Who: Cigarettes After Sex
Where: Brighton Music Hall (Allston, MA)
If You Like: Beach House, The Cranberries, Cocteau Twins, Alvvays, Mazzy Star, The Sundays or Lana Del Ray
I intended to start this article describing in great detail the grandeur of the venue, but soon realized that it would be mostly lies or at the very least an over exaggeration of the Brighton Music Hall as some clandestine and avant-garde hole in the wall. Yes, the venue was small and somewhat tucked away in its surroundings, but it is certainly not a secret. And the Brighton Music Hall itself is not that great, but it has the essentials: an excellent sound system (something I'm not used to experiencing in small venues) and an intimacy perfect for the sad, heart-aching melodies of Cigarettes After Sex.
Less than five months ago, Cigarettes After Sex didn’t have a Spotify profile, and concert tickets for the Brooklyn-based dream pop band ranged from 16-20 dollars apiece. Though far from new (their first EP, "I." debuted in 2008), their quick ascendance from around 3,000 views a video to millions can be attributed to virtual word of mouth through Soundcloud and YouTube recommendations and a featuring of their song "Nothing's Gonna Hurt You Baby" on Hulu's Emmy award winning miniseries "The Handmaid's Tale". Because of this, I am grateful to have bought my tickets early, but most importantly to have heard Greg Gonzalez's ethereal, transfixing voice in the intimacy of a small venue stiff with Robert Smith and Annie Clark wannabes, rather than TD Garden or even Boston's House of Blues.
Cigarettes After Sex songs are elegiac odes to lost lovers and heartbreak. Like The Cure, even the most seemingly upbeat of songs are filled with uncertainties like in "Each Time You Fall in Love" or the painful and chaotic complexities of relationships and adoring one single person such is the case in "Apocalypse". In an interview with Noisey, Gonzalez claimed 60's French pop star Françoise Hardy to have had a heavy influence on the band's sound, but the French influence doesn’t stop there. The artwork chosen for "I." and "Affection", Cigarettes After Sex's earliest EPs, are Man Ray photos ("Necklace" and "Feather"). All of their later EPs, while not the works of the American expatriate himself, are in the fashion of Man Ray's photography, and depict soft caresses and subtleties in high contrast. They are a band worth seeing live, and worth seeing very soon before their venues become any larger (and, as always, their fans become obnoxiously mainstream).
