The Magic Satchel

Jingle Bell Rock 2008 brought a solid lineup of Canadian artists to Calgary on December 19th, and it turns out it was well worth the price of admission and braving the sub-sero (-26.8 C to be exact) temperatures. It had been quite a while since I had seen most of these bands live (The Dears played with Matthew Good at the Whiskey in 2003, Metric was back in 2006, and Tokyo Police Club come in at the most recent with their May 18th show at the Warehouse) so to have them all come together on one stage was pretty awesome.

Sadly, I missed the first act completely, and only managed to catch the last 2 or 3 songs for The Dears set before they vacated the premises for the evening. The good news is that those songs were good enough to prompt me to go buy their new CD Missiles… mmm mmm good. The CD is in semi-heavy rotation on my iPod right now (January 20th), so that should say something about how good it is.

Tokyo Police Club – it had only been 7 months since they last came through town, but I can’t believe how much more polished they sounded compared to the last show. Some of that may have to do with the difference in the venue, but they definitely seemed to have it more “together” on this night. I mean, they still had their garage-y / lo-fi sound to their music, but it was just better somehow. Tighter. Perhaps it was because the keyboardist had more room to flail about while playing

Metric – I don’t think I need to say much here except that the new album is going to be excellent. This show was almost entirely new material, and with the notable exception of “Staduim Love”, every song they played was on the good to fantastic end of the scale. Stadium Love was just… weird. I don’t know how else to describe it other than to say it stuck out like a sore thumb from the rest of the set, and not in a good way.because, you know, sore thumbs can be good sometimes.

All in all, a very enjoyable evening of music and it added at least one new album to look forward to, as well as an artist (The Dears) to fill in the gaps in my ownership of their discography.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 20th, 2008 at 11:24 pm and is filed under Alan, Concerts, Music.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.