yesterday i went to see the modest mouse show on olympic island in toronto (avec most serene republic, do make say think, metric, and broken social scene), and here is a review:
they don't check your pockets at the entrance, that was the first thing i noticed on the way in. the empty vodka bottle lying on the ground was evidence of the impending bag checks, but like most of the pseudo-emo indie hipsters around me my drugs were slightly more subtle and could be hidden in a pocket. waiting in the suffocating heat and chain smoking my brain became a telegraph, desperately banging out in morse code a repeating message to the rest of my body a thousand miles away: act normal, walk casually, don't let your hands shake, smile at the attendant, crack a joke, open your bag, don't fuck up, don't don't don't don't don't don't fuck up.
my anxiety was over nothing like it usually is. the skinny, bespectacled emo nerd who checked my back suspiciously unscrewed my water bottle and glanced at me as he sniffed the contents. pure h20. "i wish," i said, as he threw the bottle back in my bag. yes, you little emo fuck, i wish that it was vodka, because the 200 dollars of cocaine and weed in my pocket aren't enough.
but like i said it was all for nothing. as it turns out, this was going to be like every other concert in toronto: filled to the brim with marijuana. a smoke rose up to the heavens from our little island as a silent prayer or something suitable deep. in other words, we got high, and we got high fast.
it took about fifteen minutes to find a suitable place to smoke a joint. for the uninitiated, most people wait to meld into the anonymity of the crowd surrounding the stage -- where cigarette smoke mixes with pot and nobody can tell anymore -- to light up, but it was only about 2:30 in the afternoon and most people were waiting. i had lots. about an hour later, my two friends and i were smashed; three lines, two joints and about three beers a piece. we kept it low-key, sitting through a few amusingly gay opening acts and most serene republic, which by the way sound very professional for such a shitty band.
do make say think are boring even on drugs. i believe they have now explored every POSSIBLE way of switching between two chords. the crowd of hipsters swayed back and forth, back and forth. if you watched them long enough you would become hypnotized and fall asleep. i honestly don't know if they really like this sort of shit or whether its just fun to pretend but when music is this boring it ceases to be music and starts just being noise. well orchestrated noise that happens to coincide with a beat. sometimes.
metric were the first real act and we managed to pull ourselves out of the shade to watch emily haines and her slutty antics. there is something severely wrong about the way she sings, looks and acts, and something equally wrong about the looks in the eyes of the salivating indie rock geeks as they follow her every move. it's like some sort of sick fascination with your younger sister's barbie doll. i almost fell over another hipster, lying on the ground smoking a joint as i thought: she even sings like a barbie doll might. her freakishly perky voice matches the music -- both are syrupy sweet, thin and somehow very very false. metric picked the right name. their music is well measured, perfectly balanced and as tragically choreographed as haines' so-called unpredictable and "wild" stage moves. if rock and roll is dead then metric are selling the body parts on the black market.
haines' bandmates are at least 30 if not older, and the band sounds exactly like what a 30 year old thinks kids want to hear, which fortunately if packaged correctly is a reasonable enough fascimile to fool lazy trendsurfing hipsters.
the break between metric and broken social scene was long enough for me, now having come down considerably, to get a better and more sober look at my surroundings. if i wasn't already familiar with the sort of crowd these bands draw i would think that they were selling black-rimmed glasses, studded belts, black pants and small t-shirts in the merch tents (they weren't). the sameness is actually too common to be startling, though i was suprised to note that even at a breezy 5"8' 120 pounds i was not the skinniest male present by a long shot.
the people at indie shows look how metric sounds. it's all very coffee shop, all very nu-bohemian, very familiar, the sort of shit my girlfriend likes to do. maybe just for that reason i'm okay with it, but no one will ever mistake these people for what they think they are. i caught a slim twentysomething in front of me talking to someone he apparently hadn't seen in some time about "just touring europe, writing songs". the perception is everywhere that the barrier between artist and audience has been broken, that everyone is part of the same musical commune, contributing and consuming. maybe it has, but only because bands as bad as most serene republic are allowed to perform in public. before metric i thought i was at some kind of very elaborate kereoke party, but that could have been the coke and booze mingling in my liver.
