly she would whip out her harmonica and blast out flawless riffs on it. (Definitely none of that loose and freewheeling Neil Young style!) She also played some rhythm guitar, but mostly let her band do the rest of the instrumental work. They were similarly tight, but that pointed to a problem it took me some time to put my finger on: there was no edge in the music at all. It was rather rote and too smooth and clean. They didn’t take any risks. Of course that level of professionalism makes for a solid performance, and I imagine most people got what they wanted, but I couldn’t help but feel that it was predictable and a little too easy.
The other aspect that bugged me was the visuals. After the embarrassing opening video, several songs featured projections that attempted to convey some sense of progressive, feminist empowerment. The messaging was kinda cringe and felt like pandering. The tone was deliberately inoffensive, middling, typical cishet white feminism rooted in 90s politics, and it was fairly clearly put together around 2022 and not updated since. The boldest messages were brief images of protesters holding signs with “Black lives matter” and “my body, my choice”. The lack of mention of Palestine or even Ukraine was telling. I know she’s Canadian, but the omission of anything about Trump, Merz, or any other demagogues was also odd. She barely spoke between songs, and the dissonance between her presence and the visuals made it seem all the more contrived. At best, it was simply distracting. The show would’ve been better without any of that.
About halfway through the set my enthusiasm was waning, but I liked that Alanis switched things up and switched to an acoustic setup for a few songs before returning to the fuller rock setup for the final three Jagged bangers of the set. “Ironic” felt obligatory, as if she knew that her biggest song has been the butt of plenty of jokes, and she tried to distract from that by inviting three people to sing the first verse. I’m guessing they were VIP ticketholders, which is a whole other beast that leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Unfortunately, the fans were barely audible so Alanis had to fill in most of it anyway. However, she changed the lyric of the last verse to “It’s meeting the man of my dreams / and then meeting his beautiful husband”, which was on point and the one antidote to my prior complaints.
The encore was also well-chosen, first with the City of Angels (1998) soundtrack single “Uninvited” to build tension and depth, and then the followup single “Thank U” from Junkie as a sweetly harmonious conclusion. It was perhaps a little on the nose, but inarguably the right choice to close out the evening. And then there was just the mad rush to return the cups and then get through the throttled crush to cross the moat and go home. I guess that’s the downside of seeing a band in a medieval fortress. (No bats this time, either.) Still a beautiful experience regardless!
The setlist was as follows, with some help from here. All the partial songs were segued into or from the following or preceding song, but I don’t recall the details.
01. Hand in My Pocket
02. Right Through You
03. Reasons I Drink
04. A Man [Partial]
05. Hands Clean
06. Can’t Not [Partial]
07. Lens
08. Sorry to Myself [Partial]
09. Head Over Feet
10. Everything [Partial]
11. You Learn
12. Would Not Come [Partial]
13. Smiling
14. I Remain [Partial]
15. Rest [Acoustic]
16. Flinch [Acoustic]
17. Mary Jane [Acoustic]
18. Ironic
19. Are You Still Mad [Partial]
20. All I Really Want
21. Sympathetic Character [Partial]
22. You Oughta Know
Encore:
23. Uninvited
24. Thank U
Scores:
Lùisa: B
Alanis Morissette: B-
Thanks to Alyssa!
No comments:
Post a Comment