DIANA at the Great Hall, Thursday, September 26. Rating: NNN
Thursday night’s Great Hall show was both a homecoming for local synth-pop quartet DIANA (they’ve been touring in the states) and a slightly delayed album release party (their debut record came out in August).
The mood was celebratory, and the band seemed appropriately loose and at ease for their 50-minute set. (They thought about extending it with an encore, singer Carmen Elle told us, but they don’t have enough songs.)
Elle hasn’t lost the rocker aesthetic she honed as a guitarist in Whoremoans and Army Girls. Despite telling NOW she shed the instrument for DIANA to focus on singing, she hunched over a guitar for much of the show, chin-length bob covering her face, adding rocker edge to her dreamy vocals. That breathy, ethereal voice floated beautifully the whole set, but was especially effective for Born Again, which conveyed the most genuine emotion of the band’s poppy tunes.
Stealing the show from Elle, however, were Joseph Shabason’s sax solos, the best of which arrived with great applause during Perpetual Surrender, DIANA’s signature tune. Shabason is pretty awesome to watch, alternating between keys and sax, shoulders grooving the entire time. It would have been nice if the Great Hall crowd did a little more to match that band’s energy. It’s true, some songs do recall the final slow dance in the last scene of a John Hughes movie, but certainly they merit more dancing than the gentle sway the audience put forth.
As much as Elle and Shabason are the onstage focal points, the entire band completely and wholeheartedly embraces and embodies the unique soft-rock-jazz-pop subgenre DIANA have carved out for themselves, right down to their styling and body movement. Impressive, especially for a band that came together piece by piece. With DIANA, there is a refreshing lack of pretension and it’s overwhelmingly apparent that trying to be cool is the furthest thing from their minds. Alternatively, being 100 per cent true to themselves seems to be their mission, which, of course, is the coolest thing of all.
