The beaut presence of God is palpable, embodied in the sublime melodies of her opus, ‘Cape God.’ Though I was unable to attend the celestial Cape God concert myself, I was compelled to seek out those, known as X’s, who had borne witness to the divine spectacle. Like the men in the Bible who beheld miracles and wonders. I embarked on a spiritual journey to uncover the transcendental essence of gothy synthpop savant Allie X’s ‘Cape God 5 Year Reunion Tour’ at the Webster Hall in New York City, inspirited by the hazy crimson glow of a documentary on the harrowing opioid crisis, weaving a tale of a mythical seaside town, where decadence dances hand in hand with a haunting melancholia that runs deep within its very core.
Outside, the city stretched like spider limbs, traffic groaning, windows glowing, some guy yelling on 3rd Avenue. But inside Webster Hall, it was quieter. Not silent, just charged. Something deeper than sound was moving. Something that felt like grief wearing a mask. The birds sang, light and clean, like they’d never been told a lie. Inside, the frogs answered slow and low, their croaks like hymns from a time before guilt. Then came the ecclesiastic thunder, soft, sacred, and rolling out of the speakers like a warning dressed as worship. It didn’t shake the walls. It didn’t need to. It was the sound before the first sin. And for a breath, maybe two, Eden lived inside Webster Hall. The lights dimmed slowly, casting a warm, uncertain glow across the crowd, as the first haunting notes of Cape God drifted into the air, like delicate whispers from a forgotten cherub. A spectral hush fell, enfolding the crowd in a shared stillness that felt ancient. The mood was devotional, quietly insistent, wrapped in melancholy and nostalgia like wicked incense rising from the earth. One by one, the band stepped forward, not as performers, but as clergy crossing the threshold of a sanctuary, keepers of something eternal.
They were there to conduct something sacred, a musical rite spun from a symphony of addiction, isolation, swooning, and self-fracture. The themes of the album, tangled with the pandemic’s relentless presence, stretched the room into something timeless. Minutes folded over themselves. Onstage, a glowing sphere hovered, its lights beating like a slow, cosmic heart, steady, calm, and strangely alive in the stillness. And then Allie X emerged, graceful, spectral, and solemn. Not a pop star, but an officiant. A prophetess. The room fell still, and the liturgy began. And then, with a voice that shimmered like cathedral glass refracting candlelight, Allie X opened the gates to Cape God, not merely an album, but a confessional, a seance, a hymnbook of modern affliction. Each note rang out like a bell tolling for the lost, drawing the audience deeper into her spectral world. The opener, “Fresh Laundry” wasn’t just performed; it was channeled, as though Allie stood not on a stage, but at a numinous. With every chord, the Webster Hall transformed from concert to venue into chapel, into cave, into coastline, into Cape God itself.
And as the sacred service swelled forward, the congregation was ushered into the sultry thrum of “Devil I Know.” Here, the mood turned introspective, almost pagan, dark waves of synth folding over the room like velvet smoke. Allie X’s voice quivered with the rawness of confession, the lyrics slashing softly through the collective psyche of the audience: “Maybe I could stop, but I won’t.” A song of seduction and self-undoing, it revealed Cape God not only as a place of beauty, but of terrifying personal reckoning. The devil she knew was herself, and we all saw a mirror in that flickering flame.
Then, with a sudden shift, like the first cry after a long silence. “Sarah Come Home” called out through the heavy air. The track was a spectral plea, a missing-person poster turned hymn. Blue and lavender hues bathed the stage, as if invoking the sea and sky of a dreamt-up New England town from a gothic novel. It wasn’t merely a song, it was an invocation; Allie standing like an oracle at the edge of the world, summoning a wayward spirit home. You could feel the ache of absence in every lingering syllable, the kind of grief so dense it becomes holy.
But grief makes a way for light, like the kind of gray that makes you think of cruel summer nights beyond the porch, a low light flickering in the fog while I stay inside, watching the fade behind the windowpane. And so comes “June Gloom.” With its dazed and unfocused production, it felt less like a song and more like a descent, caught somewhere between a dream and a slow sinking. The fog machines worked overtime, overclouding the venue in a grey hush. Strobes mimicked lightning from some internal storm. Allie sang with that hesitant, haunted rhythm she’s known for; like she was speaking through the clouds, caught up like The Shadow in the mist, but maybe not ready to be heard. Her voice was like the echo of a fallen angel you can no longer name, trapped somewhere just out of reach. The crowd swayed, entranced; not still but suspended in a kind of mournful ecstasy.
Then came “Love Me Wrong,” the heart of the set, the exposed nerve. A duet on record with Troye Sivan, here it was performed solo, yet still aching with two voices’ worth of loneliness. She sang like her voice was made of glass, delicate, like one wrong move and it’d break. It wasn’t just a song; it was the aching of someone who’d always been an outsider, a child who never fit in, and an adult who’d stopped believing anyone ever would. The spotlight found her and in that light, her hands shook, betraying her composure. The song bled from her in raw, shaking breaths, more than just lyrics, more like a body spilling its truth. At that moment, Webster Hall wasn’t a place anymore. It was just a room holding her fragile, beautiful wreckage.
And then, the transformation: “Super Duper Party People.” The final movement. A resurrection. The mood flipped like a tarot card. The stage erupted in technicolor, strobes slicing the air like stained glass church shards. Allie Hues emerged, crafting Allie X as more than a persona. She conjured a living apparition, a hyper-stylized spector of pop mythology. Descending like a vision from a forgotten future, in a white gown of intentional artifice, she doesn’t just perform; she haunts, provokes, and seduces. Akin to Madonna in her reinventions, Gaga in her grotesque glamour, or Chappell Roan in her theatrical rebellion, Allie X belongs to the lineage of those who turn pop into high art. But unlike them, she leans into a colder, more calculated elegance. One foot in alien detachment, the other in raw vulnerability. The audience, having been pulled through the mire of shadowy introspection, was now commanded to dance; manically, joyfully, and defiantly. The song’s title may read like satire, but its delivery was almost ecstatic, a last-ditch anthem for those who survived their own Cape Gods. It was less a sacrament in concert form and more of an exorcism.
As the final synths faded, the lights dimmed, leaving behind a silence that lingered, only the soft exhale of a thousand held breaths. There was no encore, just that brief suspended moment between what had been and what was no longer. The spell was broken, the miracle performed. No one cheered right away. It was as if applause would cheapen it. And then, finally, reverent, almost stunned, hands came together. Allie X had not merely performed Cape God. She resurrected it. And for a moment, we were all baptized in its haunted, holy waters.
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