ALLIE X @ PARADISE ROCK CLUB 10/31
Photography by Ashley Hernandez
Canadian pop singer Allie X performed at Boston’s Paradise Rock Club on October 31 as a part of her tour to promote her latest and most successful to-date album, “Girl With No Face.” Entirely self-produced, the album is notably dark and cold in atmosphere, featuring expressive lyrical imagery pertaining to the human body and feelings of alienation. I found these themes to be particularly appropriate for the date of the show, which is on Halloween Day. Indeed, as I walked into the venue, I immediately noticed the number of people wearing all sorts of costumes, most of which were in line with the rather gothic atmosphere of “Girl With No Face.”
After a gloomy yet ethereal set from opener Maiah Manser to set the tone for the evening, Allie X was able to immediately draw the audience’s attention with a much more visceral form of darkness. In the opening song, as the music transformed from a slow build-up to a rather sudden explosive chorus, Allie X also turns her previously back-turned body around to face the audience for the first time in the show. The next song, “Weird World,” perfectly released the tension created by the opening performance and was complemented by appropriate stage lighting. Compared to the studio version, the live performance of the song’s second verse featured a slightly edited production that sounded more ominous, delivering the song’s themes of disappointment and alienation from patriarchal society in an even more effective way.
It soon became clear that Allie X was craftful with her adaptations to the live setting. “Galina,” a personal favorite of mine and many other listeners from the album, featured a keyboard-only opening verse that felt particularly intimate in front of the densely packed audience of the small venue, setting up the chorus’s passionate calls of “Galina, wake up!”. By the final chorus of the song, the audience was singing the phrase even more passionately than Allie X herself. Another example is her performance of “John and Jonathan,” a song dealing with her relationship with her fans and their impact on her self-esteem. During the line “When I’m on stage, they all cheer for me,” Allie X gestured towards the crowd, which the crowd immediately reciprocated and loudly cheered for her, contributing to the song’s thematic expressions.
I was even more impressed by the formal and tonal diversity of Allie X’s vocal performances. Throughout the show, Allie X never shied away from delivering intense, elongated vocals that held sincere emotional weight. In songs such as “Black Eye” and “Girl With No Face,” her visceral screams were particularly effective, with the latter one genuinely startling me for more than a few seconds before I could resume my attention to the show. Unfortunately, the song’s guitar solo outro performance, which is my favorite section from the studio version of this song, was hindered by poor mixing that made the guitar tone sound oddly flat.
The main section of the show ended with “Off With Her T*ts,” introduced by Allie X to the audience as her “c**tiest song,” which only made it more suitable as a concert closer for her. Indeed, the singer delivered phrases such as the song’s title and “stop the ridicule,” both of which are already notably forthright, with even more power in the live setting, making the performance particularly strong in attitude.
The general consensus of “Girl With No Face” as Allie X’s most acclaimed album was, perhaps somewhat unfortunately, entirely on-point for me, as I found most of the songs from her older projects that she performed to be much more amateur in songwriting, even though she performed them with just as much passion as her recent work. One exception, however, is the first encore song, “Susie Save Your Love,” which evoked a much more subtle atmosphere that contrasted with the overarching darkness of the main set. The encore closed with “Girl With No Face”’s album closer “Truly Dreams,” another song with a more positive atmosphere that acted as a suitable ending point for the concert. I was overjoyed when I realized that even though I did not partake in traditional Halloween activities such as dressing up in costumes or trick-or-treating, the atmosphere and imagery that Allie X’s show evoked for me was just as appropriate for the holiday.
