Devin Townsend & Rammstein

So I meant to write a post a while ago, November 2nd to be exact, about the Devin Townsend Project show I went to, but I got sidetracked and became super busy with schoolwork and family stuff and whatnot, so here's a double post about two different shows:

Show #1: November 2nd, 2010:

Myself and my two friends, John and Zach, went to see the Devin Townsend Project at Cafe Campus. It took us a little while to find out exactly where it was sadly, even with my android phone with google maps, and we were becoming a bit impatient and worried, as we had purchased Meet & Greet tickets. When we finally found the place, things were running a bit late, and we had to wait a little while before actually getting in. Once we were all let in finally, we were led to a little space at the back of the venue, where Devin was just standing there, playing some ambient guitar on his acoustic, saying hi and shaking peoples' hands, joking around and just being an all-around nice guy.

It was a great experience, as I have loved Devin's works since Strapping Young Lad, and have enjoyed every album he has released since. It was great hearing him play some acoustic songs, and talk about how important it is to be true to yourself, and make any music you want to make, be what you want to be etc. He even said himself that he's very hippie these days, and that you should not buy into the whole rock star image, as it almost inevitably leads down a path of self destruction through drugs, alcohol and whatnot, mentioning that he still has to go home, as touring takes its toll, pay the bills, take care of his kid, shovel the driveway etc. It is always great to learn that one of your musical heroes (at least to me, being a musician) just wants to be treated like a regular guy, and does not want to be this rock star god persona that so many people are, being jerks to their fans. It's also great that he's Canadian as well.

Afterwards, John, Zach and I went to the Bell Province down the street to grab some food and wait for the show to start. We got in just as the first opening act was finishing their set, but they really only played around 3-4 songs from what I heard, not getting much time or sound in.

Today I Caught the Plague:

http://www.myspace.com/todayicaughttheplague

This band was an interesting metal/hardcore style band hailing from Ottawa, Ontario. Musically they are fairly technical, in a similar vein as Protest the Hero, however I was not a big fan of the vocals, for I could not understand a word he said when screaming, and the first words of the first song sounded like he was screaming: "YABABABA BABABAAOOOWWW!"Which does not sit well with me, personally. Though he did look a lot like Guile from the Street Fighter series of videogames.

Tesseract:

http://www.myspace.com/tesseract

These guys are a great band from England, playing some awesome Progressive style metal. Immediately when the band started playing I got a huge Meshuggah vibe from them, and was immediately skeptical, as I've heard several bands that try to be exactly like their influences but just come off as terrible, because it is not their own music. However, they stray quite a bit from Meshuggah's sound, with more melodic moments, but keeping with seemingly sporadic rhythms chugging through, with some amazing breakdowns here and there. Very nice people as well, as I had a small chat with them at one point after their set, waiting for Devin to come on. Definitely check these guys out and buy their EP, or a tshirt, or both.

Devin Townsend Project:

http://www.myspace.com/devintownsenddtb

Devin Townsend is one of my heroes, as I said before, and his show was just another reason why. After meeting the man, with his calm friendly nature, it was like there was an almost completely different man on stage, in a blazer, acting crazy on stage, with his high screams, low growls and almost operatic singing. He played a number of songs both heavy and not so heavy from all his albums with the Devin Townsend Project, before mentioning that he was going to play his obligatory "last song," go offstage with the band for five minutes, then come back on for an encore (as a side note, I loved the fact that he mentioned this, as it is very true, there really is no point for a band to say its their last song anymore, everyone knows they're going to come back for an encore, it seems they just want to stroke their egos via the crowd cheering). It was great to hear the first encore song, as it was one of his older songs, "Earth Day." It was all in all a great show in a small venue. If you ever get the chance to see Devin Townsend, you definitely should, he really is a big joker.

Show #2: December 9th, 2010:

So here's a bit of back story to this. Originally, I saw Rammstein in Quebec City this summer, and was not entirely bummed out when I found out they sold out their Montreal (my hometown, a three hour drive away from Quebec City) show in under an hour. However, three days before the show, my friend Tomas asked me if I wanted to go see them, as he had an extra ticket. I immediately jumped at the occasion, and proceeded to listen to Rammstein until the day of the show. They played at the Bell Center, which is an alright venue, the sound really is hit or miss, luckily the sound was brilliant that night.

Combichrist:

http://www.myspace.com/combichrist

This was an odd band, the singer looking like something out of a video game wearing all black with some white body paint, and a false metallic spinal chord at his back, blowing white powder here and there. These guys were good, though not exactly a group I would go out of my way to see, rather listen to at home, or in a bar. They have a nice sound of industrial/electro metal, sort of like a heavier Nine Inch Nails at times, though their singer could use some tips from Trent Reznor, in my opinion. Their stage presence was good, but the lights they used were a bit much, their strobe lights were much too strong and overbearing, as I had to look away at times before they gave me a massive headache.

