Canada Music Week feat. The Lovely Feathers / $100 / Women / Gentlemen Reg / Chad VanGaalen
The Horseshoe. Thursday, March 12, 2009.
Arrived a little bit past eight, and ducked downstairs. By luck, the coatcheck was open, so I was able to unload coat and bag. Getting my shit together, in the basement alcove area down by the bathrooms I was digging around for my earplugs, and noticed this woman standing in front of one of the CMW posters, sharpie in hand. She started vigourously crossing out the name of Burton Cummings1. "Am I falling in love?" I asked myself as she scrawled something above his markered-out name. I leaned in to observe that she had written "RANDY BACHMAN" and I was thinking to myself that was a sort of weird but cool bit of commentary when she noticed me scrutinizing her handiwork. And explained that it was because Burton Cummings had gotten sick and canceled out or some such thing. She wasn't a street critic at all! Just some kind of cute apologist/functionary for the military/industrial/Burton Cummings complex.
Anyways, back upstairs and ran into K., who'd also picked this as her CMW destination for the night. She was fretting over the poor job the doorperson did on her wristband, leaving it annoyingly loose and on the wrong arm.
Annoyed wristband fixation ensued, but further discussion was forestalled by The Lovely Feathers starting up, about whom I don't have much kind to say. Sort of a mildly proggy Tokyo Police Club is probably enough description. Toss in some overwrought, silly lyrical concepts (the angst of walking on the beach, the death of the pope) to boot. I mostly rolled my eyes and soldiered through it.
By the time $100 were setting up, the room had largely filled up, and they proceeded to play a focused set to an appreciative crowd. Hard to gauge whether the change was in my mood or in the performance, but I thought the band was appreciably more swinging (as in 'tight but loose') than when I saw them a month ago. I was especially struck by "My Father's House", with the interplay between steel guit and el-p sounding like a vintage Gordon Lightfoot track. Simone's vox sounded a little rough, especially near the start of the set, and constrained to the lower end of her range, but was also working on a beehive hairdo. Good stuff.
Next up: Women, who I had heard good things about but was generally unfamiliar with. They played slightly psychedelicized post-punk. Clinic came to mind, but perhaps more boiled down to the essential ingredients of Metal Box and Syd Barrett. I liked their sound, but wasn't particularly taken by most of their songs — the best parts came when the compositions melted down into an abrasive haze of echoplexed distortion. Perhaps realizing they lack a dynamic frontman, the vox were handled in a sort of "bullpen by committee" approach, and my enjoyment of their tunes was inversely proportional to the amount of singing going on. I would rate them as a band with potential, but not all the way there yet.
As the crowd cycled around between sets, we took the opportunity to move up and get central for the night's main attraction, and it was fairly dense by this point. So much so that when Jeff Cohen took the stage to make introduction, he announced that the club was at capacity. Which is a just reward for Gentleman Reg, doing a set drawn mostly from the recent Jet Black. He was backed with guit, keyb, no bass, and Dana Snell of The Bicycles sitting in on drums. A very proficient lot, though I thought at first the guitarist was making too-liberal use of some sort of staticky echo effect until he went over and thwacked his malfuncioning amp a couple times. Liz Powell (of Land of Talk) hopped up for some quiet backing vocals, and the set included a nice live arrangement of "We're in a Thunderstorm", replacing the album's disco-fied backdrop with a hi-hat riding DOR feel. Looking forward to a longer set from this band — hopefully there'll be some more local shows coming up.2
Moved back a piece after that — it was getting a little tight up front and the place was boiling. That, plus the wall of Very Tall Dudes that formed in front of us, plus general fatigue setting into my creaky bones kinda broke the spell of concentration, and not long after Chad VanGaalen3 took the stage, I was feeling done in. Based on my past experience, VanG is generically agreeable when rockin' out and kinda dull otherwise, and what I was hearing (and largely not seeing) wasn't changing that opinion. We lasted about halfway through and could hear the streetcar homeward beckoning, so we grabbed jacket and booked it out of there. I was feeling stiff and weary, but a worthy night.
Random note: graffiti spotted in the bathroom at the 'Shoe: "Beneath the concrete, the creak!" Is there a clever pun here I'm not getting, or is this upcoming generation of situationists not getting any learning on their homophones?
Random note #2: pseudo-celeb in attendance: the infamous Flyerman. Haven't seen him around for quite awhile, though I didn't miss him. K. reported him drunk and belligerent at the bar between sets.
1 Who is not too popular where I come from.
2 Looking ahead to summer, we can only hope the big stage at Pride finds a spot for Reg.
3 Rock t-shirt: Eric's Trip.
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