Yeah man.

Now this is a cool bill. Take one long-established, ever-rising west coast band, add a British band that’s refused to leave Canada alone recently, and top off with a group that’s making their first foray into the Great White North. All three carry a distinct dynamic, yet all three fit together quite nicely. Quite.

I’d spent part of the afternoon with a couple members of Louis XIV, a band from San Diego that began to show its colours somewhat quietly. Truth be told, most people I speak to still don’t have a clue who the band is. We here at Cord are going to do our best to change that though, but I have a feeling they’ll be doing fine without my help anyhow, especially following this tour. I got to the fabulous Commodore Ballroom earlyish and staked myself a claim at stage right to wait for the live translation of a CD that had already succeeded in rocking my block off. There is nothing more excruciating than standing around in that room, waiting eagerly for a band to hit the stage, and just staring at those damn blinds over the window, waiting for them to go down so you know the show is about to begin. There’s a hundred people hovering around side stage, and you know it’s close, but those last few minutes just… tick… tock… tick…tock… past the scheduled start time… you start thinking you should maybe take the time to grab a drink or hit the washroom or check out some swag or something. And then… darkness descends. Oh yeah, here we go…

Out wandered four guys donning suits, ties, leather, velvet, you name your rock togs, someone in that band was wearing it. They kicked it off with “Paper Doll,” although it was hard for a while to track where they were in the tune. Two reasons - one, the song just plain-out sounds different on stage than on the album. Lead singer Jason Hill spends that song without the burden of a guitar, pacing the stage, exuding quite the vision of stylishly rock n’ roll disconnectedness. But where on record, Hill mocks a feminine voice during certain lines, here he leaves it in his own voice, changing the melody a bit just to keep you on your toes. He has an interesting tendency to cramwaytoomanysyllablesintooneline in a fuck-you-screw-convention-and-screw-you-too kind of way. Attitude all over, it’s a beautiful thing.

The other reason the tune was hard to pick up on at first is because the bass was so unbelievably overpowering. Now this may have just been because I was standing in a spot directly in line with James Armbrust’s bass cabinet. I mean, we’re talking wind tunnel effect, the thing was sonic-waving my face off. This could have been okay if everything else was adjusted accordingly loud (though the walls would surely have crumbled), but it wasn’t. It was like watching a music video with the TV sound turned off, instead hearing some dudes outside cruising their subwoofer addled rides up and down a main street. Hill may as well have been mute for the first song. That punchy bass didn’t let up, but a couple songs in either I started losing the level of hearing that allowed me to pick up on that bass so much, or someone at the sound board also realized what was happening and got around to adjusting the mix. But enough about the technical issues. Perfection is boring anyhow.

As the set progressed, Hill got more and more akin to a wild animal provoked and let out of its cage. He dashed around the stage casting vicious glares into the crowd and sneering at his righthand man, Brian Karscig. He’d drop down during guitar solos to the stage and then bounce back up again. He tossed his head around and shuffled himself back and forth across the entire width of the stage. We were definitely not at a loss for visuals during this set. Speaking of Karscig, he brings a really interesting contrast to Hill. The two obviously play off of each other for their onstage personalities, and share the vocal duties. It’s great to have two confident singers who each have such distinct voices to work themselves into a band this way. The music is swaggering and cocky, a healthy mix of sex and playfulness and feather-flaunting. Where Hill has a swift, low, speak-like, sleazy, classic rock voice, with a hint of some mutt of an accent and lots of drawn out trailing line-ends just to leave you waiting for the next hard consonant sound out of his mouth (hmmm hot); Karscig instead has a sharper, higher, more songlike voice, lightening the heavy smut factor with reminders that it's all actual emotion, tickling it all with fun, and adding a delicacy to certain points. Karscig is the Beatles to Hill’s Rolling Stones, just to make the easiest possible parallel. This isn’t music that asks that you think too hard about what’s being said - just have fun - so I'll just go ahead and do the same with this here reeeeview.

So those two are the most active, ergo, the most notable to watch, but yeah there’s another pair of people on the stage - the all-important rhythm section. As mentioned, the bassline was a bit overbearing in the mix, but it’s no lie to say that the bass and the drums carry a lot of the weight of the old school, goodtimes, hip-swiveling feeling of the tunes. How else are we gonna know when to clap? I could barely see drummer Mark Maigaard tucked away behind his hardware and bathed in a dripping, red light most of the time (well, everyone kind of was actually. How very Amsterdam.) - the spot I was standing in was definitely not the most versatile - so I don’t really know what he was up to back there. Just here and there I’d see a wild flip of blond hair from behind a quivering cymbal, and various parts of me were bipping, bopping and tapping away on every surface I was touching. Armbrust in front of me was certainly the easiest to keep an eye on. He was like the pivot point of the band. He was not uppity and animated like the rest of them. He wore a black suit, classy, and stood solidly upright most of the time, chin up, peering down his nose at members of the crowd with a sly grin like he was really up to something. And you know, he probably was.

