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These years of cloak-and-dagger.
Haven't done one of these in a while; it has been a peculiarly showless fall. But nonetheless: tonight! Matthew Good!
(For background: Matt Good is pretty much a thread through the soundtrack of every novel I write. At 16 years old, nursing my first broken heart, I went to Europe on a March Break school trip with a Douglas Coupland novel and the Matthew Good Band's Underdogs, and something fused and stuck in my brain that has yet to ever unstick. Last week, that stuck thing sent me to Vancouver, to see the mountains and ocean and crows.)
Two things mildly horrid about this show: one, the opener, who was not only Vancouver-1998-music, but generic Vancouver-1998-music. And somewhat awkward onstage. The second thing was the venue -- Queen Elizabeth Theatre -- which is great for stuff like Owen Pallett or other sit-down sorts of shows, but not at all useful when you want to either duck out to skip the rest of the opener and/or dance your face off to the headliner. Although we found out just how much headbanging/dancing range you can actually get in those seats. Oh, we did.
As for the actual set:
This opened...I have no words. This opened with the stage set with the instruments and two table lamps, glowing soft against the darkness, and then the keyboardist crept on and started with a few chords, and Matt came on, and sang an piano-and-voice version of "While We Were Hunting Rabbits" soft and in the dark, backlit by those two warm little lamps.
This is not tonight's show. This is the Kitchener date. But this is what I mean.
There is a little hook in my soul from that, a sliver of gravity and dignity and soft profound things. It's not coming out.
Rest of set...about half of it was stuff from the new album: "Lights of Endangered Species", "Shallow's Low", "What if I Can't See the Stars, Mildred?", "Zero Orchestra", "Non Populus" (yaaaay), "Set Me on Fire" (yaaay) as the end of the encore. The other half hopped around between earlier stuff, with a real emphasis on the first two albums: "Load Me Up", Hello Time Bomb", "Apparitions", "Born Losers", "The Boy Who Could Explode" (yaaay), and kind of most wonderfully, "Weapon" as the closer for the main set. I wrote a whole book to that song, once.
The huge concentrations of really old old stuff meant that any time one of them showed up, the whole theatre got on our collective feet. I found out how much dance space you get in that seat. It's not a lot, but we managed.
It was also a bit of a mouthy crowd; definitely not my favourite. But it meant loud singing along was pretty okay. Which is good. I don't feel complete if I can't at least mouth the words.
As for the encore: I can't decide if this was planned or not, but someone near the back started, in the traditional clap/cheer between set and encore, to start chanting the beginning of "Giant", which is a bunch of cheerleaders going: "K-I-C-K-A-S-S, that's the way we spell success". So it spread, and people picked it up. And once the whole crowd was doing it -- they cut in with "Giant". It kind of had to have been a plant, and planned. But y'know what? It was cool.
The middle song on the encore was something I've never heard, and I felt sort of thrown for a minute until getting home and finding out that it's unreleased. So that's fine.
There are so many things I could have wanted to hear here that I didn't even go in with a wishlist. He doesn't often play the older stuff -- I think there were, for years, some copyright issues between the other members of the Matthew Good Band proper vs. just playing all the later, solo stuff -- but really, in this case, almost anything was good. I wish I could have heard stuff like "The Inescapable Us" or "Extraordinary Fades", but I frequently fall in love with songs that aren't touring songs. There really was no wrong way to build this setlist tonight.
So this was not incandescent, like the last time I saw him, and it was not a religious experience like every BSS show is, but the waves of sound on "Non Populus" and "Weapon", and that first song and the quiet of it, and the soft darkness behind and around us -- that, I suspect, is not going away anytime soon.
Concert buddy Jeff and I walked up from the theatre instead of taking the streetcar; we're both pretty hardcore walkers, and the transit was going to be really crowded (another small downside of that venue), and I needed to move after not being able to dance myself hoarse. So we cut up through Parkdale to the Lakeview Lunch, grabbed a very late dinner (pulled pork sandwich om nom nom) and then wandered the cool night streets back up to home territory.
