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Concert Reviews

Review: Soundgarden, The Flaming Lips – Bluesfest 2011 Day 1

This year introduced the element of the unknown in a different layout at Bluesfest.  Who knows if we would have a rocking good time on the first night out which is usually fraught with logistical issues?

Vero and I headed down to Bluesfest and ended up at the main gate in the lineup from Hell…I would say we would need to wait another 30 minutes before getting in.  Luckily Vero discovered a few other entry points that had opened up on the North side so we managed to get in without too much fuss (although it took a few minutes for their scanners to scan my ticket).

I’m going to speak of some logistical issues later, but I figure I should tell you a little bit about the bands.

The Flaming Lips are a band that I really don’t know all that well.  I know they’ve been around for quite some time and have quite the fan following as well as a solid live show.  The live show did not disappoint in terms of theatrics…Wayne coming out into the crowd in a giant bubble while confetti is thrown everywhere and girls dressed as Dorothy (Oz) dance on the sidelines.  I also thoroughly enjoyed the camera which was attached to the microphone which gave us an interesting view of the singer while he was speaking!  Overall, I thought their show was energetic, but I didn’t really click with the music and the logistics of Bluesfest were a little daunting to me.

As for Soundgarden, I’m going to have my friend Andre add his review as he is a uber-fan, but I will say this…excellent, excellent concert and it threw Bluesfest into overdrive on the first night.  The band is in top shape considering they haven’t been around for 14 years.  Chris Cornell can still wail and Matt Cameron is always one of my fave drummers.  I will leave Andre to speak about the rest.

Some logistics:

First up, the lineups were ridonculous when coming into the event around 6:45PM.  People have told us that there were two lineups in the front…one for ticket holders and one for those who have to pick up. We were still in the ticket holder lineup and it easily would have been 30 minutes if we didn’t move.
The lack of water stations is crap in my opinion especially after having some for the past few years. Water is a necessity, is it not?  I bet you’ll save a lot of people from heat exhaustion.  I have a feeling that Government funding for the festival was a big addition in the past few years (water stations, Byward Market concerts) but I am going to assume that funding (some or all?) was cut and that’s why we don’t get the perks. To have to seek out the sole water fountain on the premises was a large strike iour eyes. Even if I drink the beer!

I didn’t mind the sound bleed between stages but have heard it was mainly in the rear stages (Subway and Hard Rock). The only time I noticed it was when Soundgarden were between songs. It would be totally different if the sound bleed was DURING the set and affecting my viewing of it…I remember Rush overpowering the Swell Season. That was ridiculous. But in my personal opinion, the sound bleed did not affect me.

The layout…I’m undecided at this point…I was really upset with it when coming in for the first while but when Soundgarden started up I felt that I was still the same distance that I usually am in past years; at the ‘left speaker, third three from the stage’ AND I had a lot more room to maneuver AND it wasn’t that hard for me to hop out and get a drink. If I had the choice, I would choose the old layout, but for the time being, I need a few extra days of rocking to come to a decision. I know for a fact that Andre was quite smart in going to the right side of the stage for Soundgarden, whereas I was trying to figure out a spot that would be to be at each night. Not sure if I want to always sway from one extreme (left of Claridge) to the other (right of MBNA) each night.

So all in all, the first hour was crap but Soundgarden and my excellent spot and some beers made me get over alot of the growing pains.

Setlist:

Black Rain
Searching With My Good Eye Closed
Let Me Drown
Spoonman
Jesus Christ Pose
My Wave
The Day I Tried to Live
Blow Up the Outside World
Hunted Down
Ugly Truth
Fell on Black Days
Burden in My Hand
Black Hole Sun
Rusty Cage
Outshined
Beyond the Wheel
Encore:
Loud Love
Superunknown
Slaves & Bulldozers

 

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Bluesfest 2011 – Day (Minus One)

Bluesfest is back and it’s going to be a beautiful week! I believe it’s a little daunting to think of 12 days of rocking out in a row…I refer to the next two weeks as the Gauntlet as it’s one thing to rock out for two weeks straight, it’s another to also get to bed late, get up early and basically live off of non home cooked meals for that amount of time.

