Concerts

Concert Review: Kate Nash, April 26, Mod Club

Posted on April 27, 2010 by Ricky in Concerts | 4 Comments

Toronto – I had no idea how big Kate Nash was before attending her Mod Club show on Monday. She was in town on Monday to kick off her North American tour to promote her latest album – My Best Friend is You which has already spawned a big hit in Do-Wah-Doo. The show was sold out and it was an all ages show. Apparently Kate Nash has cornered the key teenager-young adult female demographic as the crowd mainly consisted of youngish girls. There were also some fathers in the crowd trying to hit on the bartenders as well (they probably appreciated the poster saying ‘A Cunt is a useful thing’ hanging from Kate’s keyboard). Everyone was fairly excited, and when the Kate Nash came on stage at around 10:20 pm, the place went nuts. The show however, was about as bipolar a show as I’ve ever been to. I am going to quote myself again (via twitter) to summarize the show.

1st 40 minutes of Kate Nash was great last 40 minutes were awful. Like the senators, she can’t hold a lead

I really don’t know what happened – the show started off great. The 1-2 punch of Paris and Doo-Wah-Doo emphasized all the great things about the new album – stellar production, big sound and catchy melodies highlighted by her singing with the posh English accent (even if it is layered over a Regina Spektorish piano vibe). Mouthwash and future hit Don’t You Want to Share the Guilt gave her a chance to further display her singing chaps and songwriting. I love girls with a posh British accent. Like Big Suze

Everything was going quite swimmingly and everyone were having a good time, the girls were dancing, the boys were nodding and the dads were talking to the cute girl bartenders. Then about 40 minutes in, Kate Nash played that one single piano note. One of the most recognizable notes in recent history, which announced the beginning the song Foundations. Everyone was singing and I was wondering ‘where does she go from here? she already played Doo-Wah-Doo and now she played Foundations‘. The answer was, undoubtedly, downhill.

If you left the concert after the song Foundations, then you would have given the concert a:

But of course, you stayed. For the record, I found Foundations to be a bit rushed. It’s a song about a relationship gone wrong and displays all sorts of insecurities and issues that a lot of people can identify with, thats why it’s so popular. It’s the type of song that should have been given a slower, more dramatic treatment, yet she just blazed through it.

After Foundations, Kate Nash more or less abandoned her well known piano driven pop songs, strapped on the guitar, started downing alcohol and transformed the night in to a punk rock show. For the song I got a Secret, she encouraged the crowd to learn the lyrics of the song for a sing-a-long and then played the song at such a pace that she didn’t even need the crowd. Usually sing-a-longs are like – artist sings, pause, crowd sings. In this case, it was artist sings..artist sings..song over. Strange.

The rest of the set left the audience in a bit of a faze, as she channeled her inner Siouxie Sioux and practiced her rock screams over standard punkish rock sound. It’s definitely not playing to her strengths and I think more then a few people were a bit like WTF. I think all momentum was lost. I can appreciate an artist wanting to expand her sound and trying out new things, but for a show to be such night and day, it’s pretty surprising. The one song encore consisted of another punk rock song, and not one of her bigger hits like Pumpkin Song or something.

This part of the show gets a

Overall, the show was quite unbalanced and I don’t think you should use up your two most popular tunes in the first half of the set. The band was quite disengaged and seemed to be going through the motions. They barely addressed the crowd and mostly just looked at the floor. I guess this was Kate’s show anyway so it shouldn’t matter. It’s pretty apparent the talent and charm is there, but maybe the stage act should be reigned in a little, but what do I know.

Paris
Doo-Wah-Doo
Mouthwash
Kiss That Grrrl
Take Me To a Higher Plane
Don’t You Want to Share the Guilt
I Hate Seagulls
I’ve Got a Secret
Foundations
R n’ B-side
Merry Happy
Later On
Mansion Song
I Just Love You More
Model Behaviour

Here’s the rest of the dates:
April 28 – Boston, MA – Great Scott’s
April 29 – New York, NY – The Bowery
May 1 – Williamsburg, NY – Music Hall of Williamsburg
May 3 – Chicago, IL – Lincoln Hall
May 5 – Minneapolis, MN – First Avenue
May 7 – Seattle, WA – Neumo’s
May 8 – San Francisco, CA – Bottom of the Hill
May 11 – Los Angeles, CA – El Rey