freshly jacked-up on the rest of our pot, my friends and i returned to the crowd for broken social scene. it was here i recognized a pattern. maybe it's because every band on arts & crafts is made up of mostly the same members, but they're also made up of the same flaws. until about halfway through their set i thought my teeth were made of glass, and broken social scene didn't do jack shit to penetrate that numbness. the protracted emotional release of their self-consciously "epic" music doesn't do it for me, particularly on olympic island. they were just trying too hard to put on a dramatic show, while simultaneously trying too hard to look like they weren't trying too hard to put on a dramatic show. like their audience, broken are too cool for school and don't give a shit what you think. except they do, and it shows. anyone who actually calls one of their songs "epic" onstage needs to get a fucking clue.
that said, pre-orchestrated or not, when broken manage to hit what they're aiming for it works. a few of their well-established anthems managed to connect. and the stage-talk was the best of the evening; bashing live 8 and the sponsor were classy moves that recalled canadian popular music's heyday in the 90's, when matt good would taunt tour organizers by demanding a crowd shout "blowjob" instead of "pepsi". but a band like broken lives for the happy ending, and it wasn't to be. the sunset didn't connect, the guitars were out of tune, the mistakes were too obvious, the mic volumes were off, the vocals too afraid of their own shadow. the spark didn't land, and nothing got "set on fire". little stars joke there. not the same band, but they are on arts & crafts and every band on that label is the same.
cut to modest mouse. easily the best band on the ticket, the least self-conscious and the least intentionally trendy. they came out five minutes late, unannounced, issac brock very obviously drunk, to a crowd that had grown rowdy in the meanwhile. we finished off the last of our drugs and stood dazed as they cut into paper thin walls, but something was immediately and obviously wrong.
the song clocked in at no more than 3:30, about what it is on record -- as did the next, and the one after. they broke into a number of old songs, a move which made me giddy; barely able to stand and with an unbreakable smile on my face, i had to physically restrain myself from hollaring the words to interstate 8 along with issac (whose voice was on top form, which is still not saying a lot). but beneath the giant painted-on grin and intoxicated stumbling the following words seeped out of my brain and imprinted themselves on my eyelids:
this is the wrong venue for modest mouse.
there was a time modest mouse was a tiny little noisecore/indie band from seattle. there was a time no one had heard of them and indie/anti-indie pricks like myself could jealously horde their sub-pop releases from the unwashed emo masse. there was a time that they played only small clubs, accumulated a sizable following but remained securely underground. but all of that has been long since fucked up by one summer and a boardroom of wickedly leering mtv executives who would jack off a bull if it would shoot a load of steaming dollar bills into their faces.
modest mouse is a band that needs to stretch its legs, sit back on a steady beat and hammer away at a series of ridiculous noise-jam tricks and just generally fuck around. but people come to olympic island to hear the old favourites, the songs that work, the anthems, played just like on record. 3:30. one solo only. reprise the chorus an extra time if necessary but don't push it.
even songs that required the obligatory noisy circle-jerk sequence (tiny cities made of ashes, breakthrough) seemed canned and carefully practiced. the spontanaity of modest mouse's club performances was gone. dann gallucci's suit and tie said it all: tonight was business. it was a symptom of the same disease broken social scene and metric suffer from: music by numbers. protraction continues to be the slow death of rock and roll, turning it into some kind of anamatronic puppet. it almost suited the canadian bands on the ticket, but it is a style that badly distorts the original context of modest mouse's music and makes the band seem like what it is: a bunch of guys from a shack in seattle who are in your city to play a big show with lights and smoke because they are famous now and this is what you do when you get famous. in ten minutes they will be on a plane and fuck you and they'll probably forget about all this anyway and where are we again?
