Peter Donovan and Elijah Ocean of Portland’s power-pop outfit All the Real Girls performed an acoustic set downstairs at the Empire last Tuesday night. The seven-song set covered the bulk of their recent debut, “My Friends Are Going to be Strangers,” in a stripped-down and overall quiet manner.
It took a moment for the crowd to focus. A loud rock band had just finished upstairs later than expected and people were still shuffling around, finding seats and talking.
Their debut is loud and highly produced from start to finish, so the sparse instrumentation of this set required each song to rely on the songwriting alone. Some benefited from the simpler arrangement, while others sounded a bit empty without the volume of the full band.
The opening song, “Ogunquit ’74,” was one of the most dramatically altered tunes in the set, as tom-heavy drums, bass and a falsetto vocal drive the album version. The lack of those parts left the song feeling bare.
The best performance of the evening was the album opener “The Night We First Met.” Out of all the ways the band strives to manipulate catchy classic rock styles, the chorus of that song is the most successful, and it worked in this setting. Additionally, “Scenes from the Hotel Weatherford,” one of the few quiet and restrained songs on the album, was right at home.
The final two songs of the night, “Teenage Sweethearts” and “Liquid Cure (The Way Life Should Be),” seem to be two of the band’s most accessible tracks. Each of them calls heavily upon classic rock styles and structures in different ways. “Sweethearts” has the effect of early nineties Petty, while “Liquid Cure,” the album’s first single, is more of a late-eighties boozer rock anthem, which made for a peculiar acoustic rendition.
Throughout the entire set, Ocean’s guitar was too quiet and his vocal was completely inaudible. That extra layer would have made the performance more engaging.
Though the nakedness of the songs suggested potential beyond the loud and hyper-produced pop-rock format, the energy and volume of All the Real Girls’ full-band live shows do them the most justice.