With a successful day one in the books, the second day of PYGMALION carried lofty expectations. Sept. 20 managed to draw on the momentum and deliver enthralling performances with Madison Moore’s “Pump the Beat: Queer Nightlife at the Edge” and X Ambassador’s new album, “Townie.”
Although we casted a smaller net for Sept. 20, Gallery Art Bar and Canopy Club formed great storehouses for the array of talent PYGMALION offered. Here is the sweet and sour of day two.
A Glimpse of Queer Night Life – Gallery Art Bar
PYGMALION continues to give a platform to queer culture. Last year, Seth Fein and Patrick Singer invited Alaska 5000 and Monet X Change, two RuPaul’s Drag Race All-Stars winners, to perform at Krannert Center for the Performing Arts. Though 2023’s PYGMALION brought in the aforementioned big names, this year, specifically local performers provided safe spaces for the LGBTQ+ community to live freely and authentically.
The assortment of live DJs, heart-filled stories and a panel of drag performers, made Gallery Art Bar a great place to get a glimpse into queer nightlife.
A late start didn’t stop the Art Bar’s first performer, Black Liberation Sound System, from accomplishing their mission: to get the crowd up and moving. Powerful, playful basslines and percussive elements interwoven with poetic sound bites felt appropriate for the Gallery Art Bar’s mixed-media artwork.
The genre-bending house-focused beats eventually gave way to Madison Moore’s “performance lecture,” which turned out to be a highly informative yet entirely engaging mix of history, personal tales and communal hardships.
Moore made expert use of the Gallery’s projectors and sound system to elevate what was already a lecture full of emotion and hard truths. From a mother finding love through roller skating to the ups and downs of landmark gay clubs, Moore interwove deeply personal stories with the fibers of LGBTQ+ history seamlessly.
Likewise, the feeling of community never seemed to wane. Whether the crowd was on the dance floor or enraptured by Moore’s oratory, plenty of affirmative finger snapping, fan clacking and “Werk!” shouts were doled out consistently throughout the night.
Moore broke up engaging storytelling by inviting the audience to “twirl.” The crowd obliged without missing a beat, filing onto the floor the moment the opportunity arose.
Moore DJed into the transition of two panelists. Though there seemed to be no particular agenda, the two cackling along with the audience while dishing out stories entailing Ceduxion Carrington’s habit of adopting drag children to Adrian Rochelle’s journey through identity.
Toward the end of the panel, Carrington and Rochelle allowed audience members to field their questions, concerns and suggestion for the local queer community.
Overall, it was a night of sweaty dancing, vulnerable stories and most of all, a tight-knit yet welcoming community coming together for a night of fun.
X Ambassadors – Canopy Club
The X Ambassadors’s legacy has been outlined – or perhaps overshadowed – by two pop culture moments: “Unsteady” and “Renegades,” the latter of which aired as part of a Jeep campaign. However, the band refuses to stay within these bounds.
As live musicians and evolving lyricists, the group seeks to be more than just their mainstream successes.
The band’s frontman, Sam Nelson Harris assured The Line of Best Fit magazine that an evolution was on the horizon. Using their new alt-indie album, “Townie,” as a vehicle, the band sets out to become more refined as artists and more vulnerable as individuals.
Their most heartfelt and unguarded song of the night came in the form of “Your Town.” Detailing the lead singer’s complicated relationship with their rural hometown of Ithaca, New York, the song forms a bitterly triumphant portrait about “making it out” of a place too small for your ambitions.
There you were / Spinnin’ ‘round in your cardboard crown /
-“Your Town” by X Ambassadors
You said, “Congrats, you made it out, but
Don’t forget about your town / Don’t forget where you came from /
‘Cause you’re up then you’re down, come crashing back to Earth /
And there’s no one around”
“Your Town” begins with Harris’s integral early encouragement from a former teacher, Todd Peterson, and transitioning into the singer’s touch-and-go connection with the educator. One of Peterson’s last voicemails plays at the end of “Your Town,” congratulating the frontman and pouring out pride for the band’s success. Harris noted that he never got the chance to go visit Peterson nor his hometown.
In terms of content, this is as deep as they go. Since the band has been around for 15 years and in the spotlight for 10 of them, expectations were high for an album promising vulnerability in a musical climate where pop culture is littered with confessional songwriting.
Other performances from the new album included “Smoke on the Highway” and “Half-Life,” two songs that are on-the-nose and ignite flecks of imagery at the best of times.
“Half-Life,” which the band intended to be an heir to “Unsteady,” is maybe a step back. The song feels oddly impersonal and nonspecific, but enjoyable enough to sway along to.
Where X Ambassadors fall short in truly raw lyrics, they more than make up for in a live setting.
The band played the Canopy Club as if it were an extravagant arena. Harris is a well-practiced frontman beast of a lead singer. Support from Casey Harris (keys), Adam Levin (drums) and Russ Flynn (guitar/bass) created a compelling theatrical showcase that made it easy to become engrossed in the wash of music.
There are few earworms as catchy and frivolous as “My feet go boom boom boom / Boom boom boom (x2) / My heart beats boom boom boom / Boom boom boom (x2) / High speed go zoom zoom zoom.”
“Boom” feels engineered solely to be a repeatable, feel-good song and nothing else. X Ambassadors excels considerably in a live setting where dancing and inattentive joy sit at the top of priorities.
To date, the band has been the most energetic performances we have covered. The four members injected enough swagger into their storm of waving arms, whipping hair and strafing across the stage to appear as if they were performing for thousands instead of little more than half of the Canopy’s maximum capacity.
The mixing engineers also handled the four-piece’s antics better than the previous night’s performance, keeping levels balanced and mic issues nonexistent.
The band ultimately finished their set with a faithful, heart-filled rendition of “Unsteady,” a song that pushed them into the mainstream a decade prior.
Their hard work earned them an uproarious call for an encore; one they obliged with a call back to their original hits. X Ambassadors ultimately spent their final song jamming out to “Renegades,” showing deep appreciation for their roots despite being desperate to evolve.
As a whole, X Ambassadors are hot and cold between their stage presence and purposeful songwriting. They struggle to catch up to the level of vulnerability being spearheaded by today’s alt/indie-rockers such as rising stars Indigo De Souza and Vampire Weekend or PYGMALION’s day one bands Friko and Royel Otis.
Conclusion
Day two of PYGMALION was impressive but for entirely different reasons than day one. The sincere sense of community and unbridled dedication to art and performance were worthy of screaming for an encore.
A healthy mix of marginalized experiences and mainstream media made it easy to feel grounded and connected to something much bigger even if only for a night.
Going into day three, the momentum from the first two nights felt unstoppable. Could anything sit on top of two considerable successes?
Tune in for a breakdown of day three featuring a poignant Krannert seminar and several local artists bringing down the house with CupcakKe, a pop-culture icon who does not shy away from getting the audience involved in her campy antics. Between passing the mic around for soundbites and inviting audience members onto the stage to compete for a cash prize, night three promises a fiery end to the 20th anniversary of PYGMALION.