This year, they changed the stage layout and my Bluesfest crew is quite concerned. Gone are the days of “Left speaker, third tree from the stage” which has helped us find each other for many years. Plus, the way they have two main stages next to each other is a questionable layout…here’s to hoping I’m pleasantly surprised because of this change and not left fuming because of crowd control. Heck, maybe I’ll even get another published word piece in the Ottawa Citizen this year!

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Happy Ribfest!

Chicken and Ribfest starts this week on Sparks Street. Fantastic! I have two excursions planned…more than two is just obscene!

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Paul McCartney – Montreal

Last week we found out that Paul McCartney was going to show up in Montreal again this summer on July 26!  Fantastic news for two people who tried valiantly to obtain tickets!

Unfortunately, when the presale announcement came out, I was at a work BBQ helping out for four hours and missed the announcement.  There dashed my chances at some decent seats, or seats at all.

But I tried, and tried and tried and the pop rock Gods smiled upon me and I managed to scoop up a pair of tickets in the 100L bowl of the Bell Center!  I couldn’t pass it up.

The funny part of this of this story is that it’s the most I’ve ever spent on a concert…two tickets cost $550.  I didn’t even pay that for two tickets to the entire Ottawa Bluesfest!

I thought “Is Vero going to kill me?”  My gut said no but my head said yes.  Last year we tried so hard for tickets that if someone showed up with a pair of tickets for $500, we probably would have bought them.

In the end, Vero laughed at the insanity which was us paying that much for Macca tickets (or any concert for that matter) but we realized that these types of concerts aren’t going to last forever and sometimes it’s worth it to treat yourself to three hours of Beatles music!

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Batch #5 (Coopers Australian IPA) & Batch #6 (Coopers Draught)

After checking out Beau’s Beaver River IPA and realized it was a tasty treat, I decided to buy an IPA for my next batch.  I stumbled upon a Cooper’s Select Australian IPA which I had not seen before.  Defalco’s let me know that it was super popular and I was lucky to find it on the shelf!

I also picked up a Coopers Draught as Mike and Andre has made a batch and I thought it was quite tasty.

I am now a brewing machine after four+ batches under my belt.  I zipped through the process fairly easily.

This time around, we didn’t boil the wort for 45 minutes.  Defalco’s let Mike know that we may have been inadvertently boiling off the sugar which is used to create the alcohol.  So I brought the water to a boil, dumped the malt in and turned off the burner.

Interestingly enough, once I added the wort into the carboy, the temperature wasn’t registering!  What the heck?!  It must have been TOO cold.  How is that even possible with boiling wort?  I consulted with Mike and he thought maybe boiling it again would do the trick.  I boiled a gallon of the stuff again and no luck.  Vero then suggested I do the craziest thing ever…put the carboy of beer in the hot tub!  Mike and Vero had a good laugh at the carboy sitting in the hot tub.  Too bad we forgot to get a picture.

In the end, the temperature never moved and Mike realized that the problem wasn’t that the temperature was too cold, it was too hot!  This ended up being the case as we noticed the temperature dropping after putting it in the basement and in the deep freeze.  Case in point, making beer in the summer is definitely different than in the winter!

The worst part of making beer is the cool-down period.  We had two batches of wort ready to go around 7PM.  It wasn’t until 7AM the next day that the temperature had dropped to a good temperature to pitch the yeast!  Incroyable!  At least I know that now and I won’t wait around for it.

I’m quite excited for these two batches.  Next week I will most likely do a third batch as the summer is upon us and more and more people visit wanting to try and homebrew.  I think I have enough glass bottles to make 2 batches and will have to resort to the plastic bottles for the third.

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Review: Collider (Sam Roberts Band)

So let’s recap my thoughts on SRB. We Were Born in a Flame and Chemical City were instant classics for me. Love at the End of the World took me awhile to get into but now I love it.

Collider falls back into the instant classic category for me. Upon first listen I was thinking “Awwwww yeah! This is what I love about the band.”

I find as an album it flows really really well. Reminds me of the flow of Chemical City, whereas I always felt that WWBIAF sometimes sounded like a mishmash of whatever tunes they worked on. Not that this is a bad thing!

Killer tunes so far for me are Last Crusade, Graveyard Shift, Streets of Heaven and Tractor Beam Blues. I can’t really say there is a bad tune on the album and I’ve had it on repeat for a long time and haven’t grown tired of it.