12 bucks for a ferry, 50 bucks for a ticket. ultimately i could've just bought more coke and just listened to lonesome crowded west. do yourself a favor and wait five years until the indie buzz around modest mouse dies and they wind up doing what matt good is doing: coasting comfortably off of the popularity of past hits, making records for their fans and playing small clubs. those shows will be worth seeing. in the mean time, if you need to hear them, listen to lonesome crowded west, because the performances on that record are actually rawer than the ones you'll get from brock and the boys at a big venue. trust me, even they don't want to be there.
they don't check your pockets at the entrance, that was the first thing i noticed on the way in. the empty vodka bottle lying on the ground was evidence of the impending bag checks, but like most of the pseudo-emo indie hipsters around me my drugs were slightly more subtle and could be hidden in a pocket. waiting in the suffocating heat and chain smoking my brain became a telegraph, desperately banging out in morse code a repeating message to the rest of my body a thousand miles away: act normal, walk casually, don't let your hands shake, smile at the attendant, crack a joke, open your bag, don't fuck up, don't don't don't don't don't don't fuck up.
my anxiety was over nothing like it usually is. the skinny, bespectacled emo nerd who checked my back suspiciously unscrewed my water bottle and glanced at me as he sniffed the contents. pure h20. "i wish," i said, as he threw the bottle back in my bag. yes, you little emo fuck, i wish that it was vodka, because the 200 dollars of cocaine and weed in my pocket aren't enough.
but like i said it was all for nothing. as it turns out, this was going to be like every other concert in toronto: filled to the brim with marijuana. a smoke rose up to the heavens from our little island as a silent prayer or something suitable deep. in other words, we got high, and we got high fast.
it took about fifteen minutes to find a suitable place to smoke a joint. for the uninitiated, most people wait to meld into the anonymity of the crowd surrounding the stage -- where cigarette smoke mixes with pot and nobody can tell anymore -- to light up, but it was only about 2:30 in the afternoon and most people were waiting. i had lots. about an hour later, my two friends and i were smashed; three lines, two joints and about three beers a piece. we kept it low-key, sitting through a few amusingly gay opening acts and most serene republic, which by the way sound very professional for such a shitty band.
do make say think are boring even on drugs. i believe they have now explored every POSSIBLE way of switching between two chords. the crowd of hipsters swayed back and forth, back and forth. if you watched them long enough you would become hypnotized and fall asleep. i honestly don't know if they really like this sort of shit or whether its just fun to pretend but when music is this boring it ceases to be music and starts just being noise. well orchestrated noise that happens to coincide with a beat. sometimes.
metric were the first real act and we managed to pull ourselves out of the shade to watch emily haines and her slutty antics. there is something severely wrong about the way she sings, looks and acts, and something equally wrong about the looks in the eyes of the salivating indie rock geeks as they follow her every move. it's like some sort of sick fascination with your younger sister's barbie doll. i almost fell over another hipster, lying on the ground smoking a joint as i thought: she even sings like a barbie doll might. her freakishly perky voice matches the music -- both are syrupy sweet, thin and somehow very very false. metric picked the right name. their music is well measured, perfectly balanced and as tragically choreographed as haines' so-called unpredictable and "wild" stage moves. if rock and roll is dead then metric are selling the body parts on the black market.
haines' bandmates are at least 30 if not older, and the band sounds exactly like what a 30 year old thinks kids want to hear, which fortunately if packaged correctly is a reasonable enough fascimile to fool lazy trendsurfing hipsters.
the break between metric and broken social scene was long enough for me, now having come down considerably, to get a better and more sober look at my surroundings. if i wasn't already familiar with the sort of crowd these bands draw i would think that they were selling black-rimmed glasses, studded belts, black pants and small t-shirts in the merch tents (they weren't). the sameness is actually too common to be startling, though i was suprised to note that even at a breezy 5"8' 120 pounds i was not the skinniest male present by a long shot.
the people at indie shows look how metric sounds. it's all very coffee shop, all very nu-bohemian, very familiar, the sort of shit my girlfriend likes to do. maybe just for that reason i'm okay with it, but no one will ever mistake these people for what they think they are. i caught a slim twentysomething in front of me talking to someone he apparently hadn't seen in some time about "just touring europe, writing songs". the perception is everywhere that the barrier between artist and audience has been broken, that everyone is part of the same musical commune, contributing and consuming. maybe it has, but only because bands as bad as most serene republic are allowed to perform in public. before metric i thought i was at some kind of very elaborate kereoke party, but that could have been the coke and booze mingling in my liver.
