Saw Patrick Wolf at Neumo's last night. Almost didn't go because I had no one to go with, but I'm glad I went. He sings true to his product. On stage, he's youthful and British charming. He smiles a lot and his intersong comments match the earnestness his songs seem to have.

He was all glitter and red hair. He cuts up mismatched clothes to create outfits and the outfits to match the current album remind me of a happy raver with bright colors and shiny things. When he shook his head, glitter sprang in poofs toward the crowd, which loved it.

A supremely young crowd. Kids, all seeming to be shorter than I am, stood stock-still, hands in their Target skinny jeans pockets and with their hoodie hoods up. When it got hot, they removed the hoodies altogether to bare striped shirts and studded belts. Many seemed to be younger than 20 and I'm almost positive that some of the older people on the fringes of the crowd were parents. People over 21 must've held fast to their legal status and watched from that barrier. Me, I wanted to be close to the stage so I held my own on the floor, with the shoe-gazer bunch.

This new album doesn't hang together for me as well as Wind in the Wires does. The order of the songs causes erratic mood shifts and there are perhaps one too many too-slow songs that amble nowhere. I listened to it a couple of times and already began flipping past a whole song just by the clash or the tedium of the first few bars. By contrast, Wind in the Wires is a cohesive set, an album you can listen to from beginning to end as if it were one long piece.