MS MR – The Venue – Wednesday, October 23, 2013

This review was written for and first published by Concert Addicts. Photos, including the one below, are copyright of Jamie Taylor.  
 
I’d been wanting to check out MS MR since I first heard Hurricane on my go-to Seattle alternative rock station months ago. That voice. Getting to review them was my opportunity to check out their other songs, as I only ever hear that song, so this suited me to a T.

To prepare the audience for the group’s arrival, the loosely packed house heard Wildcat Wildcat. They are a 4-piece: keyboards/auxiliary percussion, bass, drums, primary keyboards. They begin without much fanfare; at 9 pm the house lights darken and the band begins to play. During the set, the audience find out that they are from Los Angeles and that they just released an EP. To me, they appear to be a bit of an experiment in whether a guitar is an absolute necessity for making pop-rock, but what a guitar – acoustic or electric – brings is a nice hard edge at times and focus at others. To continue the analogy, this band is all round: atmospheric pop-rock, stylistically, it’s as though Atlas Genius replaced the sound that is identifiably ‘theirs’ with a keyboard. Wildcat Wildcat do make good use of the instruments they have – there’s no surplus. There’s no single lead singer; the bass player and the primary keyboardist spell off one another for parts and everyone does back-up vocals. They’re not bad. Theirs isn’t really music to dance to, but it’s got a nice groove to it and it’s certainly music to move to. Wildcat Wildcat’s 40-minute set comprised 9 songs. They extend thank yous after every couple of songs, say what a nice city Vancouver is, and that they hope to be back.

Between bands, it’s an almost non-stop arrival of people arriving and they’re heading for the dance floor. Although the mezzanine has a healthy row of people clear around the railings, the floor is where the attendees of this sold-out show wanted to be.

At around 10 past 10, MS MR and their 2 colleagues Curtis and Zac walked onstage. One of them a multi-tasker at a second keyboard station, where he also plays bass guitar and provides backing vocals; the other, a drummer. At the first notes of Bones, already a multitude of mobile phones are held up, so I’m silently hopeful people get it out of their systems now, and maybe they just wanted to get a photo of Lizzie Plapinger in her pink plush rug of a coat. You’ve got to have confidence in spades and a certain attitude to wear a costume like that, and with her multicoloured hair, a shape many women would happily starve themselves for (please don’t), and command of the audience – in addition to the aforementioned voice, yup, she’s got it goin’ on. With just her striking presence, our MS holds the audience captive and they are as putty. The drums on No Trace provide lovely dramatic elements to contrast with the vocals. Next was Salty Sweet, or as I called it, ‘the clappy one’ because of its syncopation. Rhythmically, I think by just the way the bass line goes, I’m reminded of The English Beat. Between this song and the next one, Lizzie tells the audience how happy they were to be back in Vancouver, to be the headlining here, and to have it be a sold-out show. In some ways, she seems a little incredulous of it, but immensely grateful, as Max Hershenow was also happy to say – oh, and she’s a nose-crinkler when she smiles! 

Max introduces the next song BTSK, the audience sounds very happy. What a mood piece this is – sustained chords on one side, staccato notes on the other, gelling nicely with the long drawn-out phrasing – you can’t hear her inhale so the combination creates a rather haunting, even hypnotic effect. For Fantasy the audience sings along for quite a bit of it, and not just during the chorus. Max had introduced it as being from their 1st album, Secondhand Rapture (GREAT title, BTW). It has a similar structure to No Trace in that it has wonderful percussive elements during it, particularly for the chorus, but the bridge of the overlapping oh-oh-oh, is also percussive and provides a base for Lizzie to weave in and out of their rhythm. I like it. Small wonder it was a single. The next song was introduced as the new single: Think of You – which an enterprising DJ could totally do a mash-up with Kim Wilde’s Keep Me Hangin’ On (or the Supremes original) because that’s a lot of what I’m hearing here. Speaking of covers, MS MR have a cover of Do I Wanna Know by the Arctic Monkeys to offer next. Bias alert: I LOVE this song. MS MR manage to make it their own, they don’t repeat it note for note, syllable by syllable (though ‘summat in your teeth’ sounds odd out of the mouth of a New Yorker, but that’s the lyric), BUT, remember my earlier comment about how sometimes you need a guitar to provide an edge? For this song, the guitar riff borders on the iconic and it gets under your skin. It MAKES this song. MS MR tries to get under your skin using what they have, which isn’t paltry, but I prefer the Arctic Monkeys. In all fairness, I don’t know if the audience would agree with me on that score. 

