It's particularly hard to do if you're trying to split with your parapagus tripus dibrachius twin sister - sharing as you do "three legs, two arms, three lungs, two hearts and a single liver." Good thing that twin rock stars Evelyn and Evelyn Neville (aka Amanda Palmer and Jason Webley) seemed to be getting along so famously in Toronto last night at the Great Hall on Queen Street.
Which is to say, it is time for yard-apes to brace themselves for one of the Yard's semi-regular, semi-coherent raves about the considerable gifts of Ms. Amanda Palmer and her ever-shifting crew of genius collaborators. They were in town Friday, touring for Evelyn Evelyn, a honky-tonk concept album / rock opera (think Tommy by way of Geek Love and Sweeney Todd) about the aforementioned conjoined twins, and their picaresque, grand-guignol journey from trailer to chicken farm to Manitoba porn factory to circus sideshow to Myspace stardom. I picked up the album a couple of weeks ago and have been cycling through it on the mp3 player ever since.
The live show was still a revelation. Amanda and twin sister Jason mashed themselves together in a gigantic frock for a long set of Method-acted piano, accordian, guitar and ukelele duets, while one-man-band percussionist and twin-handler Sxip Shirey handled the shadow-puppet show and proved that he would take a bullet for the twins. Or from them, if need be.
Below, a sample of the song Chicken Man (gone horribly wrong) posted by another attendee:
And here, some tracks from the album set to video from other shows, or by fans:
Bundle that in with the harmonica/music box/marble-in-a-bowl compositions of Sxip Shirey, the Slavic-influenced accordion and guitar set from Jason Webley, and Amanda Palmer's show-ending capper (aided by an unnamed, screaming young woman who came on stage to deliver a show-stopping interpretive dance to a show-stopping performance of Missed Me), and you've got nearly three hours of the best time anyone had in Toronto Friday night.
I post all this here, because as of last night, Amanda came out and announced that ticket sales were, for some reason, fatally unimpressive for her Saturday evening show in Montreal (that's tonight as I type this). She suggested this might be because people in Montreal lack the Internet - and might have been relying on her now-former record label Roadrunner to tell them the show's on.
I don't know about that. Last time I was in Montreal, everybody had the Internet. So in that spirit - for any Montreal-area, wired-up yard-apes looking for something to do on Saturday, June 5 - Evelyn Evelyn's coming to the Corona Theatre, at 7 p.m., in Montreal. After that, they're going somewhere else.