My only other comment is that I have a problem sometimes where I can’t imagine a tune being a rocking one but once I see them live it puts an entirely different light to the tune. I have a feeling this album will be an example of how I feel it’s less rocking (compared to Chemical City) upon first listens, but as soon as I see them live I will realize the power of the songs!

Killer album and I’m glad that the boys are back!

iplaying: The Last Crusade – Sam Roberts Band

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New Pumpkins Releases

The other day Vero asked me a question that I was troubled with answering…is my favourite band the Smashing Pumpkins or Pearl Jam?

Years ago, the answer was Smashing Pumpkins. Nowadays, unsure…I get excited by Pearl Jam’s live element more than the Pumpkins. But the Pumkins have always been there for me…

It wasn’t until this morning when Billy Corgan made some huge announcements that I knew the answer will always, and forever be…The Smashing Pumpkins (with Pearl Jam running a close second!)

– New/old song ‘Owata’ being released in the next few weeks: Owata has been around since the 20th Anniversary tour. This will be the first time being released as a studio recording. Sweet! This will also be the tenth release from the Teargarden by Kaleidyscope project which I have been enjoying thoroughly. Granted, who wouldn’t have wanted ‘As Rome Burns’ to be the released song?
– The Teargarden project is taking a detour…into album territory!!! He couldn’t pull himself away from the album concept for long…especially with the new lineup of the band! They will enter the studio this spring and hopefully release something this Fall. Saweet. It still will be part of the larger Teargarden concept though. Here’s hoping that they have a physical release for Lightning Strikes and Owata…maybe included in the album?
– Tour this August/September! That is wild and may coincide with my upcoming trip to Europe in September as well.
– In MASSIVE news, the Pumpkins have (after ten years) reached a settlement between themselves and EMI…so they can go ahead and release anything they have ever made, recorded, etc. First up, reissues of the albums: 2011 will give us Gish, Siamese Dream and Pisces Iscariot, on vinyl as well, with unreleased stuff. Very cool. In 2012, Mellon Collie, Aeroplane Flies High (whoa! Didn’t see that one coming!) and Adore will be re-released, along with unreleased material AND ON VINYL! I have been searching for Mellon Collie on vinyl for literally 16 years. Way too high for me to buy it off of Ebay. But now it shall be mine. My preciousss. Afterwards, Machina I & II released…this is very interesting considering Machina II has never been released other than on 25 vinyl copies. Plus they will be combined into one package with a re-ordered tracklisting as originally envisioned. PLUS a possibility of a new mix. That is huge huge huge news. I’m very stoked over the reissues.
– My favourite news of the bunch is the fact that they now have the rights to release anything they wish…this means they can go into the Vault and release the ‘last’ show on DVD, or live concerts, or rare stuff, or whatever the heck they want. This is what I’ve been waiting for these past ten years.

Epic news from the Pumpkins front. Billy has been known to get fans excited and then not go through with some stuff, so here’s to hoping every one of these plans stick!

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All in all a good Easter long weekend

I decided against going up to Kapuskasing for the Easter weekend which no doubt disappointed my family a little (hey, who wouldn’t be disappointed if they can’t see me?!) but they said they understood and I made it my mission to not just laze around all weekend long but to get some honest to goodness work done.

Friday started off swell…I helped Vero clean up the entire house for the arrival of her parents.  Unfortunately she wasn’t feeling well all weekend.  I let her nap while I hauled our new patio set into the backyard and assembled it.  Special thanks to Nanny for helping out with the purchase of that particular patio set!  It is quite the beauty.  We picked up the Camden collection from Canadian Tire after extensive searching around town.   Do you know that it’s pretty well impossible to find a patio set that doesn’t have a glass top?  We hate glass tops.  We finally stumbled across this beauty and decided upon it.  Here’s to many years of good use!  The assembling went well, other than the fact that I dropped a nut in between two planks on the deck and Lord knows where that ended up.  I searched for twenty minutes!

We then went to Vero’s sister’s place for some excellent spaghetti and good conversation.  Vero’s parents were staying until Wednesday as Andreane is returning home for the summer and they were helping her move out of her apartment.

