March Retrospective

March is winding down and spring is here, the days are getting longer and we've actually had some sun. Plenty of rain and wind too. While it's warmer than Winter, early Spring evenings are still best spent indoors, and watching live musical is one of the best ways to spend time indoors.

One of my New Years resolutions was to see lots of bands and blog about each and every one. Going to several shows a week and writing about each takes a level of creative discipline and consistency I haven't achieved before. I'm not even claiming to write good or interesting blogs, but I am getting the photos and videos uploaded, backups run, blogs written, edited and published and promoted, repeat as needed, so I can claim to be writing and publishing pretty frequently, even if it's only self publishing on a free blog that not many ever notice. The creative discipline and efforts of writing about the shows are good for me on many levels. I try to be more open to the musicians and the songs at the shows, looking and listening for interesting bits to comment on, seeing if I can find any themes or patterns between the bands at a show. Trying to be both in the moment living through the show and also in the collective space of ideas, metaphors, allegories, concepts and correlation to recent and past examples. I feel like it stretches my cognitive and writing mental muscles in a way that can only be good for me. I get a glow out of volunteering and creating on multiple conscious and unconscious levels that brightens my outlook and gives me many fond memories. I hope any readers out there get even a fraction out of this blog of what I get out writing it, and thanks for reading!

This March I managed to see 25 bands. Adding that to the first two months I have now seen 60 bands/sets/performances, 49 for the first time. Duplicates were PWRFL Power, My Parade, Kinski and the St. Marks choir performing a capella.

Highlights:
Playing with my new Nikon digital SLR at shows.
The Lonely Forest pumping out great song after great song sounding like they might be positioned to break out to national awareness.

Marnie Stern shredding, singing and bantering, so many good performances like Marnie and Tera Melos and Kinski - all in one show.

My Parade setup on the floor again, no hierarchy for them,
the haunting impact of Knowmad's the River Runs Deep.

Several shows with packed houses and the occasional sellout like the Knowmads kept things lively. The grace and the spiritually centered and comforted feeling granted to me at Ash Wednesday mass and the sense of coming home it kindles in me.
Yet another great Veracity show, best attendance yet and a variety of talented bands with several (most, 3 of 4) using horns.

Diamond Rings and PS I Love You on stage together with that surprisingly low voice from the lean and lanky young fashion icon adding some low end punch to the guitar riffing and wailing high end falsetto vocal coming from the big shambling hairy guitarist as the drummer smashes his way through the beat underpinning it all, I wish they did a full set as a supergroup!


The creative wacky Magmafest show with my first Skype-in and PWRFL Power on stage for the first time in years.


Pogo-ing until my feet hurt, and then pogo-ing some more at the Ex show.

Great volunteers dealing with messy customers professionally and well, noticing that my example gets some of the kids to get a little more focus and polish - mentoring and volunteering are very positive for my self esteem!

Conclusion:
Good music exalts us just a little, taking us out of our little internal rat races and exposing us to some corner of a larger collective creative universe in an immediate and sometimes powerful and urgent way. When the creativity somehow spans the audience and feeds back to the band with the positive energy flowing and the creation - to steal a beer company motto: life just doesn't get any better than that!

Diamond Rings, PS I Love You and Noddy at the Vera Project

I ended up taking over steering at the Diamond Rings show at the Vera Project for Sam, who had originally signed up for it. I was at the Vera for a meeting anyway, so once the meeting wound down I was able to take over and "steer" the kids and see an interesting show. One of the great things about being open to volunteering at the Vera when they need a hand is that I get to see all kinds of bands that I wouldn't normally have gone to see. That's not always a great blessing, but it has certainly broadened my horizons.

Diamond Rings was described as a "glam rock/pop" act when I read about it, and the video I checked out had the singer and 4 other kids wandering around the streets (somewhere in Ontario, I suspect) dancing to the music while the singer lip synched. The singer had a kind of rainbow eye makeup thing going on and a dyed blond mohawkish sort of haircut.

