Music review: Amanda Sum's New Age Attitudes has devastating details beneath its quirky surface
Vancouver singer explores simple pleasures and awkward truths
Amanda Sum
The Cultch presents Theatre Replacement’s New Age Attitudes: Live in Concert at the Historic Theatre May 12 and 13 at 7:30 pm and May 14 at 4 pm as part of the 2023 Femme Festival
WALKS. SPORT. Giggles.
Those were the “simple pleasures” professed by an anonymous audience member in attendance at the opening night of Amanda Sum’s solo show, New Age Attitudes: Live in Concert at The Cultch’s Historic Theatre.
Sum had personally given a hand-assembled pop-up book to each attendee upon arrival, along with a ballpoint pen. One page asked the reader to write down three “simple pleasures” and three “simple pains”, then tear the page out, crumple it into a ball, and toss it onto the stage. The singer-songwriter, who is also an actor, randomly selected a few of these and handed them to three or four audience members, saying “I think this is yours.”
The one she gave me was not mine (which, in the interest of full disclosure I must confess I left blank). Whoever it did belong to listed their pains as “prostate”, “cuts”, and “gravel”. I’m sorry for your troubles, unknown stranger, and I sincerely hope the giggles in your future outnumber the prostate pains.
That odd sense of almost, but not quite, making a connection with the other humans who surround you was a running theme of the show, albeit a mostly unspoken one.
At this point in the review I should probably note that, although Sum is a writer of intriguing songs and a talented singer-pianist who did indeed release an album called New Age Attitudes last September—listen to it on Spotify, Bandcamp, or wherever you prefer to find your music—this performance does not exactly live up to its title.
For about the first third it, for example, Sum doesn’t play any music at all. Instead, she sits at a tiny table assembling more pop-up books while the audience silently reads the lyrics to the songs, along with descriptions of how the recorded versions sound. When it’s time for everyone to collectively turn to the next page/song, Sum taps out a signal on a tinny toy piano.
In this awkward but admittedly charming way, she manages to avoid actually performing the first four songs, including the album’s title track.
When she does eventually get around to the “live in concert” portion of the evening, Sum does so while seated at a full-sized piano, her back to the audience the whole time. It’s part of the show, of course, but it effectively conveys the fraught nature of performing soul-baring confessional numbers to a roomful of people.
Sum doesn’t really sound like anyone else. There are hints of Fiona Apple and perhaps even a trace of Veda Hille (no stranger to the Cultch herself), but her style also manages to encompass jazz and classical influences.
What portion of the lyrics are straight autobiography and how much is Sum exercising her poetic license is anyone’s guess, but the details—from the nagging guilt she feels for leaning on her dad to do her taxes for her to her admission that she can accept never feeling pretty so long as others appreciate her for her personality—are occasionally devastating.
At one point, she stops to eat an orange between songs, which is a bit of business that goes on for longer than you would expect it to. Is it self-consciously awkward? Sure, but it also serves to diffuse some of the tension wrought by songs such as “Comedy Special” and “Awkward Bodies”.
Like the rest of New Age Attitudes, it’s endearingly quirky at face value, but there is a surprising emotional depth beneath the surface.
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