Live Review: Charlotte Gainsbourg @ The Bell House (Jan. 19th)

I’m a bit behind today. Sorry for that, but I have spent the morning scrolling through all the various blogs and websites that attended last night’s Charlotte Gainsbourg show at The Bell House and I kind of feel like the coverage of the event has been blown out of proportion. Now I understand that last night was Charlotte’s first ever New York performance and likely her first ever show for paying customers, but just because of the special nature of the performance and the fact that Wayne Coyne showed up to watch the show does not make it the greatest concert of all time as all the other sites would have you believe. Instead what we saw on The Bell House stage last night was a performer that was nervous, quiet, and terribly shy - spending most of the set hiding behind her hair while standing at the microphone and the other half sitting on a stool gently crooning along with her band.

Starting with opening act Dean & Britta, the show last night was a subtle affair with hushed, whispering that took the place of singing, and a sound system that was as quiet as I have heard in New York in ages. For the opening set most of the crowd provided a huge din that over shadowed the nuance of Dean & Britta and forced their set to be skewed by my disdain over the folks that spent $30 just to have a conversation. Normally that doesn’t matter when I go to shows, the sound system is usually so loud you couldn’t talk over it if you tried, but last night was meant to be something else and I truly wish people would have been able to restrain themselves from ruining a performance that could have been somewhat magical.

For Charlotte the crowd was far more respectful, choosing to call out or chat briefly only between songs and offering their complete attention as the songs played. And the music needed that type of reverence to even reach you as Charlotte sang so quietly for the majority of her set. Her band seems fully capable of transforming the nuanced sounds of her record to a coherent and lovely sound on stage, but Charlotte Gainsbourg seems too shy for the stage. Her whispery vocals worked at times, particularly when the song called for that sort of sound, but on the bigger songs like "IRM" and "Heaven Can Wait" I thought she would loosen up a little more than she did.

Still, we will give her credit, the songs she has put together with the help of Beck are devastatingly beautiful and they do come across that way in her performance. A little less bass, a little more vocals, and maybe some excitement here and there and we would have been raving about this show till we went in the grave, for now we will say we thoroughly enjoyed the set but the raving from other folks is just a bit over blown for the show we all witnessed last night.