Rammstein:

http://www.myspace.com/rammstein

Honestly, I don't know where to begin. This is a band I have been listening to since I was 14, and have wanted to see live since then. I got my first chance to see them in Quebec City, which in and of itself was an amazing show with Apocalyptica. Make no mistake, I loved seeing them live, but this show at the Bell Center was much, much better for a number of reasons. One of them being, even though I was not on the floor, the amount of people blocking my view was significantly less so, as the crowd at Quebec City was apparently around 120,000 people, whereas the Bell Center capacity is something around 13,000, and when standing at an elevated level I could see so much more than I could when mostly spending my time looking at the giant screens in Quebec. The sound was much clearer, and the pyrotechnics just that much more amazing, with a slight difference in sets, the final song of the encore was Engel, in which Till came out in angel wings, spouting fire and exploding at points in the song. It is also always intense watching them bust out the face-mounted flame throwers. I really can't say much more than it was intense and amazing. See them, if you can.

Lakes of Canada

So last Friday, October 8th, I went to see an acoustic gig at Grumpy's bar on Bishop.
It consisted of a one-man guitarist performance opening act, followed by a three piece
band made up of... well a bunch of instruments and singing.

Jesse Creatchman:
This guy was the opening act, just one guy, a guitar and, for a tiny bit, a harmonica.
To be honest my first impressions of the guy were not so great, if only because I'm
shallow and highly judgmental. This guy comes onto the stage wearing running shoes, slacks and a turtleneck.
Either way, regardless of attire, the guy can play and the guy can sing. Kind of like a young
John Mayer I guess. He seemed a bit nervous though, which wasn't helped by the fact that within
the first song he broke a string and had to borrow the guitar from the main band. After the initial
setback, things went very smoothly from then on. (kind of hard to get even more nervous after something like a broken string, you've pretty much got two choices: break down and end early, or just deal with it in any way you can and move on). He has a really good voice, and has some interesting songs, the most notable of which being a song he wrote about getting robbed, but they didn't take the whisky. If you're ever in Montreal and have a chance to see this guy play, I'd say its worth it, he's got a pretty good chance to get his name out there as far as I'm concerned.

Lakes of Canada:
This was the main event, the reason why I went out to Grumpy's that Friday night. Totally worth it. This trio of guys, all wearing vests by the way, really have something good going for them. Jake, Conor and Chris know what they're doing. All three of them sing, and all three of them play a number of instruments and percussions. It's obvious in their performance that they practice a lot and work well together. The trio of vocal harmonies really plays through well, and really makes the music all the more powerful. They have this really great sound, which their Myspace states sounds like "Fleet Foxes meets Sufjan meets Simon & Garfunkel meets Ingrid." Though personally I found a lot of their vocal harmonies and overall song structures and styles were reminiscent of artists like Promise and the Monster, or Lisa O Piu. The highlights, for me, of the night were two of their songs, the first being "Inconsiderate Friend", a funny little ode of sorts to those friends that you have that are just complete asshole's, yet still your friends. The second I guess could be considered a dirge for the lead singer's cat, the late Mr. Kitty Fantastico (which I must say was an awesome, poofy, white, three legged cat with personality and style). Overall it was a great show, with very interesting instrumental lineups (a floor tom, glockenspiel, tambourine, guitar, piano, charango, shakers, voices, the only thing missing was a cheese grater and an electric toothbrush) that can only really work well together with the right folkitude and, well, practice combined with good song writing. These guys are going somewhere for sure. They've been working hard at writing songs and, as far as I know, are almost done recording an EP at Concordia's Loyola campus, so that should be out relatively soon, check them out, when the EP is done buy a copy. Also if I understand correctly a music video should be out soon as well. Here's the link to their myspace, at the moment they just have one live recording up, but soon should have snippets from the EP.

http://www.myspace.com/lakesofcanada

Something that has been on my mind for a while.

So I know this gets thrown around a lot, and a lot of people bitch about it, but really it is something that is on my mind a lot, and really makes me angry.

Why is it that so many people with almost no talent "write" and record songs that sound like carbon copies of whomever their favorite musician is, and get so much recognition and praise for it? Seriously, this pisses me off. They come up with extremely generic pop music, that sounds just like every pop musician and band before them, and these music critics and radio DJs decide its amazing, beautiful and unique, which brings a tear to one's eye because of how soulful these young people are (just like all the other musicians who have done it, imagine, tons of bands and musicians sounding exactly the same, and getting the exact same praise, being called unique and soulful). It brings these useless critics nearly to tears, and it brings me to the nearest toilet to vomit. This happens so often that a lot of young people with talent, who start off making some very interesting actually original music that has potential to lead somewhere, to decide "Hey, I could keep making the music I want to, or I could just write a three chord rock ballad and get false recognition, fame and (so long as they are not deemed a one-hit-wonder) fortune for a while, maybe grow old and continuously flog the dead horse that is my career a-la Rolling Stones, AC/DC and Guns N' Roses."

