Category: Concerts

u and me not at home

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Part of Lindsay’s birthday present to me this year was tickets to see Wet Leg at History last night.

First, though: something to eat. We tried Rorschach, but the wait was far too long, so we just started walking. We ended up walking all the way to Godspeed, put ourselves on the waitlist, and finally got seated around 8. We knew we’d miss the opening act, and at this point knew we had to hustle to get there before Wet Leg went on. We had a pretzel and some sausages and duck fat fries and a couple beers (not warm, or in a pack) and made our way down Coxwell. We got there just in time to find a couple spots at…well, at the back.

All in all: great show. I like their albums, but the songs were almost all better live. They played 19 of ’em (which is ~80% of their entire catalogue) but bookended the biggest bangers: crazy strobes and “catch these fists” to open, and then “Chaise Longue”, “mangetout”, and “CPR” to finish. Rhian Teasdale had everyone eating out of her hand all night — that line in the chorus of “mangetout” seems like less a boast and more like an acknowledgment of fact — while Hester Chambers just exuded cool from the back of the stage.

No encore, which I love and respect. Just that big 1-2-3 combination, and they disappeared into a blanket of white light. Primo show.

Georgian Crothers Boss

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Over the past week I’ve done some fun stuff. The kind of stuff that reminds me why I like, or liked, Toronto.

Friday

Lindsay, Kirsten, and I finally tried Tiflisi, a Georgian restaurant in the Beach which made Michelin’s Bib Gourmand list the past two years. We had:

  • Assorted phkali (vegetable spreads with walnut sauce) + shoti-puri (traditional Georgian bread)
  • Lamb khinkali (traditional Georgian soup dumplings w/ lamb)
  • Kebab platter (w/ chicken, pork, lamb)
  • Bottles of Rkatsiteli and Saperavi wine, both aged in Qvevri

It was goddamned delicious. Even the vegetable spreads were seriously good, but the dumplings…holy crap.

Sunday

In the morning, we went for a walk / wee hike in Crothers Woods. We probably missed the height of the fall colors the previous weekend, but it was still pretty nice. At the entrance to the park we started chatting with another erstwhile hiker (and her beautiful black lab Grayson) and just began walking together. We had a nice little stroll, enjoyed the weather, and Grayson found a tennis ball that we used to play catch.

Wednesday

Early in the workday I received word that I had somehow lucked into an invite to the Bruce Springsteen concert at the Scotiabank Centre that night. I’m probably not the biggest Bruce fan but I know his live shows are legendary, so I went.

The set list:

  • Main set:
    • Long Walk Home (introduced as a fighting prayer for his country)
    • Land of Hope and Dreams
    • Lonesome Day
    • Candy’s Room
    • Adam Raised a Cain
    • Hungry Heart
    • Better Days
    • Letter to You
    • The Promised Land
    • Waitin’ on a Sunny Day
    • Reason to Believe
    • Darkness on the Edge of Town
    • The E Street Shuffle
    • Nightshift (Commodores cover)
    • Last Man Standing (acoustic)
    • Backstreets
    • Because the Night (Patti Smith Group cover)
    • She’s the One
    • Wrecking Ball
    • The Rising
    • Badlands
    • Thunder Road
  • Encore 1:
    • Born to Run
    • Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)
    • Glory Days
    • Dancing in the Dark
    • Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town
    • Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out
  • Encore 2:
    • I’ll See You in My Dreams (solo acoustic)

Thoughts:

  • (I only really knew 10 of the 29 songs he played last night, and 3 of those 10 were covers…including “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town“, bizarrely enough, when a fan handed him a Santa hat)
  • My favourite song of the night was a hard-chugging blues version of “Reason to Believe”, the only song he played from Nebraska. Close seconds were “Adam Raised A Cain” and the Patti Smith cover.
  • The man is 75 and he played at high energy for three hours. Three fucking hours.
  • The E-Street Band is huge (I counted 16 members, including Bruce) but so tight. Nils Lofgren and Little Steven are icons, but seeing Max Weinberg power through that 3-hour set without so much as a few seconds’ break was incredible. And there’s some magic to a band whose core has been playing together for fifty years.
  • Most of the fans there were older than I was, and knew every word to every song, but I could see people in their twenties around me singing along too.

