As headliner Miss Geo set up their equipment for the performance, I watched Paz put down a flat board – painted with the blue, white, and red rectangles of the French flag – to lay her keyboard. “‘Ow you guys doing?” asks Paz in her thick French accent. The other half of this female electro-pop duo is guitarist, lead vocalist, and more local resident Abby Gutierrez.
After playing an electronic interlude, Miss Geo dives into a collection of catchy songs. Abby is a natural in front of the mic; whether she is playing on her guitar or not, she is clearly focused on her vocals, but always looks relaxed. Sometimes, instead of singing, Abby adds a bit of sass by speaking her lyrics. Like any good musical act, the live sound has a little extra something: the sound of the fuzzier guitar, prominent on tracks like “Hooked“.
Threading a booming and intrusive bass line throughout all the tracks, Paz showcases her talent on the electronic keyboard. Although Paz is almost always intently focused on churning out her electronic beats, she looks out into the audience every once in a while to quietly sing back-up vocals into her mic. With catchy pop melodies combined with an overall attitude of spunk, I can’t help but think of Miss Geo as an electronic Tegan and Sara.
The best tracks of the night are songs from Miss Geo’s arsenal of unreleased (but hopefully soon to be released) songs. Heavily featuring Paz’s electronic beats, Abby abandoned her guitar for most of the tracks. Paz’s compositions are surprisingly complex and show growth from Miss Geo’s first songs. Deep EDM-like rhythms pulse through TT’s, slightly changing Miss Geo’s chill electro-pop into a bout of intense club music. But what hasn’t changed in these new tracks is Miss Geo’s catchy pop phrases. “We built this thing on rock and roll,” sang Abby, lyrics easy enough to pick up on that I had them down by the third chorus. Another interesting new song performed was titled “Pretty Little French Girl”. “It’s not me!” Paz informed the audience, just to clear up any confusion.
My one complaint of the show was that all the bands’ performances got pushed back about half an hour, pushing the headliner’s start time from 11:30pm to midnight. By the time Miss Geo came on the audience dwindled down to those who were willing to brave their chances at catching the last T. Unfortunately, this was not the first time this happened at TT’s.
Three bands opened for Miss Geo, but one band worth mentioning was Rich People Food. Their mostly dancey rock music had the crowd grooving wildly throughout their whole set, which probably would have happened anyway regardless of the fact that most of the audience was a slightly drunken group of birthday party-goers. The band’s most memorable song was their cover of Beyonce’s “Crazy In Love”. It seemed surprising for a rock band to play a song from the reigning pop diva, but this surprising mix of genres was what made the song the perfect close to their high-energy set.