It sickens me how much this stifles the creativity of today's youth (it also sickens me how materialistic we have become, but that's a whole other story). What people need to do is wake up and realize that they're allowed to be different, they can write songs with more than three to five chords, songs don't necessarily need the verse-chorus template. There should be an unwritten rule when a band signs a contract, or even gets started. They should follow in the steps of the amazing band Isis, who will forever be known as an amazing band for the music they created. They were together for 13 years, from 1997-2010. As they had written in their blog when stating that they were going to split up as a band they said: "Simply put, ISIS has done everything we wanted to do, said everything we wanted to say." ... "We've seen too many bands push past the point of a dignified death and we all promised one another early on in the life of the band that we would do our best to ensure ISIS would never fall victim to that syndrome." (the full blog post can be found here http://isistheband.blogspot.com/2010/05/isis-has-reached-end_18.html)

If only bands (like the previously mentioned AC/DC etc) would do what Isis has done, and proverbially cleared the path, left it open for new projects and new bands (not necessarily with young people, but even bands created from the remnants of the split up groups of the past) to come into the open, if these mainstream pop-rock bands had just died gracefully ages ago, we would be getting a lot more new talent within the mainstream, instead of hearing this endless wave of factory-made cookie cutter music.

Been a while

So, like most people, I have this tendency to start something up, get super excited about it, and then suddenly get bored and/or forget about it relatively quickly. Such is the case with this little turd of a blog.

Thus I will, just like everyone else I will hopefully keep this thing going, at least more constantly than before, seeing as how I will be going to more shows, and have a lot on my mind recently. (just saved the draft for this and looked at my blog, wow, three whole posts woop-de-doo. I suppose I could consider this a -moderately- clean slate. So I'm going to follow this post with a rant. Here's a recap of some of the shows I went to since my last posting (not all the shows, just a couple highlights here and there).

Sleepy Sun:

http://www.myspace.com/sleepysun

So I saw Sleepy Sun on June 21st (for the second time). They are a great psychedelic rock band hailing from San Francisco. They played at Il Motore (same as last time) which is actually a great little venue tucked away up Jean Talon Ouest. Once again they put on an amazing show, they're so full of energy that it really pumps you up. Also they're really great people, really nice.

Noel Fielding Live:

Noel Fielding is part of the comedy duo that is the Mighty Boosh. They are fairly inventive and very surreal in their sets and comedic style. None of that changed when I saw Noel Fielding do standup for Zoofest (kind of an offshoot from the Juste Pour Rire here in Montreal). He's one of the best comedians I've seen live, because you can tell he puts a lot of energy into what he does and he just keeps you laughing. There were also a few times where he couldn't help but laugh at what he had just said, because he wasn't fully doing scripted bits. All in all a great comedian and if you ever get the chance to see him I highly reccomend it.

Isis:

http://www.myspace.com/isis

Now Isis was a great and sad show. I've liked this band for a long time, and had missed them the previous times they came to Montreal, however their show on June 23rd was one to remember. For one thing it was the last show on the tour. Another interesting fact about this show was that it was also their last show, ever. They decided to end it, as they felt that they had done everything they wanted with the band, and did not feel like continuing on, essentially flogging a dead horse. It was a great show, full of emotion from the band members. Though my only complaint was that they did not play an extended set, it was relatively short (under 2 hours from what I remember). Though I did manage to score two t-shirts from the last of their merch (stood in line for 45 minutes during the opening act).

John Mayall:

http://www.myspace.com/bluesbreakersrocknroll

Alright, now, it was not John Mayall with the Blues Breakers. It was John Mayall with a new band whose name I forgot. Though it was undeniably one of the most awe-inspiring concerts I've been to. The sheer talent of all the musicians up on stage blew me away, and just being at a John Mayall concert (one of the jazz pioneers) was amazing. That is all I can really say about that show, it was simply amazing.

Between the Buried and Me:

Now, this show was interesting, as when I bought the ticket I was under the impression that Devin Townsend was a headliner. Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy Between the Buried and me, but when it comes down to it, if you want to see Devin as a headliner and he's just an opening act, you get kind of annoyed. Cynic was alright, though they did some weird yoga thing with the audience which was kind of odd. Devin's 30 minute set was awesome, and I look forward to meeting him November 2nd, and Between the Buried and me was alright, they put on a good show, but they look weird, the singer looks like an emo kid, one of the guitarists looks like a pop-punk guy, and the other guitarists looks like he should be in Enslaved. Weird, but they make awesome music so it works.

The Mars Volta:

http://www.myspace.com/themarsvolta

So, this show ranks as one of my top 3 shows of all time. Great music made even more amazing by being played live. The way that they subtly change the songs with improvised parts here and there during the songs just makes them that much more amazing.