DIANA @ Adelaide Hall for WL14 – Feb. 14, 2014. Photo: Tom Beedham

By Tom Beedham
“We come from here, which is nice,” DIANA frontwoman Carmen Elle told the crowd at Adelaide Hall in earnest on Feb. 14. She went on to explain she finds herself bragging about the city’s music scene when the band is abroad.

DIANA has had some time off from hometown gigs since an extensive international tour bracketing the release of its 2013 debut Perpetual Surrender brought it back to Toronto Sept. 26, so there was no surprise to see plenty of smiling faces awaiting the band’s Wavelength performance. The band didn’t come to Wavelength bearing any new material, and they weren’t without their flaws—a miscued sample fully derailed “That Feeling” mid-song, leading Elle to declare, “This is Y2K, people. This is not an exercise. It is not a drill. Stock up on bottled water,” before the problem was resolved and the band could run through the track from the bridge onwards—but no one seemed irked by any of this.

Instead, the audience was content to celebrate an album it’s had proper time to process, a sentiment made clear by plenty of listeners caught singing along at any given point in the set. Or maybe—as Elle suggested they do at the show—they just wanted to “get desperately drunk on music. And then puke in the cab on the way home. Musical puking.” But either way, they all seemed confident DIANA would deliver. And they did.

More photos:

DIANA setlist:
“Strange Attraction”
“Perpetual Surrender”
“Anna”
“That Feeling”
[Instrumental interlude]
“Foreign Installation”
“New House”
“Born Again”

Originally published by Aesthetic Magazine.