They were late going on — 8:45 instead of 7:30 — so the show wrapped up at 11:45. I left, tired but pretty blown away.

White Lights

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Last night, for the third time in 15 years, I saw the Rural Alberta Advantage live. For the second time in a row, Lindsay missed them play because she was sick. Luckily I was meeting Shannon & Warren there, for their first time seeing the RAA. (On the way out we bumped into Mike & Heather too.)

Speaking of first times: how had I never seen a show at History before? What an great venue. Big space, excellent sightlines, fantastic sound, lots of bar & bathroom capacity, even a seated mezzanine area that looks pretty enticing.

Anyway, the concert: fantastic. They’re always good, but this was top-notch. The first time I saw them live they were just starting out, playing in a tiny venue (Lee’s Palace), and you were really immersed in that energy. Last night, in front of 10x as many people, it still felt that way. Maybe it’s because they were back in their hometown. Whatever it was, it worked. Lots of stuff from the new album, but plenty of old favourites like “Tornado ’87” and “Frank, AB”…all the Alberta disaster singalong songs, really.

The setlist:

  • CANDU
  • Bad Luck Again
  • Don’t Haunt This Place
  • 3 Sisters
  • Four Night Rider
  • Tornado ’87
  • Vulcan, AB
  • AB Bride
  • Drain the Blood
  • Stamp
  • North Star (Nils solo)
  • Don’t Wake Up
  • White Lights
  • Plague Dogs
  • Edmonton
  • Frank, AB
  • Brother
  • Terrified
  • —ENCORE—
  • In the Summertime
  • Alright
  • Conductors
  • The Dethbridge in Lethbridge

Fun things I’ve done in the last couple weeks

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  • Went to an extensive Ontario cab franc tasting at Chez Nous. Like, 40-odd different bottles. It would have felt overwhelming if it hadn’t been a dream come true for a CF nerd like me. It also afforded me a chance to ask Ricky + Olivia about their soon-to-open restaurant.
  • Drank some very yummy older wine.
  • Saw Mitski on Superbowl Sunday, her second show in three nights at Massey Hall. Her setlist was heavily weighted to her new album, but there were plenty from previous albums as well. I assumed there would be few if any changes from the previous night’s setlist (there were none, in fact) so I knew I wouldn’t hear “Best American Girl” or “My Body’s Made Of Crushed Little Stars” (I think the chorus from that one is going to keep it out of rotation for a while) but I did get an excellent rendition of “Washing Machine Heart” to close out the night. Emilie Hanskap in The Star does a more eloquent job of describing the concert than I could; suffice it to say it was a pretty landmark show.
  • Finished Doctors and Distillers (goodreads), a book I’ve been slowly reading for months. A really fascinating look at the history of spirits, cocktails, wine, and so on, and how they were used medicinally throughout the ages. I learned a lot, and wanted a lot of cocktails. (Also, I now know the etymology of the word cocktail.)
  • Had dinner & drinks at our friends Shannon & Warren’s place last night. Warren made excellent Detroit-style pizza, and we drank some good wine (probably slightly too much of it) and were sent home with surplus tiramisu.

“Chekhov.”

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Lindsay and I have both been so busy that we haven’t had much of a chance to just have a normal Saturday night out. Last night we finally managed it.

First we had dinner at The Civic in the Broadview Hotel:

  • Petite Thuet sourdough w/ cultured butter
  • freshly shucked west coast & east coast oysters w/ hot sauce, horseradish, lemon
    • glasses of Champagne
  • 36oz herb-crusted bone-in dry-aged ribeye w/ confit shallot, roasted sunchokes
  • crispy potatoes
    • bottle of Malbec

Then we went to the Crows Theatre to see Stars: Together, a play by and about the band Stars. It was musical-ish and autobiographical-ish, not quite like anything I’ve seen before.

We capped off the evening with glasses of wine (including one of the mulled variety) at Chez Nous.

Today we’re right back at it but it was nice to shut off for those few hours last night.

