Our Portland based writer, Elisabeth Wilson, went to see Beach House last night and had such a great time that she fell out and had an attack in the street. Here’s her first hand account!
I’d been looking forward to seeing Beach House play in Portland for oh, I don’t know, four months? So it was finally April 10th and it wasn’t freezing outside and the night was unfolding without a hitch: living room pre-show drinks with my girls, Nellie Furtado listening party (some dirty dancing—not by me), some bar hopping and more pre-show drinks, and then we head to the venue, Doug Fir, on Portland’s lower East side, just blocks from the Burnside Bridge. Doug Fir’s claustrophobic bomb shelter/log cabin/all-together unsettling atmosphere started to dampen my excitement a little, and the sold out show was filling up fast. But I had a pretty good spot close to the stage, and there were so many cute girls giddy with anticipation that it was hard not to be excited. The opening act was Bachelorette from New Zealand—a sweetly low-key one-woman show with lots of looped keyboard and layered vocals. There were some alarmingly aggressive Fuck yeah’s starting to happen somewhere in the peripheral at this point and I could no longer move without jabbing someone in the boob and getting a sideways glare. The room was filled to capacity and the discernable lack of air in the room was making me light-headed, but Bachelorette’s set finished up and Beach House would start any minute! I was going to make it! I wasn’t THAT dizzy! They finally appeared, to wild applause, close to 11pm and started with “Walk in the Park.” By the middle of the third song, I noticed that I couldn’t actually hear anything anymore and my vision was starting to go, too. It felt like someone had lit a fire under my shoes and I started to teeter from side to side, so I thought it best to get the hell out of there, rather than, you know, hit my head on the floor. I watched the remainder of the show from a stairwell, safely away from the hoards and with an even better view of the stage.
Beach House performed as a 3-piece with guitar, drums, and the ever-amazing Victoria Legrand on organ and vocals. As epic and dreamy as always, they performed songs from each of their albums, including “Used to Be,” “Master of None,” and “Heart of Chambers.” Most songs were from their January release, Teen Dream. And just in case you were wondering, yes, Victoria DID coerce the audience into a drunken, half-assed rendition of The Wave and, yes, she WAS wearing an over-sized white linen blazer with the sleeves pushed up. They played till almost midnight and did a two-song encore, finishing with “10 Mile Stereo.”
– Elisabeth Wilson