Head is not my Home is a fun, upbeat number. Lizzie flashes her happy, crinkle-grin, when the audience spontaneously echoes the oh-oohs back to her. In this song, I can see where people make the comparison between Lizzie and Florence Welsh in vocal style. I think the difference is that Lizzie can be a lot more subtle with her control, whereas Florence Welsh just belts it out. There’s little finesse, she just hits you over the head (or ears) with how much power she can put behind a note: her album’s called Lungs, for Pete’s sake. She’s got a set, that’s for sure, but so does the artist I’m listening to this evening, and, I gotta say, I’m with Team Lizzie. Florence & the Machine seem to put more focus on Welsh’s voice, by contrast, Plapinger’s voice seems more organic, nestled in with the entire ‘soundscape’, as it were.

Between songs Max mentions that this is the second-to-last day of the tour, having started in Montreal, and how much they really enjoy playing in Canada – that the audience is really affectionate here. If anyone in the audience was blushing, I couldn’t tell. For This isn’t Control, it’s just Max and Lizzie on stage. I love how positively twinkly the keyboard sounds for this song. Actually, I like it all around. They segue right into Dark Doo Wop, which is exactly that.. There’s an immediate response from the audience when it starts. There’s also a nice bit of tension when we get to the chorus repeats and push from the cymbals (MS MR’s friends were only off-stage for the one song).

Max introduces Ash Tree Lane as one of the first songs he ever wrote. I like it – it has a nice flow to it, and the drums are really the pulse of this song, for a bar or two, and not just once during the song, those quarter notes on the drum are the only thing you hear. The next song was a cover, originally done by LCD Soundsystem but this time I don’t actually know that I know the original, so I can take this one at face value. As with the other cover, it’s very much in line with their style. Talk about making it your own – if Max hadn’t said that it was one, I might not have known. From where it is in the set, it’s a last-gasp chance for the band to engage the audience and they respond: it’s very much a “dance, clappy-clappy, yay” song for them.

To close the show, Hurricane, is introduced as a song that means a lot to Lizzie and Max personally and that they think it’s great that it seems a lot to the audience. For me, it’s also the only song I know well enough to sing along to with the rest of the audience, and it’s the song that for the first few times I heard it, I had to stop everything and look up the artist name. As far as drawing you in, dang, they’re GOOD! They also mention that there wouldn’t be an encore. Perhaps this is one of the hazards of being a new-ish and successful band: you’ve only got so much material? As for the performance, those lovely low notes on the keyboard vibrate through the floor and by having the two male voices for the chorus made the song sound ever so much richer.

That was the show – I’ve seen their music style described as ‘dream pop’ and it definitely has atmosphere, creates ambiance. In a way, it’s ethereal but don’t let that lull you; lyrically they can get ‘down and dirty’ as in BTSK and explore darker themes in others. To my ears, this group is more about the overall ‘sound’ and experimenting within it and testing the limits of that atmosphere, than making their songs distinctively different from one another. As I was packing up at just after 11 pm, I heard one person after another saying “OMG, that was so good” or “OMG, I thought I was going to pass out”. It was a very good show; a very genuine show. I got the impression that amongst all the artifice that happens outside of a gig, MS MR are very much “What You See Is What You Get”, and what we saw and got was a really good night of music.

Setlist:
Bones
No Trace
Salty Sweet
BTSK
Fantasy
Think of You
Do I Wanna Know
Head is not my Home
This isn’t Control
Dark Doo Wop
Ash Tree Lane
Dance Yrself Clean
Hurricane