HOUSE 77 Xmas EDITION

So last night I went to the Death Cab and Franz Ferdinand show. There are some rather interesting things to report...

First off, Ricoh Colliseum. It's a hockey rink. It has seats. Anyone who bought tickets from the Docks (like me) got floor tickets, other people got pretty screwed. Suffice it to say, I was happy about that little unexpected piece of information. Other than that though, I wasn't terribly impressed by the place.

The first problem is the utter lack of room inside. It was stupidly crowded. The beer was NINE bloody dollars, and the washrooms were hopelessly small. I think there were four men's washrooms, and they only had like six urinals each, which compared to a place like even the Kool Haus is pretty underequipped. Next, the exits were awful. When people tried to get out when the concert was done, it was just a tremendous mass of people trying to escape through like two exits. For the maybe five or six thousand people it held, it was pretty bad for getting out (that being said, the Kool Haus is still a disaster by comparison, but I think that's the worst club on earth for getting out of).

Now, speaking of problems getting out, if say...a fire alarm were to go off...and people had to escape. They'd have a problem. But oh...wait...here comes big problem number three with the place...the fire alarm DID go off!!! Right in the middle of Death Cab's third or so song! And it went on for AGES. Like three songs. They couldn't get the damned thing turned off. And it wasn't even like a constant tone, it was this "EEEEEE" *pause two seconds* "EEEEEE". And there were flashing lights. Though the flashing lights were actually kinda cool. But yah, it ruined a few of their songs, which was annoying as hell.

Last but not least, supposedly the acoustics were terrible, but being smack dab in the middle on the floor meant we had very few problems with sound, I am just basing that on hearsay.

Anyway on to the music. I don't really know Franz Ferdinand's music beyond their singles on the Edge, but I would say that by the end of the set they did a pretty decent job. It began REALLY slow though. They played perfectly, and have some awesome vocal mish-mashes, but really, at the beginning they seemed to be mannequins doing practically nothing to entertain. About halfway through they played The Fallen and did a little more entertaining stuff by introducing the band members in a fairly amusing way...but the strange thing was that they'd already played Take Me Out...which I would have assumed would be their closer. Instead, they closed with a pretty good act of This Fire. It was entertaining, but they started out way too lifeless for my tastes, and had weird choices for how to create the flow for their set...plus...some of their songs are pub music for drunks...so it wasnt the best venue for them.

Then Death Cab...I like em...they screwed around a bit with their songs, which is fun, and something that Franz didn't do. Transatlanticism was a bit of a let down as a closer because their rendition of it seemed lost in the arena...until the end of it, with some pretty crazy distortion effects and some pretty sweet jamming in the middle. So they recovered that. Beyond that, it was almost entirely what I expected...they did a cool little drum show similar to what Incubus did when I saw them...but nothing out of the ordinary. It was perhaps a bit too slow-tempo alternative for my tastes though, and though they tried to entertain on stage, the bassist came across as being a grunge rocker...which didn't fit when they were playing a song like The Sound of Settling. The lead guitarist seemed pretty lifeless too. And the drummer looked like he belonged in the mid-nineties behind someone like Dave Matthews or Bare-Naked Ladies.

So anyway...to those who I offered the tickets to...I'd say in the end, be happy you didn't pay $50 like I did. I enjoyed the show, but I have seen epically good shows for less than 30$...I still figure that BSS put on the best show I've ever seen...and that was FREE!