Yann Tiersen & Asobi Seksu @ Irving Plaza, NYC - pics

April 19, 2009

“at yann tiersen, irving plaza with, probably, every french person in new york city.” – Soraya Darabi

“the good news is that we got there early enough to watch the whole thing in the very front! the bad news is : yann + an electric guitar + band – his violin = major midlife crisis. i love this man, but it was awful.

he DID move me to tears when he finally picked the violin up for sur le fil – but 99.9% of the time was alt. rock hell. he even managed to butcher the amelie theme beyond recognition. & there was no piano. or accordion.

why yann, why?! i miss the good ol’ days” [photobear]

I never saw Yann during the good ol’ days. In fact, Amelie aside, I never even listened to Yann in the old days or the new days, but I do agree that the show wasn’t what I expected, and it wasn’t that exciting. You can see in the pic above that Yann was getting his Thurston on. “Awful” is kind of strong, but maybe that’s because I like “alt rock”, though I think my issue was that it wasn’t “alt” enough, which I took more as a sign that I went to the wrong show. I wished I was at the Walkmen or Throbbing Gristle’s 1st NYC performance – both shows happened the same night (4/16). Oh yeah, the violen parts were the best.

Asobi Seksu are on tour with Yann, and they sounded great as the opener (their first-ever show at the venue). A few of their songs sounded really great on the sound system – a few were so-so. All in all, I’m glad they were there. More pictures from the show (and yes there were a lot of French people there) below…