Check out Spin’s review of the show here

Concert Review: OK Go [Mod Club, April 23rd, 2010]

Posted on April 27, 2010 by Wade in Concerts, Everything | Leave a comment

OK GO is a band from Chicago and they just released their third full length this year. They are best known for their catchy, almost anthem-esk pop songs, and for embracing all things viral. Their videos have seen huge success on the Internet which, in return, has launched them into ‘we can fill the Mod Club’ superstardum. I had never seen them before, but they have had some pretty awesome tunes in heavy rotation on my iPod over the past few years. Here is a brief time line of the band leading up to their show at the Mod Club last Friday.

October 12, 2008 – OK Go announced that they had finished writing new songs for their third album. Album to be produced with Dave Fridmann (The Flaming Lips, MGMT).

May 7, 2009 – a song from the album, titled Skyscrapers, was released for streaming online.

November 10, 2009 – the first single WTF? was released.

January 8, 2010 – OK Go appeared on The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien and performed a song from the album, This Too Shall Pass.

January 12, 2010 – the album Of The Blue Colour of the Sky is released on EMI.

March, 2010 – OK Go cuts ties with EMI and Capitol. It is speculated that the split came as a result of the lable trying to block viral distribution of the bands music.

April 1st, 2010 – Of The Blue Colour Of The Sky is re-released on OK Go’s own label, Paracadute Recordings.

April 23rd, 2010 – OK Go shows up at the Mod Club and attempts to drown the audience in confetti.

Here is some more point form points from the show.

*If Franz Ferdinand and the Flaming Lips had a love child and made that love child tour across North America, it would be named OK Go
*Guitars with lasers mounted on the end…cool
*A four-piece handbell rendition of “What To Do”? I was not expecting nor have I ever seen anything quite as impressive.
*Confetti
*Video cameras on the end of microphones…always cool
*More confetti
*Jackets with l.e.d. messages on the back…yeah, cool.
*More, more confetti
*From our vantage point in the balcony you could see everybody at the front of the stage singing along with all the songs.
*It seems that the OK Go live performance is a pretty direct extension of what you can see them doing on-line in their music videos. With some of their stage antics I almost felt like they were making fun of the whole ‘live music’ genre, but it worked. Give the crowd what they want I guess, and OK Go definitely knew what we wanted on Friday.
*The Brass Tapps at College and Dovercourt is the loudest bar in Toronto to wach a hockey game in.

OK Go – This Too Shall Pass from OK Go on Vimeo.

Concert Review: Quasi, April 18, Horseshoe Tavern

Posted on April 22, 2010 by Ricky in Concerts, Music | 1 Comment

Toronto – Quasi is a band from Portland, Oregon and have been around for many years. It features the former husband and wife duel of Sam Coomes and Janet Weiss along with bassist Joanna Bolme. You may be familiar with Janet Weiss, who is also part of the band Sleater-Kinney. They were in town on Sunday to promote their album American Gong which was released on February 23rd.

Normally, I wouldn’t go to Sunday shows, but I was running off the high of having the Penguins annihilate the Senators and so I felt like my energy level was pretty good. I had never heard of Quasi before but my friend had mentioned them as being good live and that the drummer was good. I’m a easy sell I guess. The Horseshoe was about 2/3 full when the band took to the stage at 9:50 and it was quite an eclectic crowd. Mostly, the people there were a tad older then say, a Hot Chip concert.

The show seemed to be divided up into two parts, the first half, when Sam Coomes was on the guitar, and the second half, when Sam Coomes was on the keyboard. The first half consisted of wailing on the borderline of jamming guitar sessions that blended nicely with Janet Weiss’s drumming. The lyrical delivery of Sam Coomes seems to be somewhat influenced by say, the Pixies, with it’s quiet / loud / quiet / loud sequences. It was definitely Portland/US college indie circa 1990s sound, whatever that is. You know the type. The keyboard portion, which according to my friend was more of their standard fair and was more theatrical, a little bit maniacal and somewhat more interesting. Coome really likes to pound on that keyboard, and that keyboard looks like it’s taken quite a beating. At times, you would think that he was just mashing shit up, but there is some method to his madness and somehow a song did come out of it. It was all pretty interesting. Janet Weiss’s drumming was also fantastic, and you could see why the lights of Stephen Malkmus and Bright Eyes would recruit her for drumming duties.