Saturday morning I peered outside and it was raining.  A perfect opportunity to paint the basement!  I had been itching to paint the basement for awhile as it was holding back the dream of my concert posters on the wall, as well as hanging the TV on the wall.  The basement consisted of one side painted in a light brown, the other in a colour that I like to call ‘shit brown’.  No joke.  I was tired of it.  So I decided to match the paint job on the one wall to the other.  Luckily I found an old bucket of paint that I brought to Home Depot so they could find a match.  It wasn’t a perfect match, but it was the closest it could ever get!

Arriving home with some supplies, Danielle and Gaetan graciously offered to help and so we set up our work area, applied our first coat and stopped for lunch.  I had purchased the expensive paint/primer in one and I’m not sure if I needed to.  The Home Depot paint person indicated that I should be fine with regular paint with two coats, no primer but then I mentioned that I was thinking of the paint/primer combination and she thought I might be able to do it one coat.  One coat definitely wasn’t enough when it came to changing a dark brown to a light brown.  Either way, good to know for next time!

Early afternoon, the second coat of paint was applied (over top some nice dart holes in the wall!) and I put a fire on in the wood stove (no squirrels this time!) to warm up the basement and help speed up the drying process.

Onto the next project…mounting the TV!  It took a lot of visualizing and a beer in hand to figure out exactly where I wanted to place it.  I had to keep in mind the eye level of people sitting down as well as how I wanted shelving to appear on the wall around it.  I settled on a certain distance and marked the wall and by that time Vero’s family had come back from shopping which was perfect timing.

Everything was set to go…I drilled the hole into the stud and then I was holding the wall mount in place while Gaetan was inserting the bolt.  But he said it wasn’t grabbing to anything!  What the heck?  We pulled it off the wall, grabbed the stud finder, confirmed that we were in the stud and couldn’t figure out what was going on.  In the end, we removed the electrical box on the wall and I fished my hand up the wall to find out that (with bad luck) we had hit a knot in the wood!  Argh.  No matter.  Now that we knew about it we simply readjusted and everything worked out fine.

The TV on the wall is actually quite sweet.  I didn’t realize I would love it’s aesthetic this much, but I really do feel a TV deserves to be mounted onto a wall.  We even watched the Habs game that night on the television and there was excitement in the air (not because of the game, because of the TV!)

The next day we spent puttering around the house…I cleaned up the garage, cleaned the BBQ…I’m not really impressed with the BBQ at this moment…you can already see some areas that have rusted on the stainless steel…to the point where the grease trap broke off!  I think I should have tried to clean the BBQ BEFORE the winter instead of afterward.  Ah well, I have learned a lesson.  I should also look for some BBQ cleaner spray which will cut the grease down.  I used dishwasher soap which did the trick but I’m sure there is a foam out there that is easier to use.

Not going to lie, I set up the hammock and had a little nap outside as well.  What a beautiful, beautiful day on Easter!  Plus I made a batch of beer and saw a white bunny rabbit in my backyard that night!  What are the odds of that happening on Easter!?  Are white rabbits domestic?  I thought so.  I wonder if it had escaped?  We also played a card game of Golf which everyone seemed to enjoy quite a bit.

The Easter weekend ended with us traveling around Ottawa looking for a few things…Ikea was one of our stops for some ideas of shelving.  I finally became disgusted with the fact that the colours weren’t what we had in mind and I vowed to make my own bookshelves.  This is quite the ambitious project and I didn’t kid myself into thinking it would take a few weeks.  I figure as a novice woodworker with not many tools, this venture can take me an entire year.  But I shall start out small like Dad suggested.  Perhaps a small shelf, or a bookcase to get the feel of building something.  Then I can move onto bigger and better things like making a hidden doorway to the storage area.  Ha!

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Batch #4 – Dark Ale (Darktin)

Batch #4 happened on a beautiful Sunday afternoon after cleaning the BBQ and the garage.  I wanted to show Vero’s parents how it was done.

Nothing really out of the ordinary happened with this batch…pretty standard fare.  It takes HOURS to cool down from boiling though.  What a pain!

I did happen to take a hydrometer reading so that was foolish of me.

Three days later, I checked on the batch and it looked it severely bubbled over/through the fermentation lock.  There was beer on the floor and on my white shirt sleeve which was touching the top of the fermentation lock.  Upon closer inspection, it looked like the fermentation lock was still in place and bubbling away.  What’s strange is I also made a 4.5 gallon batch thinking I could get a higher alcohol content with less water.  So I find it quite strange that the thing fermented/created enough pressure to blow a little.  Any ideas as to what may have happened?