When I was a kid back in the 70s and 80s glam rock was a pretty huge influence; even fairly loud guitar oriented bands like Rat, Poison, Def Leopard, and Bon Jovi all spent a fair amount of time on their makeup, hair and appearance. While I enjoyed some of the songs, I was drifting towards a slightly more hardcore sound and I tended to sneer a little about the bands that spent so much time on their image. I preferred the energy and raw power of a good punk show, or the heavy metal sounds of less "glam" bands like Black Sabath and Led Zeppelin. When I look back now the distinction seems pretty silly, since the heavy metal bands put time and efrfort into their clothes and hair too, they just consciously went for a less pretty look, and the punk bands for all of their "non-conformist" claims mostly went for a small set of similar looks: military surplus, ripped jeans with safety pins and so on. It was an anti-uniform uniform, but it was still a uniform.

Since then I've gotten over the fixation on looks and I now spend more time listening to the music and the lyrics, that's what speaks to me (if anything does). Being a typical male I'm still a sucker for attractive women, some things never change, but the makeup and clothes don't figure as prominently to me.

Listening to the one song by Diamond Rings that I checked out on YouTube I was struck by the vocals: the singer had a low voice and an interesting approach, and the music was bouncy and fun too.

So here I was checking out the show. The attendance was fairly light, with a small crowd for the first band, Noddy. When I went into the show room, the 20 or so people who were watching and listening were mostly sitting down in the chairs at the outer edge of the venue, which is odd and mostly negative - the band gets zero energy from the crowd when that happens. It did let me get right up close to take pictures, though.

Noddy was interesting, if a bit tech heavy for my tastes. Two of the three members were playing synthesizers and triggering sequencers and drum machines, so they tended to be rooted to their equipment and either almost hiding behind it or facing sudeways; both of which tend to create an emotional distance which makes the performance a little less urgent and engaging. The music sounded pretty good, though.

The lead vocalist was more energetic, and one of the keyboard players at least was moving around and putting on a bit of a show. I missed having a live drummer, the lack of a real performer tends to limit the options for dynamic interplay between the performers and freeze the beats to a metronomic exact timing - not always a bad thing, but it does limit artistic options to some degree.

Mildly lousy camera work, par for the course from me. I'm kind of amused by my criticism of their artistic efforts, when mine as demonstrated in the video suck much worse. They moved enough and put out enough energy to get the audience to stand up and move closer, so the performance was successful on most levels. Not bad for an opening act.

Next up was PS I Love You, kind of the anti-glam rock approach.

The quitarist had long hair that at first fell down and almost merged with his reddish beard, giving his face a kind of wall of hair appearance which was amusing. He also could really kick out some interesting riffs, and I enjoyed the live drummer.

In the video above you can see him using his right leg on some equipment, on looking closer I realized he was using bass pedals - not quite sure what the correct term for that is, but it allowed him to get a more full sound by including a bass line underneath the music which I think was a smart artistic choice. Two piece bands often end up with a kind of top heavy sound, and the bass pedal avoided that.

PS I Love You brought Diamond Rings up for the last song or two of their set, including one song that they said they wrote together, so it's apparent these guys know each other (I believe they're both from Ontario, Canada). The visual contrast was somewhat interesting, the big hairy dude shredding on the guitar and the lean blond madeup dude singing along - nice final bit and a good choice to end the set.


It also set us up well for the transition to Diamond Rings.

In this photo her's playing guitar, but he spent more time playing synthesizer. I just like the visual of the guitar better.

He used a drum machine and sequencers, playing keys or guitar some while he sang, sometimes just singing along to the sequenced tunes from his laptop. Once again not my favorite approach, I like the dynamics of a group, the interplay of the drums and bass in real time and so on, but he won me and the crowd over with his dancing and performance. He has aenough charisma to pull it off and keep us interested.

The way he opened up the show, facing away from us while the sequenced music played, pumping his fist to the beat and so on worked quite well.

When I was younger I would not have appreciated this much, but that says more about me and my biases than it does about Diamond Rings. In an interesting way it somehow closed the distance between us and him. It was like we were all listening to the same music, and he was grooving and moving to the beat - we wished we were that interesting to watch, and that confident. Facing away from us he ended up facing in the same direction we were facing, at least at first. Effortlessly throwing in one hand keyboard riffs, singing in that low voice, the engaging motions, he was definitely putting on quite a show.

He also played the guitar for a bit:

Working the hair, busting the moves, singing the songs he'd written, playing multiple instruments - the guy's got talent, and he had the audience getting into it too. He definitely won me over and I enjoyed the show. An excellent way to spend a rainy and windy Thursday night, and I'm glad I got a bit out of my comfort zone to check it out.