Feist

It's very synchronicitous and quite fitting to see the arena show reinvented by Feist and co. after earlier this summer having Broken Social Scene do the same thing for me with folk festivals, also in Edmonton, and both have been (along with Cat Power, and Annabelle Chvostek) the highlights of my musical year.
Arena shows vs. smaller settings: for me, it really worked in the rink, charmed the hell out of me in fact. Clubs can be noisy, chattery, all kinds of unrelated distraction, and by their nature eliminate young people. This crowd was not your typical stadium audience and for that I am eternally grateful, no beer-swilling lunkheads falling all over me, and walking away from a show buzzed purely from the music alone and not being utterly stoned by osmosis is a rare treat. I've never seen a concert where so many complete families attended, and the ratio of women to men was even larger than at Lilith Fair. Makes for a much better behaved bunch. I predict there will be a lot of young girls demanding ELECTRIC guitars under the tree this year.
Live visuals, love 'em. Arts and crafts indeed. I'm old enough to remember construction paper chains and scissoring snowflakes, adds a sense of wonder to the proceedings, and flashes me back to bygone theatre tech days where imagination trumped budget.
So if it felt a little strange to the musicians, it wasn't to us. My very first concert ever was Johnny Cash, just prior to his Rubin-esque renaissance. He hadn't been on the road for a while, and played most of the show straight to the front, occasionally catching himself and playing a moment to the sides and above the horizon. But there was no need to worry, he owned the house and he rocked it. Same here.
Great choice in an opener. Hayden set the bar high, and somewhere in the cosmos Gram Parsons' charred remains have arranged themselves into a smile.
The music...Ahhh...When something is really good it just sits me down and shuts me up. You are so in the moment you practically don't even think, you just absorb. If there's such a thing as an excited meditative state, this is it, that direct link to the collective unconscious, greater good, what have you.
I was late to the party in terms of the albums, Let It Die got me curious but I was a bit iffy on the production, Open Season really caught my attention (special thanks to the Mocky mix o' Mushaboom) and The Reminder just sealed the deal, one of those rare albums I'll have with me wherever I shall roam.
In live performance it ups the ante even more, brings the lesser-known tracks side-by-side with the hits, where they always belonged. The newer arrangements on the older tunes really open them up, the sequenced vocals are beyond cool, and the slower tunes are put across with as much intensity as the rockers. Great guitars. Sealion's heart beat like a hammer, and the connection to Nina Simone is no accident, the level of passion is that high. The sequence of songs was perfect, and cheers to whoever was doing your sound because I've never heard that barn sound better. I hope someone films a few of these, I'd buy a DVD in a heartbeat.
You get the applause and yells and screams, fans literally beating the boards, glimpse of us here and there, but what you don't get to see is the organically tripped-out happiness of the people post-show, packed smilingly into trains or hoofing it delightedly away into the remains of the day. It's a sweet thing, trust me.
If there is one thing I can hang on the Broken Divine Metric Apostle From The Tombs nexus, it's that it flies in the face of the music industry's tired insistence that people are only one thing and one thing only. If you're multifaceted, by all means reflect away, we need all the light we can get.
I wasn't intending to write an essay, the short of it was it looked great and sounded better.

P.S. I just saw the Sesame Street thing. LOVE the chickens. :)