Social media can be frustrating. Sometime yesterday, my friend Ellie W. posted something like /But with the emptiness of loss comes a freeing up of space inside for hope./ and I got so excited because it’s exactly the right quote to lead into this Basia Bulat show review, but now she’s deleted it. Still, it’s a beautiful line and the sentiment sticks with me. AND SO THE INTERNET MAKES IT LIVE FOREVER.

I’m a joyful human, but it’s no secret that I live for Sad Bastard music. Basia Bulat’s new record Tall Tall Shadow (Secret City Records, 2013) scratches both itches deliciously. Written around a year of mourning the loss of a friend, the formerly acoustic singer-songwriter gets loud, edgy, and electric. If you’ve ever locked yourself in the bathroom with Beck’s Sea Change and watched yourself cry in the mirror until you laughed at your own self-involved ridiculousness, this record will be your new best friend. (Just me? Really? Whatever, try it, it’s cathartic).

So you can imagine I was a little concerned about the public meltdown I was likely to endure, watching a very real person sing about powerful and dangerous feelings on one of my favorite stages on a Friday night. Did I cry? Oh yes. But I was also smiling, weirdly proud of the way we (as people, as artists) can spin suffering into something pretty enough to save someone else from suffering of their own.

Who can be sad when a 60-something couple sits in the front row, the wife snapping her fingers to the beat, the husband sipping from a PBR tallboy? With the full backing band, Basia Bulat indie-popped like a pro. I never got to see Basia’s all acoustic sets, but she seemed just as comfortable with electric organs and vocal effects as she does with her autoharp and her tiny charango.

She sang “Paris or Amsterdam” on stage by herself and wrecked faces with the worst of the strongsad. But for “The Shore,” an off-stage band member brought her a Green Bay Packers stool and she sat with her autoharp on her lap and played it with a small mallet. The novelty of the pretty noise distracted mercifully from the sadness of the song.

I thought “Tall Tall Shadow” would be the final song, but she chose to end with the somber and reflective “Never Let Me Go.” When the song wrapped, the audience rose from their seats to give a well-deserved standing ovation. Basia managed to look genuinely surprised, but there’s no way they haven’t gotten the same reception everywhere. Basia Bulat’s music is the real crack Toronto should be famous for. She never left the stage, saying thank you over and over, then sliding straight into the encore. About a quarter of the audience clapped out a rhythm for her during “Before I Knew,” though it kind of threw off the song a bit, it was still sweet.

She ended the show with a reminder to her fans that she hadn’t strayed too far from where she started, with a song she said she had vowed to stop singing, “Hush,” with which she used to open every show. She sang without a microphone, stomping and clapping for rhythm.

As Basia sings in the title track of her new record, “You can’t run away when the tall, tall shadow is yours,” but if you run toward the light instead of away from it, you can’t really see that shadow anymore, and sometimes not being able to see it is good enough.

SETLIST
City with No Rivers
Promise Not to Think About Love
Gold Rush
[can’t read my own handwriting, sorry]

Five, Four
Paris or Amsterdam
Little Waltz
The Shore
Snakes and Ladders
Wires
Someone
Tall Tall Shadow
Never Let Me Go

Encore
Before I Knew
In the Night
Hush

Opener Foreign Fields played St. Louis for the first time last night, and I’m glad they got a great introduction to our city. If you’ve never seen them, think Simon and Garfunkel + William Fitzsimmons. It works! Loved their first song with its loop of tiny birds chirping. Hope they make it back here soon.