The show was well over an hour, and most people there were already fans of the band. The band had a fairly low key approach and were genuinely thankful for the crowd being there on a Sunday night. For the encore, they listened to some request and I guess played songs off that list. Good times were had.

Concert Review: Hot Chip & The XX, April 20, Kool Haus

Posted on April 21, 2010 by Ricky in Concerts | 4 Comments

Toronto – Rarely do you see a double bill of epic proportions. Both The XX and Hot Chip could have sold out many venues in Toronto by themselves, yet they have chosen to join forces like Crosby and Malkin and take over the Kool Haus for one night. The show was beyond sold out and I was lucky enough to have tickets for the show. Having seen and loved both bands live before, I was quite excited for the show.

The XX

I like to do this thing called ‘call the venue beforehand and ask for set times’. I did this, and the women on the other end on the phone said that The XX was going to be on at 9:45. Great! I thought. I would have time to watch most of the Pens-Sens game and then go to the Kool Haus. Since when are bands ever on time? Well, not only was the XX on time, but they were early! I was shocked when my coworker texted me at 9:35 and said that the band just took the stage. Luckily, Toronto is a city of cabs and we were able to get one right away. However, the cab driver did not know where the Kool Haus is. How is that even possible? If I was a cab driver, I would scope out all the concerts and show up right when the show ends and take all the 905ers back to the suburbanite basements where they belong. Clearly this man had spent too much time studying medicine or neurosurgery and not enough time studying traffic routes in whatever country he had come from.

Arriving at the Kool Haus at around 9:45, I gathered we had missed about two or three XX songs. Bummer for Gary I guess. The XX must really hate England or have some severe gambling debts back home, for they have been touring FOREVER since their album came out, and this is their third show in Toronto since December. Having seen them in December, there has been notable growth in their live performance. The band is definitely more calm on stage and definitely have developed the confidence to tweak a lot of their songs in the live environment. The set was more or less identical to their set at SXSW, right down to the crazy drumming at the end of Infinity by Oliver Sim. As you would expect, they played all the songs off their debut album. The vocals were somewhat muffled by the Kool Haus sound system, which was a shame. The crowd was mostly enthusiastic for the band but there were definitely some chatty betty’s in the crowd and considering the XX’s music contains some quiet parts, that was quite the distraction.

All in all, a good showing by The XX. Even though they aren’t very lively on stage, their music speaks for itself. You can see them many times and still get shivers whenever Infinity or Basic Space places.

Hot Chip

Judging by the colorful nature of the crowd’s fashion choices, I would say most people were here for Hot Chip. The London band was in town to promote their latest album – One Life Stand. I’ve seen Hot Chip twice already, so I knew what to expect – a good dance session. I skipped my gym workout Tuesday night because I figure I’d get my exercise in at this show. I was correct. Going to a Hot Chip concert is like going to any other electronic act – if you aren’t dancing, then you will not enjoy the concert. That’s what their music and shows are about. If you want to stand there and sway, then go to Beach House or She and Him. Hot Chip is for people who like to dance. Having said that, I felt kinda sorry for all the people cramped in the middle of the Kool Haus. The show was sold out, so unless you were off to the side (like we were), you were pretty crammed in. This does not bode well for dancing and so I figure most of the people in the middle did not have as great a time.

Hot Chip played around 80 minutes. The set consisted of a handful of tunes off their new album and some carefully chosen numbers from previous recording. I am not that familiar with their new material but Thieves in the Night, One Life Stand and the single I Feel Better (in the encore) got some good reception. For my money, Over and Over is still their best song and the crowd went bonkers for that tune. I kind of described what that song is like live in my review of their last show. Other classic Hot Chip tunes played included A Boy From School, Hold On and set closer Ready for the Floor. Needless to say, the Kool Haus was transformed into a sweaty dance pit.

Overall, a great night of music, featuring two bands of extremely different sounds. Both were great and you can’t really ask for more.

Check out the new XX video, Islands, here:

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