It’s their first show in Toronto, and Clues are proving to be a mystery. The band has five members, for one thing, so it is unclear why two men are up there playing a buzzing flute drone and barking unintelligible, distorted chants. Then they abruptly disappear, beginning an awkward, protracted interlude of people coming onstage to fiddle with microphones and leave again. There is no explanation for any of this. Eventually I discover that the duo was Jerusalem In My Heart, some guys who were once in Godspeed You! Black Emperor and tagged along on this tour unbeknownst to everyone in the crowd at Sneaky’s. There are less inscrutable ways to introduce yourself.
The headliners were preceded by The Darcys (who cover Final Fantasy’s “The CN Tower Belongs to the Dead” with a sped-up tempo and gravely vocals, beating all the fragility out of the original) and The Ghost is Dancing, both of whom are more traditional crowd-pleasers. The latter’s baroque pop sounds bigger than the sum of their lineup, but I wish they had multi-instrumentalist Lesley Davies singing more — for a band with R&B sympathies (they often cover TLC’s “Waterfalls”, though not tonight) she’s the only member living up to that genre’s vocal acuity, even getting a little melismatic at one point. Join the indie-rock vanguard: reject the yelps and embrace Mariah!
The bar became increasingly sweatier as Clues came on (there was some co-ed band nudity by the time Ghost is Dancing finished), and I wasn’t sure how patient the audience would be. Clues’ just-released debut is good, an album full of the same fancifully demented pop that singer Alden Penner made with the Unicorns, but I’d heard some of their early shows were a shambolic mess: picture caped musicians frantically running around. No cloaks this time, though. That’s too bad, because Clues’ aesthetic of quasi-mythical fight songs would be the perfect RPG soundtrack — it was fitting that Scott Pilgrim himself showed up.
Clues are all slashing riffs and quick keyboard stabs, arranged for maximum bombast. One track builds up to the sort of epic, stoned, psychedelic melody that heroes are followed around by in Jodorowsky movies. Their rapport with the audience was politely uncomfortable from the start; at one point the crowd began clapping during a pause within a song. Maybe Clues should seem like an ordeal to some people, though. They make music to crawl dungeons by.