Update:  Well, because I failed to measure the original gravity, I have no idea what the alcohol content is.  Either way, it came out to be a fine tasting batch of Dark Ale, or as I have called it, Darktin as Vero’s family was up for the event.  I must say that I enjoy my other batches more…the dark ale is definitely an acquired taste and an entire batch is a lot to take in.  Plus, since it’s an acquired taste, it’s hard to let people try it and enjoy it if they don’t care for the darker beer.  That being said, I think in the future I will stick to one batch as experimental for yours truly, and the other for a beer that pleases myself as well as others.

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A Critter Cometh

Me: Babe, can you stop making that noise with your leg please?
Vero: Uh, I thought that was you.

The beginning of an adventure at dinner last night.

We got up slowly from the table and realized the sound was definitely some other thing in the house.  We went downstairs armed with broom sticks and a dustpan (where’s a baseball bat when you need one?) but the sound stopped.  We returned to the table and a few minutes later the sound started again.

We eventually deduced it was something inside the chimney of the wood stove.  Thank the lord that it was there, and not up in the ceiling tiles like I originally had thought!  The question, is, how to get to it?  What was it exactly?  We asked these questions back and forth and wondered how we would deal with this.

At one point we realized it had gone all the way down into the wood stove.  Of COURSE this had to be the time that I never bothered cleaning the glass window to the fireplace so visibility was quite low.  Vero grabbed a flashlight and she said she could definitely see something moving in there whereas I saw nothing.  She said it looked like a mouse tail.  Fair enough, we can handle a mouse!

Armed with a garbage bag to catch the critter on its way out, and Vero armed with the broom in case I missed it…I explained that if our grandmothers could smack a mouse with a broom, we surely could!

So we opened up the door a little…but nothing much was happening.  It’s kind of hard to poke a broom inside the wood stove and expect a critter to come towards us!  If anything it’s going to shy away!  So we opened up the door a little more.

This is when all hell broke loose.  As I remember it Vero yelled out “It’s big…IT’S BIG!  IT’S BIG!!!” and in my mind I’m thinking “What the heck is it?”.  Vero also recalls that I jumped back into the stairwell at one point screaming like a little girl, but I definitely don’t remember that part.  🙂

So out of nowhere this brown thing scurries right past my garbage bag and onto Vero’s broom stick and climbs up it.  To put this into context, this is all happening in one second flat.  This sucker is fast.

The memories of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation come to mind and I yell “SQUIRREL!!!”.

Yes, we had a squirrel in the basement.  Trish would have fainted.  So here the squirrel is running around in the basement and things start popping into my head.  “Don’t let it get in behind the bar!  It better not go into the well area!  Ahhh!  Get it out from behind the freezer!”

Luckily we were smart enough to close the doors and try and get it to go upstairs and out through the garage.  This critter was cunning…it bounded over furniture, climbed my guitar, had a run over the drum kit, hid behind some boxes a few times…at one point hid INSIDE the freezer (in behind it where the mechanics are).  When it got close to the wood stove it would scale the brick wall like Spider-Man and would jump from the wall through the air towards us.  Screams were heard for miles away…it was hilarious, thrilling and annoying all at the same time.  At one point I thought I had shattered the fluorescent tubes in the ceiling as my broom stick went for a wild swing.

EVENTUALLY we finally got the squirrel to start walking up the stairs.  Vero left me in the dust as she slammed the door to trap her and the squirrel inside the stairwell.  I followed once I knew the squirrel had moved outside.

Luckily for us the thing had jumped into a grocery bag.  Perfect!  I scooped up the grocery bag, ran through the garage and at the last moment realized it was trying to jump out so I dropped it onto the driveway but then accidentally stepped on its tail and it ran back into the garage!  Doh!

But at this point, the job was done.  We realized the scared thing would hide out until we left.  We left the garage door open and assumed it would leave once the coast was clear.

At least, that’s what we’re thinking is happening as I type this.  Who knows if the squirrel decided that his life was so boring that he would rather have a few giants chasing after him with broomsticks.

We surveyed the scene afterward and shared tales of our hunt and laughed at the absurdity of girls screaming and how I jumped five feet backwards when we realized it was definitely larger than a mouse.

Good times had out in the country!