CONCERT

PHI Event Centre La Force Credit Norman Wong COVER — Photo: Norman Wong

Nov. 21 and 22, 2023 La Force

Past Event
Music

Price in advance: $24.57 (fees included)
Price at the door: $26.09

Taxes not included

All ages

Doors: 7 PM
Music: 8 PM

PHI Centre Espace 1
407 Saint-Pierre St
Montreal, Quebec, H2Y 2M3

La Force's November 22 show is almost sold out! As a result, we’ve decided to open up our dress rehearsal to the public. It’s a peek behind the curtain; a front row seat behind-the-scenes! It will be raw and real and fun surprises may ensue! Join us for this one-of-a-kind performance of XO SKELETON.

Before visiting, please review some essential information about the visit, including details on accessibility at the Centre.

The artist presents a mixture of haunted pop and hot-blooded R&B from her new album XO SKELETON.

Presented by

XO SKELETON

XO SKELETON is the supple, steady, uncanny new album by La Force: a mixture of haunted pop and hot-blooded R&B that glistens at the meeting-point between life, death and love. “In dreams, the dead and living are the same,” Ariel Engle sings on “october,” her voice shimmering. “Maybe that’s why I’m better in the dark.”

With this LP, Engle originally intended to make a dance record. She worked on cigar-box guitar, piano; she visited NYC for a few days in studio with pros. But everything felt rushed, or forced—and of course the veil of COVID descended over everything—so her music-making shifted home. “It was such an intensely interior time,” she said. Engle’s old friend, co-producer Warren Spicer (Plants and Animals), would come over around “toast o’clock” and they’d work in her basement until lunch, allowing songs to unfold at heartbeat pace, unhurried.

These nine extraordinary songs are human-scale and intimate, with chord changes like the shifting of limbs, saxophones and processed strings that travel with a vascular ripple. Listen to “how do you love a man,” with its nimble bass and swooning groove, and a title that winks at the beyond.

Throughout these 35 minutes, La Force’s music is electric + vivid, and also tactile + grimy—a sound that enfolds influences as disparate as Tirzah, Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Jazmine Sullivan, the Cocteau Twins, Mica Levi, Tricky w/ Marina Topley-Bird, and even Joni Mitchell’s “Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter.” XO SKELETON bends and turns with its every shift of pulse—mournful, searching, turned on. Like a body, you might say. Or the memory of one.