First of all, I gotta come clean.
1. I did not know who the Darcys were
2. I did not know who the Balconies were
3. I did not know who the Black Hat Brigade were
4. I spent most of the concert talking to the Balconies at their merch table and the gaggle of ladies sitting beside us
5. I was a last minute fill-in for Gary
6. Ricky and I drank a whole lotta beer and left early to eat the most efficiently delivered (and delicious) shawarma, putting another stymie in my vows to shed the excess weight
In otherwords, this is going to be a crummy review that will not do the bands the justice they deserve. But to be fair, there were two openers–the first openers were the Balconies and they were playing when we got there around 10:30. They are a 3-piece set out of Ottawa with an interesting sort of relationship triangle going on. The two vocalists are brother and sister; the drummer and the female vocalist are a couple. They hail from Ottawa and are all transferring to the University of Toronto soon to pursue their classical guitar studies. They have been described as alternative-rocky-eclectic-high-energy stuff. From what I remember this sounds fairly accurate.
Seeing as I took notes on my hand and they are pretty much 80% washed off now, I had to piece together smudged chicken scratch + pry into the memory banks to remember Black Hat Brigade were on next. I missed most of their set because we were sitting near the back trying to get invited to this girl’s cottage in the Kawarthas. So I apologise, Black Hat Brigade. I have subsequently listened to the tunes on their MySpace page and Zombie City Shake has its catchy moments.
Finally, the Darcys hit the stage — I think around midnight or so. Ricky described them as “Canadian Rock” (although they are self-described as Indie / Rock / Shoegaze) and from what we could tell, they have managed to attract quite the young following. In fact I would go so far as to say we were possibly the oldest people there, which spiraled me into a bit of a depression. But let’s get back to that shoegaze thing…is this the most misunderstood category of music or what? You may accuse me of narrow scope here. You may be right. It just seems to me that everyone and their brother is being lumped into “shoegaze” regardless of the fact that their guitars aren’t particularly ambient and the band has terrific showmanship. I guess the Nu Gaze term hasn’t caught on yet. Anyway…yeah. The part of the set we caught was good, but again this review is pretty pathetic, so what do I know? I like their Strange Fits tune but wouldn’t be able to tell you if they played it last night. I think they did…
After that we had delicious shawarma at Ali Babas that was rocketed over to us in under 2 minutes. Whatever was in that sauce made me inhale the thing in under 2 minutes. I’m sure Ricky can elaborate as to what fixins were on there.