Significant ingestion

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Well now, THAT was a fun weekend. Lindsay’s brother was in town, and we squeezed a whole lot of fun (and somehow a fair amount of relaxation) into less than two days.

We picked him up at the airport Friday night, and after dropping his stuff at our place, we went straight to White Lily. He’d heard about it. It lived up to his expectations. “Absurd” is what he said, I think. We relaxed at home and introduced him to Fargo (the TV show, not the movie).

The next morning I got a haircut and brought home peameal sandwiches for all some and jumped into the Fargo episode they were watching. After a bit we made our way to Boxcar Social, walking through the first few minutes of Eats & Beats, to sample some cortados and tasty beers.

After that we walked up Broadview to Good Cheese, took a picnic basket of cheese and meat and baguette and cole slaw and some drinks, and walked up to Riverdale Park East where we sat and enjoyed a perfect day.

We left there, grabbed another cortado at Rooster across the street, walked a little further for the full view (best in the city, in my opinion), and then walked home.

After a little more Fargo we got on with the reason for the visit: an Anderson .Paak concert at Echo Beach. We arrived just in time to catch the last 30 seconds of Thundercat‘s set, then watched NoName kill it, and then saw Anderson .Paak absolutely torch the place. I wasn’t expecting much — I was more tagging along than anything, and have never been super into his music, but holy shit what a show. Huge spectacle technically. Amazingly locked-in band. Insane energy. Maybe a little too much “Torontooooooooooo” pandering. Fantastic vibes though. And I had no idea he’s such an amazing drummer. Anyway, it was better than I expected, and actually a pretty fucking remarkable show. Bonus: after days of thunderstorm warnings it barely even rained…there was just got this bad-ass fog that rolled in during the encore. Anyway, we were glad it seemed worth a flight to Toronto — “Absurd Plus” was the assessment, if I recall.

[Setlist]

This morning we got ourselves out of bed for some massive replenishing breakfasts at Eastbound (we all got the fork + knife fried chicken sandwich) and then had to have a little nap before heading to the airport. What a fun visit. What a killer concert.

What a great weekend.

Sparks

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Last night we completed our August full o’ concerts, seeing Beach House at the Sony Centre. They were just so…dreamy? Trance-y? Lush? The music is just as breathy and ethereal live as it is on the albums (not surprising; about 1/4 of it is backing track, not live) largely because it’s so precise and layered, so I didn’t hear anything new, but the visuals — intensely lights and effects back-lighting three silhouettes — added a lot.

Unfortunately there was a constant flow of people walking in and out, which was distracting, especially since no one could find their way back without turning on their phone’s light. I don’t know if people were tripping from the lights or just had to pee a lot, but it kept yanking me out of the moment. Still: so lovely.

The reported set list:

  1. Levitation
  2. Wild
  3. PPP
  4. Dark Spring
  5. Heart of Chambers
  6. Lazuli
  7. L’Inconnue
  8. Myth
  9. Rough Song
  10. Sparks
  11. Girl of the Year
  12. Space Song
  13. Wishes
  14. Drunk in LA
  15. Wildflower
  16. Lemon Glow
  17. Walk in the Park
  18. Dive

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Also: before the concert we had dinner — a much better outing than last time, too. This time we stopped at Leña, in my old neighbourhood. I’d never managed to go, as it opened not long before I moved, but I’m glad we stepped in — it was very tasty. We had:

  • bread w/ housemade miche, salted butter
  • sea bream tartare w/ sweet green tomato, lime, nasty sauce, potato
  • seasonal oysters w/ half dozen, cava mignonette, nasty sauce
  • angus beef ribeye steak w/ peperonata, yukon gold chips, chimichurri
  • 12 vegetable salad w/ milk mayonnaise, charred & raw vegetables, tomatillo & coriander dressing

It was all good, but the sea bream tartare was so spicy and delicious. I’d go back just for that.

 

Hope Drone

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Last Tuesday I met Lindsay after work for dinner and some beers at Stout Irish Pub before strolling around the corner to the Phoenix.

