Review: Luke Doucet/FemBots/Whitey Houston/Shout Out Out Out Out show: 28 Oct 2005

So. The show tonight? So fucking good. So very, very good I can't possibly explain the goodness of it. If you happen to live in... Calgary, Victoria, Vancouver or Edmonton... you should really, really go to the show I went to tonight. (You've got like... 1, 4, 5, 6 or 7 days to decide and show up, depending where you live. But really. Go.)

Whitey Houston? More fun than a two man band ought to be. More noisy. More amusing. More stage presence. More everything. I don't think I'd like to have to listen to them all the time ever, but they play a damn good show. Short though it was. The few songs I'd heard beforehand don't hold a candle to the live show. They played five songs, I think, and it felt like they were over in 15 minutes, though they must have played longer than that. The one dude, who I call Furry Hat Man because he wore a furry hat, promised that if we were a good enough crowd, by shows end, he would become Pissed His Pants Man. Alas, I did not stay long enough for the pissing of pants, but it may yet have happened. The last couple songs they had some dude come up and play with them, some dude who I call Maraca Man because he played the maracas. I couldn't decide if he was with the band/show in some way, or if he was this other dude who came in with a polaroid camera and went up to talk to Furry Hat Man before the show, but anyway he had more fun playing the maracas than anyone ever has a right to have doing anything at all. I don't think I've ever seen anymore more happy to be on a stage with a band playing music.

The FemBots were a bit more hit and miss. I liked them; my roommate hated them. My roommate says they sounded like a bunch of middle aged guys who always wanted to be rock stars, but have decided that making interesting noise is the closest they'll get. Well, they do make interesting noise, so I guess that bit at least fit. One of the guys had this really cool instrument, the name of which I have no clue, that utterly fascinated me, and I'd still like to go back and ask him what the shit it was. The roommate also thought all their songs sounded the same, which I also didn't agree with, but some of their stuff was too slow and maybe a bit boring for a show like that. It just didn't go down right until they started to rock a little harder. (Which they did at some point in all their songs. A lot of them had slow beginnings and then exploded into sound part way through.)

Luke Doucet was... so much better than I was expecting, and I was expecting pretty good. He opened with a version of Mitzi's that was at least a dozen times better than the studio version. Next was Emily, Please, and then It's Not the Liquor I Miss, Brother, Broken One, Lucky Strikes, One Too Many and a really wonderful version of New York. (Not in that order. I didn't keep track.) There may have been another, but I think that was it, and it was too short. Too too too short. I'd have paid $10 just to hear Mitzi's, this version of Mitzi's anyway, and a whole lot more for all the rest of it, and more yet to have had a show of just him. When he was done, he told us not to get up and go, but to stick around for at least one Shout Out Out Out Out song because they'd rock our shit till we didn't have any shit left to rock. (Unless the rocking of shit comment came from the FemBots dude, which it might have. I can't recall. Doucet did tell us to stay for one song at least, anyway.)

I don't remember a lot of what he said, actually. He told us about New York, about the person it was written about. He told us about the song Brother. He told us that he heard someone call his stuff country (which is exactly what I'd told my roommate, or a variation of what I'd told her, before the show started because there is something country-esque about his stuff which is maybe just the singer-songwriter vibe and the pedal steel and the acoustic and the banjo and the other things that give a song a country tinge) and that he really thought it was rock. And it was. And she loved it. She loved it enough that she told me half-way home that she regrets not having bought his album.

So anyway we stuck around. And I was so so so wrong about Shout Out Out Out Out.

The fact is the studio songs I've heard (which is all of two songs) are terrible. And I told my roommate quite a few times that probably they'd be the worst part of the show, and probably she'd want to leave half-way through the first song. But they are a brilliant live band. Brilliant. I can't explain just how good they are live. And I hate dance music with a passion approaching the pornographic, but they were so very, very good. Alas, Lead Singer Jesus-beard Dude promised us that if everyone got up to dance, then Furry Hat Man (who is part of both Whitey Houston and Shout Out Out Out Out) would piss his pants onstage. And good as they were, as much shit as they were rocking, I just don't want to see anyone pissing their pants. We were tired, and they were ear-destroyingly loud, and pants-pissing is where I draw the line. So before the (totally infectious, and I'm not an easily infected girl) beat made us want to get up and dance, we left. We did stay for three or four of their songs. And yeah. More entertaining than bears on bicycles. Everything I said about Whitey Houston having more of? Multiply that times the extra four band members, and you might have something like what they are.

[ETA: I could have done without the vocoder, though. I think it's just a pet peeve of mine. I don't like the fucking vocoder. Rely on your own damn voice. Or sing through your guitar and/or strange telephone set-up like Luke Doucet, because that at least sounded interesting.]

Through the whole first three bands, this floppy haired dude kept walking back and forth from where he was standing, back to the bathrooms. He was kind of glazed-eyed and he stared at each person at each table he walked past, in a vaguely creepy way, and we started calling him Snorts-Cocaine-Off-Urinals, because that's what he looked like he must be doing in the bathroom so often. And then it turned out he was Snorts-Cocaine-Off-Urinals-Who-Is-Also-In-Shout-Out-Out-Out-Out, so we decided that he must also have been scanning the tables, hoping for some hot chick (or hot guy, damned if I know what he was looking for) to take back to his hotel room after the show. Snorts-Coke spent a lot of time standing with these other two guys, tall and gangly and stringy haired and scruffy guys, and they also turned out to be part of Shout Out Out Out Out. And so did Maraca Man. (Shout Out has two drummers - Maraca Man and the drummer from Whitey Houston.)

The sad part about all of this is that I was able to see them all and recognize them all and know who was with who. BECAUSE NOBODY SHOWED UP.

Luke Doucet and the woman who sang with him, Melissa McClelland, were standing about just a little ways in front of me through most of the show. So I knew, too, where they were at.

I would guess there were forty or fifty people there. Including the bands, the entourage (if they had any - they took their own instruments off and on-stage for the most part), the security and the bartenders. And that's pretty fucking sad, when you consider the fact that FemBots had 5 or 6 members, Shout Out had 6 members, and Luke Doucet had four.

It was an embarrassingly small crowd, and it was embarrassing that they (Whitey Houston) mocked Regina for having been a terrible show and for having played Regina for like $31 (or was it $32, FemBot lead singer wondered) and then to show up in Saskatoon and play for a crowd of security and their own tour-members. So many people missed out.

If all four of the bands had just phoned it in, just done their bit and got off-stage and took off elsewhere to get piss drunk and snort more cocaine or play more maracas or do something more interesting than play to a half-empty club... I wouldn't have blamed them. I wouldn't have blamed them at all if they'd each played a $2.50 set instead of sets full of $10 songs. I wouldn't have blamed them if they'd cancelled. I wouldn't have blamed them if they'd come out on stage, and then turned around and left. It was just embarrassing. Not for them, but for the club (which is always operating on a deficit, and yet hardly advertised - I only found out about the show by fortuitous accident). But they really didn't feel like they phoned it in. Maybe they did - I've never seen any of them live before - maybe this was a down night for them, a slow night, or a not very good night, but I thought they are all really remarkable (even the FemBots, who as I said, were a bit hit and miss). And I'd pay more than $10 to see each of them again.