As we covered earlier this year, Cigarettes After Sex, the trio founded by Greg Gonzalez in 2008, have embarked on a tour in celebration of the five-year anniversary of the release of their self-titled debut. Thoroughly selling out Boston’s House of Blues, just as they did in 2019, the set is an opportunity to see on display exactly what makes the music of Gonzalez and his band so profoundly special and captivating – to the point that it threatens to oversell one of the largest area music halls.
Gonzalez appears at the center of the stage and walks around for just a moment before strumming the first notes of ‘Crush’. Like many of his lyrical works, it’s a depiction of a moment of change, of blossoming love, of a seductive feeling that leaves him wanting to completely immerse himself in this new sensation. It possesses his alone time and the very walls around him, their intertwining emotions taking physical form and fusing with each other.
When Gonzalez announces that the next song in the set is called ‘John Wayne’, the crowd cheers, then does so once again as the song begins, as if they didn’t know what was coming – this becomes a theme of the night. In instrumental passages Gonzalez departs his microphone stand, approaching one side or the other of the stage. His posturing and use of the space are actually not different to many a rock star, but with his characteristic ease, it seems like he’s moving in languid slow motion.
The roar of the crowd when he approaches is so unlike anything Gonzalez has ever put to tape, but in these instrumental sections, they themselves become part of the song, occasional accompaniment to the bass of Randall Miller and drums of Jacob Tomsky. The bass creates a kind of pocket universe inside the room, and in that form well Gonzalez’s guitar and vocals create at will, and Tomsky needs only a minimal kit to accentuate things further. Subtle projected images play above the band throughout the night from a faint beam of light, including a serene cycle of ocean waves.
What makes Gonzalez’s words so thoroughly compelling is how he combines speaking with such effortless patience, genuine affection, and perhaps most importantly: in the language with which all people want to be adored, on a fundamental level. He delivers both the purest profession of devotion in the same timbre as the most sensual detail, like in the unlikely sing-a-long moment that is the chorus of ‘You’re All I Want’ – both sentimental and perverted. But he’s not splitting his attention between carnal and cerebral, as with ‘Sweet’ where he says, “I’m obsessed with your body / but it’s the way you smile that does it for me”. In this synthesis of feeling, he devotes himself to both dimensions absolutely. The specificity of something like ‘K.’ excels as well – not only do these songs convey a deep sense of emotional honesty, they also marry that to emotional clarity, an equally essential component of commitment, like the relationship between accuracy and precision.
A majority of the songs from Cigarettes After Sex make their appearance throughout the evening, and when ‘Apocalypse’ arrives the venue’s disco ball lights up bright overhead, spinning a practically uncountable number of light beams out across the room before the encore intermission. The song is like Gonzalez extending a metaphorical hand to someone, pulling them to something new out of a dying world: “Come out and haunt me / I know you want me”. Gonzalez walks to the front of the stage and, smiling, hands out setlists to members of the audience in the front row.
They return with ‘Opera House’, the album’s lengthiest offering, one of the places the band’s droning soundscapes find themselves indebted to Angelo Badalament, and the final track of the night is pulled from their earliest release. ‘Dreaming of You’ tracks a descent into unconsciousness, a cavernous realm of possibilities in which Gonzalez can find someone he’s longed for, and in making this the final moment of the night, it’s impossible not to do the same: to ponder to where – and to whom – one’s own dreams will take them tonight or any night, as they fall into that shimmering darkness and ascend on the other side.
