Samia might seem all too easy to pigeonhole (never ask an indie musician why their parents' names are blue on Wikipedia). But with her new album Honey, she wriggles out of her box by expanding her sonic palette and dabbling in the likes of alt-country and glitchy synthpop, experimenting with bewildering tonal shifts from one track to the next. More bewildering yet, they all — albeit to varying degrees — seem to work, even if it's a bit whiplash-inducing taken together.
Perhaps it's to be expected then, that where her live show lacked in cohesion, it made up for in spirit. Despite needing to replace their passport-less American drummer the day beforehand, Tommy Lefroy — the duo of Wynter Bethel and Vancouver-born Tessa Mouzourakis— set the tone for an already-packed Opera House.
It was their first time playing in Toronto, and though notably green performers, they delivered their literary, bruisingly tender songs — about feminism, a boyfriend not liking "Tougher Than the Rest" and trying to park at Jericho Beach — endearingly, with Bethel admitting that she was on the verge of tears seeing people sing them back. Harmonizing in their similar soft tones, they traded lead and rhythm guitar duties. Mouzourakis took the former more often, letting Bethel have her bandleader moment and touch hands with the crowd as they sang crushing latest single "Worst Case Kid."
Tommy Lefroy's set was special in that it felt like you were seeing an act on the cusp of something truly great. Samia's work thus far has provoked a similar sentiment, producing some precious gems of songs glimmering with potential. Whether that potential was to fit in seamlessly with the alt-folk "sad girl" movement that is rightfully producing some of the most compelling indie rock du jour or to rise up out of the parameters of the genre's saturation remains unclear.
The unnerving organ solo set the tone for lead single and album opener "Kill Her Freak Out," with a live arrangement that emphasized its choral nature: a hymnal eulogizing the life you once imagined with someone in light of a pregnancy announcement. Samia stood completely still, gripping the blue tulle-wrapped mic stand as she sang — the only way to deliver that kind of news.
But she shook it off quickly to dance with an unselfconscious self-consciousness to "Fit N Full" and "Big Wheel" from her 2020 debut The Baby, playing off her band with goofy leg kicks and jazz hands. And, if you think about it, there's a bit of Rachel Berry energy in Samia (of course, if Rachel Berry's two gay dads had raised her in Brooklyn, and she fucked and wore mom jeans): though her raw vocal talent is far richer and her musical theatre arm gestures are mostly kept in check, there is the same sense of saucer-eyed conviction that made even an intentionally unlikable Glee character feel undeniably real. Don't you know her from somewhere?
This is an element the singer-songwriter revels in. She has crackling voicemail messages throughout her recorded catalogue, which were also played over the loudspeakers at her show. Likewise, her writing ranges from occasionally-overwrought hyper-specifics and name-dropping to amorphous anguish that her syrupy voice eagerly swallows as both dessert and medicine. The plodding midsection of her set exhibited both ends of this spectrum with Honey tracks like "Pink Balloon," "Sea Lions," "To Me It Was" and "Dream Song," which she brought Tommy Lefroy back out to sing on.
The performance's most arresting moment came from "Breathing Song," the introduction to which was met with a knowing, collective "Oof." Samia apologized before launching into the sparse dirge about a miscarriage with minimal instrumental support — she didn't need it. Though she played several other ballads in the same unflinching, confessional vein, "Breathing Song" felt like it brought everything to a halt; like we were all holding our breath for her to hit the final wail of "No, no, no." And when she did, the catharsis in the applause was palpable.
The release of "Breathing Song" as a pre-album double single alongside Honey's title track — and their subsequent consecutive appearance in the tracklist — had originally perplexed me. These songs strike as the record's lowest low and highest high, both compositionally and in mood, but their sisterhood became more apparent as Samia immediately recovered from the open-wound-on-the-asphalt feeling of "Breathing Song" with the drunken campfire singalong.
"Honey" is meant as a mockery of the singer-songwriter's attempts to convince everyone that she was okay, but her earnestness cuts through the satire and it begins to register as more of a survival mechanism. Her shadow appeared larger than life itself on the wall of the austere Opera House as she sang, "I'm not scared of sharks, I'm not scared of being naked / I'm not scared of anything."
Samia saved some of her grandest masterpieces ("Winnebago," "Is There Something in the Movies?" and "Show Up") for the very end, and they were worth the wait. Maybe it's fitting that there's a lot of topsoil, both tedious and actively painful, to get through before the truffles turn up. Her stomach-churning, punishing pen has inked several turns of phrase that singed me the instant they landed, and hearing those words ring out in a theatre as they were sung back by an endlessly generous and attentive Toronto audience (she asked, "Can we just take you on the rest of the tour?") felt, well, poetic.
"Walking into the middle of the party / I'm writing a poem, somebody stop me," Samia sings all-too relatably for this fellow melodramatic word girl on the stuttering, marimba-laced "Amelia" as she attempts to romanticize her life — from the dancing to the dying — in song. The golden perspective of its sage namesake, Amelia Meath of Sylvan Esso, helps her to the realization: "Oh my god, there's nothing quite like doing what you came to do."