freshly jacked-up on the rest of our pot, my friends and i returned to the crowd for broken social scene. it was here i recognized a pattern. maybe it's because every band on arts & crafts is made up of mostly the same members, but they're also made up of the same flaws. until about halfway through their set i thought my teeth were made of glass, and broken social scene didn't do jack shit to penetrate that numbness. the protracted emotional release of their self-consciously "epic" music doesn't do it for me, particularly on olympic island. they were just trying too hard to put on a dramatic show, while simultaneously trying too hard to look like they weren't trying too hard to put on a dramatic show. like their audience, broken are too cool for school and don't give a shit what you think. except they do, and it shows. anyone who actually calls one of their songs "epic" onstage needs to get a fucking clue.
that said, pre-orchestrated or not, when broken manage to hit what they're aiming for it works. a few of their well-established anthems managed to connect. and the stage-talk was the best of the evening; bashing live 8 and the sponsor were classy moves that recalled canadian popular music's heyday in the 90's, when matt good would taunt tour organizers by demanding a crowd shout "blowjob" instead of "pepsi". but a band like broken lives for the happy ending, and it wasn't to be. the sunset didn't connect, the guitars were out of tune, the mistakes were too obvious, the mic volumes were off, the vocals too afraid of their own shadow. the spark didn't land, and nothing got "set on fire". little stars joke there. not the same band, but they are on arts & crafts and every band on that label is the same.
cut to modest mouse. easily the best band on the ticket, the least self-conscious and the least intentionally trendy. they came out five minutes late, unannounced, issac brock very obviously drunk, to a crowd that had grown rowdy in the meanwhile. we finished off the last of our drugs and stood dazed as they cut into paper thin walls, but something was immediately and obviously wrong.
the song clocked in at no more than 3:30, about what it is on record -- as did the next, and the one after. they broke into a number of old songs, a move which made me giddy; barely able to stand and with an unbreakable smile on my face, i had to physically restrain myself from hollaring the words to interstate 8 along with issac (whose voice was on top form, which is still not saying a lot). but beneath the giant painted-on grin and intoxicated stumbling the following words seeped out of my brain and imprinted themselves on my eyelids:
this is the wrong venue for modest mouse.
there was a time modest mouse was a tiny little noisecore/indie band from seattle. there was a time no one had heard of them and indie/anti-indie pricks like myself could jealously horde their sub-pop releases from the unwashed emo masse. there was a time that they played only small clubs, accumulated a sizable following but remained securely underground. but all of that has been long since fucked up by one summer and a boardroom of wickedly leering mtv executives who would jack off a bull if it would shoot a load of steaming dollar bills into their faces.
modest mouse is a band that needs to stretch its legs, sit back on a steady beat and hammer away at a series of ridiculous noise-jam tricks and just generally fuck around. but people come to olympic island to hear the old favourites, the songs that work, the anthems, played just like on record. 3:30. one solo only. reprise the chorus an extra time if necessary but don't push it.
even songs that required the obligatory noisy circle-jerk sequence (tiny cities made of ashes, breakthrough) seemed canned and carefully practiced. the spontanaity of modest mouse's club performances was gone. dann gallucci's suit and tie said it all: tonight was business. it was a symptom of the same disease broken social scene and metric suffer from: music by numbers. protraction continues to be the slow death of rock and roll, turning it into some kind of anamatronic puppet. it almost suited the canadian bands on the ticket, but it is a style that badly distorts the original context of modest mouse's music and makes the band seem like what it is: a bunch of guys from a shack in seattle who are in your city to play a big show with lights and smoke because they are famous now and this is what you do when you get famous. in ten minutes they will be on a plane and fuck you and they'll probably forget about all this anyway and where are we again?
12 bucks for a ferry, 50 bucks for a ticket. ultimately i could've just bought more coke and just listened to lonesome crowded west. do yourself a favor and wait five years until the indie buzz around modest mouse dies and they wind up doing what matt good is doing: coasting comfortably off of the popularity of past hits, making records for their fans and playing small clubs. those shows will be worth seeing. in the mean time, if you need to hear them, listen to lonesome crowded west, because the performances on that record are actually rawer than the ones you'll get from brock and the boys at a big venue. trust me, even they don't want to be there.
