Music seen at SPACE Gallery, November 24, 2007
By CHRISTOPHER GRAY | November 28, 2007
About 200 people gathered at SPACE Gallery on Saturday night, paying a Dedication Necessary $12 to see one half of a duo you aren’t likely to ever hear on mainstream radio (and, for full disclosure’s sake, I have never heard at all). Of those 200, I knew one. What I’m trying to get at is that Boston’s Dresden Dolls are a big-league cult duo, Amanda Palmer is their sorceress, and her fans come out from all kinds of woodwork to see her.
I opened the door, pretty much on time (as Portland concerts go), to raucous cheers and hollers. Opener Jason Webley was already a third done with his set of accordion drinking songs. In good-natured brown top-hat, brown vest and with what’s essentially a Satan goatee with a matted-down handlebar mustache, Webley controlled the audience. He told funny jokes, mandated mildly complicated audience sing-a-longs, had everyone stick their index fingers in the air and spin around twelve times (“cheapest way to get wasted,” he says), and played accordion-driven drinking songs sung with a precise mix of fury and brio. Webley’s set — accompanied by Palmer for a couple of songs (they pretend their side project, Evelyn Evelyn, consists of Siamese-twin friends of theirs, to riotous effect) — was the energetic highlight of the show, but it scarcely mattered to Palmer and the audience: he just set a high pedestal for her to rest upon.
As for her — dressed down relative to DD standards, in cute white shirt, amazingly complicated hair styling, and black dots centering her bottom eyelids — she sang about a dozen really smart and open relationship songs, played on a keyboard that broke a little more with every song (seven bum notes by set’s end). On occasion, she’d pop open a question box from the merch table and answer questions from her fans. She owned them, and she sold me. I’ve got a new old band to check out.
Related:
Rock-and-roll circus, Tracks of her tears, All Dolled up, More 
- Rock-and-roll circus
“We’ll fuck up a lot, that’s just the way it is,” said the evening’s MC/entertainer, Sxip Shirey, adding that everyone in the crowd should “feel free to fart.”
- Tracks of her tears
There are tears but no onions in The Onion Cellar. But who needs emotionally catalytic root vegetables when you have the Dresden Dolls?
- All Dolled up
Last night, Amanda Palmer kicked off this season of the Boston Pops EdgeFest.
- Avant gardening
A Web site that’s hosted everyone from the Dresden Dolls to Diamanda Galás and Tortoise brings an international festival to Arlington.
- The Dresden Dolls
No, Virginia ranks with Elvis Costello’s Taking Liberties as a B-sides/leftovers album that turns out to be more fun and more revealing than a thought-out official release.
- Growing pains
So much has happened for the Dresden Dolls over the past year that it’s no surprise the duo fared so well in this year’s Best Music Poll.
- All dolled up
We have seen the face of Boston rock and roll, and it’s got painted-on eyebrows.
- Fun Funeral Rite
Now it can be revealed: Amanda Palmer has a stage mom.
- Playlist: May 25, 2007
Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991, Heavier than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain, Songwriters on Songwriting, and more.
- Boston music news: August 10, 2007
The Dresden Dolls played Cyndi Lauper’s “True Colors” tour this summer.
- Eat it, High School Musical!
It's a Thursday afternoon at Lexington High, and 20 or so students have congregated in a music room surrounded by racks of folding chairs and sporting a sleek black Steinway baby grand.
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Topics:
New England Music News
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, Celebrity News, Entertainment, Dresden Dolls, Chris Gray, Jason Webley, Less