And being yourself is the only way to do it.
Perhaps it's to be expected then, that where her live show lacked in cohesion, it made up for in spirit. Despite needing to replace their passport-less American drummer the day beforehand, Tommy Lefroy — the duo of Wynter Bethel and Vancouver-born Tessa Mouzourakis— set the tone for an already-packed Opera House.
It was their first time playing in Toronto, and though notably green performers, they delivered their literary, bruisingly tender songs — about feminism, a boyfriend not liking "Tougher Than the Rest" and trying to park at Jericho Beach — endearingly, with Bethel admitting that she was on the verge of tears seeing people sing them back. Harmonizing in their similar soft tones, they traded lead and rhythm guitar duties. Mouzourakis took the former more often, letting Bethel have her bandleader moment and touch hands with the crowd as they sang crushing latest single "Worst Case Kid."
Tommy Lefroy's set was special in that it felt like you were seeing an act on the cusp of something truly great. Samia's work thus far has provoked a similar sentiment, producing some precious gems of songs glimmering with potential. Whether that potential was to fit in seamlessly with the alt-folk "sad girl" movement that is rightfully producing some of the most compelling indie rock du jour or to rise up out of the parameters of the genre's saturation remains unclear.
The unnerving organ solo set the tone for lead single and album opener "Kill Her Freak Out," with a live arrangement that emphasized its choral nature: a hymnal eulogizing the life you once imagined with someone in light of a pregnancy announcement. Samia stood completely still, gripping the blue tulle-wrapped mic stand as she sang — the only way to deliver that kind of news.
But she shook it off quickly to dance with an unselfconscious self-consciousness to "Fit N Full" and "Big Wheel" from her 2020 debut The Baby, playing off her band with goofy leg kicks and jazz hands. And, if you think about it, there's a bit of Rachel Berry energy in Samia (of course, if Rachel Berry's two gay dads had raised her in Brooklyn, and she fucked and wore mom jeans): though her raw vocal talent is far richer and her musical theatre arm gestures are mostly kept in check, there is the same sense of saucer-eyed conviction that made even an intentionally unlikable Glee character feel undeniably real. Don't you know her from somewhere?
This is an element the singer-songwriter revels in. She has crackling voicemail messages throughout her recorded catalogue, which were also played over the loudspeakers at her show. Likewise, her writing ranges from occasionally-overwrought hyper-specifics and name-dropping to amorphous anguish that her syrupy voice eagerly swallows as both dessert and medicine. The plodding midsection of her set exhibited both ends of this spectrum with Honey tracks like "Pink Balloon," "Sea Lions," "To Me It Was" and "Dream Song," which she brought Tommy Lefroy back out to sing on.
The performance's most arresting moment came from "Breathing Song," the introduction to which was met with a knowing, collective "Oof." Samia apologized before launching into the sparse dirge about a miscarriage with minimal instrumental support — she didn't need it. Though she played several other ballads in the same unflinching, confessional vein, "Breathing Song" felt like it brought everything to a halt; like we were all holding our breath for her to hit the final wail of "No, no, no." And when she did, the catharsis in the applause was palpable.
The release of "Breathing Song" as a pre-album double single alongside Honey's title track — and their subsequent consecutive appearance in the tracklist — had originally perplexed me. These songs strike as the record's lowest low and highest high, both compositionally and in mood, but their sisterhood became more apparent as Samia immediately recovered from the open-wound-on-the-asphalt feeling of "Breathing Song" with the drunken campfire singalong.
"Honey" is meant as a mockery of the singer-songwriter's attempts to convince everyone that she was okay, but her earnestness cuts through the satire and it begins to register as more of a survival mechanism. Her shadow appeared larger than life itself on the wall of the austere Opera House as she sang, "I'm not scared of sharks, I'm not scared of being naked / I'm not scared of anything."
Samia saved some of her grandest masterpieces ("Winnebago," "Is There Something in the Movies?" and "Show Up") for the very end, and they were worth the wait. Maybe it's fitting that there's a lot of topsoil, both tedious and actively painful, to get through before the truffles turn up. Her stomach-churning, punishing pen has inked several turns of phrase that singed me the instant they landed, and hearing those words ring out in a theatre as they were sung back by an endlessly generous and attentive Toronto audience (she asked, "Can we just take you on the rest of the tour?") felt, well, poetic.
"Walking into the middle of the party / I'm writing a poem, somebody stop me," Samia sings all-too relatably for this fellow melodramatic word girl on the stuttering, marimba-laced "Amelia" as she attempts to romanticize her life — from the dancing to the dying — in song. The golden perspective of its sage namesake, Amelia Meath of Sylvan Esso, helps her to the realization: "Oh my god, there's nothing quite like doing what you came to do."
And being yourself is the only way to do it.
