Cigarettes After Sex: a soft, melodic and dreamy live performance

FUnfortunately it is a pleasant surprise to see the Unipol Forum in Milan full of people (declared sold out) for the concert of Cigarettes After Sex which last year filled the Fabrique in Milan (therefore with very different numbers). A full house announced a couple of weeks before the event. It is a predominantly young audience, a “stylish” minority and above all among the many there is a large foreign presence. English is the most spoken language but there are also many languages ​​from Northern Europe. With casual encounters between foreigners waiting to enter for the concert. This is a condition that does not always occur during performances by foreign artists.

Apart from this note, those who go to see Cigarettes After Sex (who for the occasion presented their latest album “X’s” released last July) already know what to expect, they know their music (right down to singing the songs welcoming their hit with a roar). The Forum audience knows above all the atmospheres and sensations that listening induces. The American trio is famous for its dream pop atmospheres, dreamy, melancholic, enveloping and almost hypnotic.

Even live they maintain what you hear on record. The setting, the sound and emotional design of their music does not differ, it does not become anything else, it remains anchored to the imagery they want to represent.

Greg Gonzalez (vocals and electric guitar), Randall Miller (low) e Jacob Tomsky (drums) put themselves on stage, in an essential show from a visual point of view, all played on black & white, without colored lights. Be careful because essential in this case does not mean sparse, but rather devoid of any superfluous frills that “deviate” from the musical lines. The latter are guided by harmonies built on electric guitar arpeggios that create a soft carpet, deep bass lines and precise drums, never muscular or out of line. Gonzalez’s vocal melodies then spread over all this, offering epic moments of great involvement and depth. In the general musical proposal of the trio it is precisely these melodies that make the difference, marking the songs that remain more monotonous in the harmonic part.

The result is a warm, enveloping, melodic sound that does not descend into sadness or depression, but rather leads to an emotional suspension. The atmospheres are rarefied, intimate, dreamy and the texts draw pictures that must also be imagined in black and white.

The concert takes the listener into a delicate, soft world, the melodies follow each other while singing. In general everything lives on emotion, on “sensations” and on emotional rather than physical involvement. There is no one who sweats, certainly not the three protagonists on stage, who are not stage “animals”, nor the spectators, who are more engaged in an intellectual than physical sense.

Yet despite its slowness, its essentiality, the evident absence of a “spectacle form”, it is difficult not to be enchanted by the performance of Cigarettes After Sex, to be captured by their yearning or fascinated by Gonzalez’s warm and seductive vocal timbre.

It should be noted that the concert also works because it lasts about eighty minutes, 17 songs which are the right limit for listening to CAS. Furthermore, the risk of attention decay would be high. The three (especially the frontman) lack a bit of empathy and at times, despite the warm atmosphere they create, they appear a bit cold, cold, haughty in their relationship with the public. Evidently they prefer to “keep the music going” rather than certain somewhat pandering “coaxes”.

No spectacular concessions, no “tinsel” that distracts from the essence of the music accompanies the concert. The lights are strictly white and at the beginning of the show the band performs (with Gonzalez hidden behind sunglasses) against a black backdrop. After a few songs, the image of a full moon emerging from the clouds appears on the screen behind the trio. This will be the only concession to the visual part, occupied for most of the time by a close-up of the singer-guitarist strictly in B&W. Some elements of entertainment are provided by the public who often illuminate the Forum with their telephone torches.

The Cigarettes After Sex prove to be good and warm, relaxing and engaging, bewitching and melancholy, to be listened to while getting lost in the melodies with your eyes closed (perhaps with an “after” cigarette between your fingers).

Ladder

X’s
You’re All I Want
Dark Vacation
Pistol
Nothing’s Gonna Hurt You Baby
Touch
Falling in Love
Tejano Blue
John Wayne
Cry
Sweet
Sunsetz
Heavenly
K.
Dreaming of You
Apocalypse
Opera House