Austra, Grimes, and Black Lodge at The Earl (Pictures)

Don't fear - Rocktober is officially dead and over - stick a fork in it and see for yourself - and I'm not going to cling to it (too much, but it really was great), but before moving back to the normal postings, here as promised (threatened?) are a final set of pictures from Sunday night's show at The Earl, starting with the opener, Atlanta's Black Lodge.

This is a very young, very new band, apparently just getting started.  It's actually a privilege to get to see a young, new band still learning how to command a stage, how to get the balance right, and how to keep an audience entertained.  This is how you learn - get a chance to play at The Earl, do your absolute best, and see what went right, what mistakes were made, and how things can be improved.

Statistically, it's most likely this band will not make it very far.  Members might get a chance to join other bands, or they'll get frustrated by the long road ahead, or just lose interest in the project altogether.  But every band started this way, playing in front of a cold bar full of strangers who've never heard of them, so already they're no further behind than any of their peers.

Grimes:

Montreal's Grimes set up on stage and did her sound check wearing a big winter coat, but things heated up quickly as her music kicked in and everyone started dancing, led by her "designated dancer" Duffy, who was in the audience getting the enthusiastic crowd moving.  

Really cool bangs.

Claire Boucher (Grimes) has an amazing, four octave voice that she often keeps in the higher registers for a "little girl" pop sound that nicely fits the dance groove of her music.  With all her electronics on stage, it was hard to tell how much of her vocal sound was altered and how much organic, but does it matter?

I thoroughly enjoyed her set, and was sincerely sorry to hear it have to come to an end.  It would be great to hear her as a headliner some day, where she could stretch out a little more and play a little longer.  But then again, my favorite band is always the one on stage at the moment.

Austra:

Scary bass dude behind one of Austa's two back-up singers.

This was a truly great show.  Visually arresting and musically propulsive, there was always something going on to hold your attention.

Singer and frontwoman Katie Stelmanis' operatic background and training was obvious, not only in the sheer power of her voice, but in the careful, nuanced way that she shaped her mouth and throat for each sound, deliberately forming and bending each note as an instrumentalist might.  

Austra's two back-up singers are sisters Sari and Romy Lightman, who also have a solo project called Tasseomancy.  In the background is drummer Maya Postepski.

The scary bass dude is Dorian Wolf.

All music, without exception, is a direct expression of the buddha-dharma.

Katie Stelmanis at the merch table after the show, flanked by Grimes' designated dancer Duffy.

Austra, The Earl, Atlanta

Last concert of Rocktober 2011, and the fifth one of this week alone.  By my count, I've seen 49 different bands since September 20th (counting two separate performances at different venues by Yellow Ostrich as two, not one, act), not including all of those hard-working and deserving but largely anonymous bands working the various stages at the East Atlanta Strut and L5P Halloween Parade.  Tomorrow is Halloween - time to finally conclude Rocktober and get back on with my so-called life.

One of the themes that's run through this series of concerts has been bands dominated by powerful female singers, from Glasser back on September 20th, and continuing on through Thao, Wye Oak, Zola Jesus, Saint Vincent, and Atlanta's Featureless Ghost.  Many of these bands, particularly Glasser and Zola Jesus, set the warmth and femininity of their vocals against colder electronic instrumentation.  Tonight's show, featuring artists Austra and Grimes, continued that trend,and may have been one of the best shows of Rocktober.

Pictures soon.

The opening act this evening was Black Lodge, an Atlanta band named for that extradimensional epicenter of evil in Twin Peaks, who provided a goth variation on the theme.  The quartet features two bassists, keyboards and drums.  They're a new band and looked quite, quite young as they employed ominous synth lines and deep, minimalistic bass for a sound that helps the band live up to the gloomy connotations of its name.  Do I even need to even tell you that they all dressed in black?  Did I mention tomorrow is Halloween?

Grimes, the avant-pop solo project of Montreal singer, keyboardist, and artist Claire Boucher, is on tour with Austra and followed Black Lodge.

Grimes draws upon a diverse collection of influences as she experiments with loops and a stratospheric falsetto (she says she listened to Mariah Carey's Heartbreaker to learn how to sing over four octaves).  She performed solo, except for a dancer (Duffy) who worked the crowd.  But the dance beat was the driving force in her music, and just because she works in a pop format doesn't mean she has to stop being interesting and intelligent.  There's an eerie, supernatural undercurrent to her songs and the moody instrumentation surrounding them.

Like Zola Jesus, Katie Stelmanis, co-founder and lead singer of Toronto's Austra, had studied as an opera singer before migrating to rock. She took piano and violin lessons and, as a child, sang with the Canadian Opera Company. Later, after years of private lessons, she was set to study opera in college, but deep down inside, Ms. Stelmanis says she knew she didn’t want to move to Montreal but stay in Toronto and make "classical music with really fucked up, distorted, crazy shit on there." This realization eventually led her to abandon school, discover electronica, and form Austra, which now includes Dorian Wolf on bass and Maya Postepski on percussion.

The songs are guided by Stelmanis' haunting voice and orchestrated entirely with sleek analog synths. It's a throbbing, beat-heavy mix of stylish, emotionally remote synth-pop that's both unsettling and alluring, but always danceable.

Tonight, her operatic background was evident in the intensity and strength of her singing.  There's a point somewhere around the 2:45 minute mark in her song The Beat and the Pulse where her voice goes into a sort of overdrive.  In concert, she spent most of her time singing with that kind of intensity, and actually seemed to have to hold herself back during the earlier part of the song for dramatic effect before she returned to her normal stride.  She was that good.

Ra Ra Riot, The Earl, Atlanta

It's almost the end of Rocktober, which has seemed to last a short eternity - sometimes time seems to go fast and we feel that our lives are rushing past us, and other times it seems to go slower. Right now, Rocktober feels like it's lasted for months and months, and last September's Bumbershoot and MFNW feel like a year ago.  I like it when time goes slow.

Tonight's Rocktober show was Ra Ra Riot, Delicate Steve and Yellow Ostrich at The Earl.  Alert readers will recall that we saw Yellow Ostrich earlier this Rocktober (although it seems like so much longer ago), opening for The Antlers at the misbegotten Masquerade, where they were almost drowned out by the racket coming from upstairs.  This evening was Atlanta's chance to redeem itself for such poor hospitality, and my chance to actually hear Yellow Ostrich perform, rather than just see them perform.

As before, Alex Schaaf made prodigious use of repeaters, layering vocal tracks over each other until he created virtual choirs of his lone voice, while his bassist and one-man horn section, Jon Natchez, did about the same.

New Jersey's Delicate Steve performed between opener Yellow Ostrich and headliner Ra Ra Riot. Delicate Steve plays instrumental rock somewhere between jam-band improvisation and spaced-out psychedelia, with some tribal drumming and surf guitar thrown in the mix for good measure.  He had a five-piece band with him, including a second guitar, a bassist, a multi-instrumental keyboardist, and a standing drummer (something I'm seeing more and more of this year).

Near the end of the set, Delicate Steve had Jon Natchez of Yellow Ostrich join them on stage to add some baritone sax to the eclectic, anything-goes sound

The evening's headliners were Ra Ra Riot, who recently appeared on the Jimmy Fallon tee-vee show.

So we were all familiar with their songs and their sound, and those of us close to the stage could see the set list and thought we knew what to expect.

What no one saw coming and nobody expected was the band to come on stage dressed in their Halloween costumes.  They performed in costume for their entire set.

Speaking of Halloween, there was also this guy from last night.