We were there to see Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Lindsay for the first time, me for the first time in seven years. We got there late so it was tough to find a good spot, but it’s not like you need to see much of what GY!BE does on stage. They started, as they often do, with “Hope Drone” before moving on to more. We’d eventually hear a lot of their latest album Luciferian Towers (including “Bosses Hang”, to my mind one of their best songs) but I was happily surprised when their second song was “Mladic”, another of my all-time favourites, coming from a few albums back.

Midway through the concert I moved toward the back, which was kind of a mistake, and I drifted away from the show a little. But then they ended with the “Sad Mafioso” section of “East Hastings”, which always reminds me of watching 28 Days Later with Tim in London sixteen years ago, and it was savage and thumping and so amazing to see live when I never thought I would. So for the second time I ended up having a weird, almost offputting experience seeing GY!BE, but they played three of my favourite songs, so it felt worth it.

Of course, it might have been fitting if they’d played “Storm” instead since we exited into an epic deluge which swamped the city and drenched me to the bone trying to get home.

The set list:

  • “Hope Drone”
  • “Mladic”
  • “Bosses Hang”
  • “Fam/Famine”
  • “Undoing a Luciferian Towers”
  • “Monheim” (including Murray Ostril / ‘…They Don’t Sleep Anymore on the Beach…’) from “Sleep”
  • “The Sad Mafioso” from “East Hastings”

Digital Witnesses

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On Tuesday we went to the Sony Centre for one of the best concerts I’ve ever seen: St. Vincent, on her Masseduction tour. The performance was so stylish and sharp and overwhelming, and the music was just as good live as on the albums, and she fucking shreds on guitar. A couple of times it was so good that I actually welled up, just from the sheer awesomeness. It was made all the better by the crowd being so into it (except the two dunces standing next to Lindsay). What an experience.

The set list:

  1. Sugarboy
  2. Los Ageless
  3. Masseduction
  4. Savior
  5. Huey Newton
  6. Year of the Tiger
  7. Marrow
  8. Pills
  9. Cruel
  10. Cheerleader
  11. Digital Witness
  12. Rattlesnake
  13. Hysterical Strength
  14. Young Lover
  15. Fear the Future
  16. Slow Disco
  17. New York
  18. Smoking Section
  19. Happy Birthday, Johnny
  20. Severed Crossed Fingers

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Also: before the concert we tried East 36, which used to be Lucien, and it…wasn’t very good. I mean, our cocktails were good, but after that the problems began: our oysters were served without any sauces, my confit duck leg was too fatty (even for confit duck!), and Lindsay’s NY strip was like shoe leather. Lindsay’s Cab was okay, but my Pinot was rubbish. Don’t think we’ll be going back there anytime soon.

Pa’lante

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Even though I moved to this neighbourhood a year ago — almost exactly a year ago, actually — I hadn’t been back to The Opera House to see a gig. In fact, looking back through this here blog machine, I see that it’s been (again, almost exactly) sixteen years since I watched Spiritualized play there, and more than fifteen years since I watched my beloved Sleater-Kinney blow us all up there. Nothing since though, at least as best I can remember.

The reason I say all this: Thursday, after some dinner at La Carnita, we headed to the Opera House for a triple bill. We arrived in the middle of Bedouine‘s (website) set, which sounded lovely. I wish we’d seen a little more of her.

Next up was Hurray For The Riff Raff (website), a band I’ve listened to a fair bit in the past and whose last album I really liked. I would have gone to see them on their own; the fact that they were co-headlining with another excellent band made this ticket a steal. I loved their set — singer/guitarist/songwriter Alynda Lee Segarra has a voice that doesn’t seem real, and an incandescent stage presence. Some of their songs are fun; some are heavy as fuck (like “Kids Who Die” which Segarra wrote after reading the Langston Hughes poem), but all were captivating.

The headliner that night was Waxahatchee (bandcamp), whose last album I also loved. Their set was a little less incendiary than HFTRR’s, but as solid as I wanted: lots of songs from the last album, a few good cuts from Ivy Tripp, fun banter. It had me listening to their whole repertoire the next day.

Also: walking in our front door, like, three minutes after the show ended? Sweet.

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