And now I am home, and night-air chilly, and a little, sweetly haunted. And will probably dream of rabbits, and lamplight, and guitars.
(For background: Matt Good is pretty much a thread through the soundtrack of every novel I write. At 16 years old, nursing my first broken heart, I went to Europe on a March Break school trip with a Douglas Coupland novel and the Matthew Good Band's Underdogs, and something fused and stuck in my brain that has yet to ever unstick. Last week, that stuck thing sent me to Vancouver, to see the mountains and ocean and crows.)
Two things mildly horrid about this show: one, the opener, who was not only Vancouver-1998-music, but generic Vancouver-1998-music. And somewhat awkward onstage. The second thing was the venue -- Queen Elizabeth Theatre -- which is great for stuff like Owen Pallett or other sit-down sorts of shows, but not at all useful when you want to either duck out to skip the rest of the opener and/or dance your face off to the headliner. Although we found out just how much headbanging/dancing range you can actually get in those seats. Oh, we did.
As for the actual set:
This opened...I have no words. This opened with the stage set with the instruments and two table lamps, glowing soft against the darkness, and then the keyboardist crept on and started with a few chords, and Matt came on, and sang an piano-and-voice version of "While We Were Hunting Rabbits" soft and in the dark, backlit by those two warm little lamps.
This is not tonight's show. This is the Kitchener date. But this is what I mean.
There is a little hook in my soul from that, a sliver of gravity and dignity and soft profound things. It's not coming out.
Rest of set...about half of it was stuff from the new album: "Lights of Endangered Species", "Shallow's Low", "What if I Can't See the Stars, Mildred?", "Zero Orchestra", "Non Populus" (yaaaay), "Set Me on Fire" (yaaay) as the end of the encore. The other half hopped around between earlier stuff, with a real emphasis on the first two albums: "Load Me Up", Hello Time Bomb", "Apparitions", "Born Losers", "The Boy Who Could Explode" (yaaay), and kind of most wonderfully, "Weapon" as the closer for the main set. I wrote a whole book to that song, once.
The huge concentrations of really old old stuff meant that any time one of them showed up, the whole theatre got on our collective feet. I found out how much dance space you get in that seat. It's not a lot, but we managed.
It was also a bit of a mouthy crowd; definitely not my favourite. But it meant loud singing along was pretty okay. Which is good. I don't feel complete if I can't at least mouth the words.
As for the encore: I can't decide if this was planned or not, but someone near the back started, in the traditional clap/cheer between set and encore, to start chanting the beginning of "Giant", which is a bunch of cheerleaders going: "K-I-C-K-A-S-S, that's the way we spell success". So it spread, and people picked it up. And once the whole crowd was doing it -- they cut in with "Giant". It kind of had to have been a plant, and planned. But y'know what? It was cool.
The middle song on the encore was something I've never heard, and I felt sort of thrown for a minute until getting home and finding out that it's unreleased. So that's fine.
There are so many things I could have wanted to hear here that I didn't even go in with a wishlist. He doesn't often play the older stuff -- I think there were, for years, some copyright issues between the other members of the Matthew Good Band proper vs. just playing all the later, solo stuff -- but really, in this case, almost anything was good. I wish I could have heard stuff like "The Inescapable Us" or "Extraordinary Fades", but I frequently fall in love with songs that aren't touring songs. There really was no wrong way to build this setlist tonight.
So this was not incandescent, like the last time I saw him, and it was not a religious experience like every BSS show is, but the waves of sound on "Non Populus" and "Weapon", and that first song and the quiet of it, and the soft darkness behind and around us -- that, I suspect, is not going away anytime soon.
Concert buddy Jeff and I walked up from the theatre instead of taking the streetcar; we're both pretty hardcore walkers, and the transit was going to be really crowded (another small downside of that venue), and I needed to move after not being able to dance myself hoarse. So we cut up through Parkdale to the Lakeview Lunch, grabbed a very late dinner (pulled pork sandwich om nom nom) and then wandered the cool night streets back up to home territory.
And now I am home, and night-air chilly, and a little, sweetly haunted. And will probably dream of rabbits, and lamplight, and guitars.