Honestly, this is just plain good times. It’s hot. It’s engaging and it encourages crowds to easily join in. The floor filled up quickly through their set with smiling people waving their arms around, shaking their butts around, sliding their shoulders around, really just dropping their inhibitions and getting into it. There’s something very A Clockwork Orange about them - stylish, carnal, a bit twisted, likely to offend a bunch of people who refuse to look past the top layer, but damn it they’re just having so much fun, you can’t help but get drawn in. Only these guys aren’t attacking people for no reason past their own kicks. If they start doing that, we may have to re-evaluate our thoughts on them. They killed the set with Karscig leaving his guitar alone and heading near the back of the stage to take up post at the keyboards. The last tune was “Finding Out True Love Is Blind,” the track people are most likely to have heard from them. It’s actually a pretty cute song, even through its unapologetically lusty exterior. Girls, come on now, we always say we want our men honest. Well, you fucking got it. Stop whining and take your damn shirt off for them already. If you can't handle unminced words from a rock band, you should really go pick yourself up some Enya records and leave the rest of us alone. Our last vision of the band was Armbrust standing alone on the stage, back to the crowd, wavering his bass around right up to the face of the cab, throwing out a mountain of ear-splitting feedback over the room for such a long time I think some glasses at the bar started shattering. Finally he put the bass down, spun on his heels, blew a kiss out, and calmly walked off stage.

Now again, we wait. The Futureheads were the meat + cheese in this Commodore sandwich. It was my first time actually seeing them live. I don’t know what I was expecting from them, but they ended up being much different than I thought they’d be. They are right on the edge of having a super-classic old Britpunk thing going on, but they’re way too well-groomed and happy-peppy to pull that off. It’s definitely entertaining to watch them though - extremely active bunch of guys with instruments aloft, wide eyes, and tons of audience singalongs. They managed to get half the room oh-ing along with one member, and the other half oh-ing along with another. Clap sequences were shared, and there was a song near the end of the set that really caught me for it’s edge, but I unfortunately did not catch the name. Overall though, not completely grabbing me, and I’m not sure why. The audience was definitely into it - jumping around and singing along. I guess they’ve been here enough times in the last few months to have picked up a healthy fan contingent. Good on them!

Shortly came the crush of people charging to the front for Hot Hot Heat. It’s been nice to see these guys grow from small earlyish slots at festivals and clubs, to headlining big tours of their own and helping to break a new band or two. No matter what size stage they’re on, they always fill it completely with their rambunctious nature and huge songs. This is the real break-in tour for new guitarist Luke Paquin - previously in town the band played a couple of tiny showcases at the 150-capacity Media Club to get the guy’s feet wet. He fit in marvelously. Scarves alive, Batman, these guys look great on stage. But for all the twirling and head-flinging by everyone involved, the showman is undeniably lead singer/keyboardist Steve Bays. It’s an unusual set-up, having the keys in the middle of the stage, usually played one-handed by Bays, who keeps his other hand fisted firmly around a microphone that is always in that grip no matter where he is on stage. When he’s not crouched wide-stanced behind the keys, he’s stomping vigorously around the stage with his curly mess of hair flipping around his face, storming the crowd and leaning down into peoples’ faces to sing at them or with them. He thrives on the crowd attention and is extremely gracious about it all the time - he wants to be right there in touching distance of the groping hands of the adoring fans. He knows it, he loves it.

The band’s new album “Elevator” hasn’t been out terribly long, and it would appear the songs haven’t had enough time to sink into mass public consciousness yet, but the audience went absolutely batshit every time they launched into a song off the previous disc, “Make Up The Breakdown.” “Bandages” man, I thought the floor was going to cave in it was bouncing so hard from having a few hundred people simultaneously leaping with all their might on top of it. Keep your knees bent, kids, so you don’t collapse - it was like being double-bounced on a trampoline for five solid minutes. It was kind of a cool feeling. Too bad I wasn’t drunk yet, that probably would have been fun.

The guys played long and hard, exhausting the crowd and you would think, themselves. Bays yapped away personably between songs, telling people where after parties were to be held and thanking everyone for their support, talking affectionately about the guys’ hometown of Victoria. For all their rock looks, fancy duds, big-time light shows, and globetrotting, they are still incredibly down-to-earth, normal guys from a small Canadian city. You just know that friendly, polite nature us lovely Canadians just have - it sticks out with them. They don’t put on any airs or make attempts at being larger than life. They just are, they got a great shot at the top and they’re taking it, but they are not forgetting where they came from.

They played an enormous encore, something they would echo in the (appropriate…) echoey gymnasium-like setting of the Croatian Cultural Centre two days later for the all-ages version of the same show. The all-ages gig was interesting - take all that energy and stuff it into a huge cavern of a room that’s lit way too brightly in the back and doesn’t even have a beer garden for us old farts who were mixed in among the kids. Truthfully I spent quite a bit of time upstairs in the Centre’s bar, drinking $3 beers and feeling the vibrations of the Futureheads coming through the floor below me. The younger crowd is definitely much more into everything though, already whipping themselves into a frenzy early during the Louis XIV set, fuelled by the sort of subversive lyrical topics that would make their mothers cringe - nothing like youthful rebellion. It was cool to see the show in two very different settings like that. Everyone held up well and transferred between the two venues easily. So yes, an enjoyable couple days. One of those experiences that brings it all home - yes, there is a reward. This is it.

Elsewhere

By Andy Scheffler
Photos : Andy Scheffler
Published : April, 2005.