How We Were Charmed By Nathanial Fregoso

In case you did not know, Nathanial Fregoso is the lead singer of LA indie-pop outfit The Blood Arm. They played here, in Lyon, last evening. The usual: I got there half an hour before the time on the ticket: 19:30. Inside, this huge crowd of...15 people. I got myself a Blood Arm tshirt, chated a bit with the guy selling the tees...American, told me that they like it to be cold in Europe when they come here (wrong time you picked...30 degrees celsius...oh, dear)...At about 20:45 the music stopped, so I assumed the opening act will grace us with they presence (the opening act on the ticket being this French outfit, Second Sex...). However, one must learn to utterly distrust FNAC (remember, at Klaxons, the opening act according to FNAC was Twisted Charm...). So, instead of French indie, the tee guy told us a story, about how he got arrested by la police because he yelled "Fuck Sarko" (up to date, aren't you?) and then he introduced Blood Arm. The four guys from Blood Arm got on stage and the show took off...and what a show. Nathanial spent most of his time in the crowd, kissing and hugging people (yes, I am not washing for the next four months). During "Angela", he asked us to sit down with him on the filthiest floor he had seen in France and feel the pure emotion. During another song (its name slips my mind right now) he sang from the bathroom and even picked people out of the crowd to be his bathroom singers. And when he was on stage, he jumped around, shook his ass ( at one point he asked us to yell "Vive la fete!"...a fan yelled "Vive la fesse!" instead) and crumbled to the floor like some kind of indie preacher. For the last song, he helped people get on stage, so by the end of the gig, half of the audience was up there. After these 45 minutes feeled with 'pure emotion', I grabbed a setlist off stage and got again on metro B back to the dorm....