it's always fun and games until

Future’s looking pretty bleak for me personally of late, so it’s no better time than now for the music of Aimee Mann it would seem – that she performed her songs with such equanimity, while drawing on materials from almost all points of her career, is an added bonus anytime. Take her pensive delivery of “Amateur”, always one of my favourite out of her back catalogue, starting out a bit unsure, somewhat in the vein of the floundering confidence implied in her lyrics (“Despite conclusions I drew, there was a chance you’d surprise me”), then gathering momentum, tentatively, along to the sparse instrumental arrangements (this night, it was just Aimee and her two mates). Nice surprise too that she pulled off a rendition of “Invisible Ink”, probably one of the more surreal breakup songs that have been kicking around in my head somewhere. Then there were the few songs that found wider commercial applications in the frog-friendly movie Magnolia (the melancholic melodies of “Save Me” sounds particularly lucid, up close), where you find Aimee’s brittle songwriting still works best when listened as straightforward pop without too much interpretation. Modern life is rubbish, for sure – and so may it be, for we’re long wised up to that fate anyway – but it bears reminding that sometimes it really takes a sublime songsmith like Mann to make one feel a little less lost in space.

(Setlist)
The Moth
Nightmare Girl
Momentum
Build That Wall
Par For The Course
This Is How It Goes
Amateur
Wise Up
Save Me
Red Vines
You Could Make A Killing
Little Tornado
Little Bombs
31 Today
Freeway
Invisible Ink
That’s Just What You Are
Video
Ghost World
Deathly
Driving Sideways
Voices Carry