My sister-in-law and I went. My brother wasn't interested. I probably wouldn't have travelled to see this band, but since it is rare that anyone comes here to play anything I figured it would be an experience. We actually had three bands play. The first one I knew would be a joke when the drummer comes out first without a shirt on and struts around the stage grinning from ear to ear. After one song we moved as far away as we could. Their 30 minutes conisted of screaming into the mic while jumping around. No one had a clue what they were supposed to be singing, but it ended with another one taking off his shirt so it must have been good for them.
The second band was "Mobile" and there was only one song in their 45 minutes that I recognized. They were quite a bit better than the first band and we got back up close for them. They ended with "Teenage Wasteland" which was nicely done, but not their song. The venue this was in, though, was a hockey ring and even though they just spent $13 million improving the place it seems that none of that went to doing anything about the sound problems in there so pretty much all it turns into is echoing base, feedback noise and unrecognizable vocals unless you already know the words and can pick them out from the rebounding sound waves. At work today someone came in and said the concert was great. I asked him why and he said 'cause it was loud, but you couldn't understand any of the words. Okay, must be easy to be a rock star then. Just make noise.
The headliner band was "Default" from Vancouver and they are quite well known in Canada and it remains a mystery why they would even stop here but they did. For them we were able to make our way to within 6 bodies of the stage near centre. We found that the closer we could get the better the sound was. We managed to get close to the pocket where the side speakers didn't interfere as mush with the speakers on the stage so the bad sound qualities of the building was ever so slightly muted closer up. We were able to get to the second row thanks to a few people getting hoisted up in front of us and surfed back over our heads. From this close the sound was as good as it was going to get for this place and we could make actual eye contact with the lead singer very easily. Just about every song they did I've heard at one time or another so I enjoyed their performance.
We stayed up front for about half of it until a few people decided to start the shoving back and forth so we dropped back again (which still was very close since there weren't that many people actually on the floor in front of the stage - more sat a mile away in the stands). Then we watched the crowd surfing in wonder as people would just let people fall on their heads instead of reaching up and moving them along. "Gee, I'm not going to touch him, let's just let me fall on his head here instead."
My ears rang the rest of the night.
It would have been much better outside without the building ruining the sound, but it's not too often you can get close enough to get splattered with a singers sweat when he bops his head so what-the-heck, it was something to witness. I'll need to pick up their CDs.
http://www.defaultonline.com/"Count on me" is one of the best ones if you want to take a listen.
Bart
