Amanda Palmer is not OK. Most of us are not OK right now; we’ve just decided, for the preservation of our mental health, that it’s less exhausting to smile and nod than to talk and risk screaming so loud and so long that everything breaks. Some of us are masking it better than others.
That’s not Amanda Palmer’s style, thankfully. So for the last night of the Dresden Dolls’ four-show run at the Bowery Ballroom, she and Brian Viglione opened the floodgates for sadness while keeping rage in check. At the center of their nearly three-hour, 21-song set were seven new songs—the first substantial addition to the band’s canon in more than 15 years—that processed all that Palmer’s been through since her last solo album, 2019’s There Will Be No Intermission: lockdown and loneliness in New Zealand, divorce, single parenthood and more.
As personal as they are, “The Runner,” “Xmas,” and “Whakanewha,” in true Dresden Dolls style, sounded massive enough to hold Palmer’s grief with enough space left to serve as a vessel for the sobbing audience’s collective and individual pain as well. (Hearing her channel Regina Spektor added a touch more mirth than pathos.)
Four excellent covers lightened the evening and gave Palmer and Viglione a chance to stretch their legs and swap instruments: a cathartic, earthshaking rendition of Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs,” the Beastie Boys’ “Fight For Your Right,” Jacques Brel’s “Amsterdam” (sung dramatically, as if Palmer has any other setting, from the balcony) and Bo Burnham’s “Welcome To The Internet.”
In addition to this emotional affirmation, it was grounding to shout along to old-school Dresden Dolls bangers like “Sex Changes,” “Coin-Operated Boy,” “Half Jack” and “Girl Anachronism,” but they took it up another level with “Sing,” the first song of the encore, as a reminder that when we feel we can’t talk to one another lest we say things we can’t take back, we can turn to our better angels and sing for all that troubles us.
—M.J. Fine; photos by Chris Sikich
