Review: Matt Mays & El Torpedo show: 21 Oct 2005

The Novaks, who opened, were terrible. Or their music wasn't terrible, so much as just the singing. They were sort of... Generic Loud Rock Band. And I could have done without them. They sounded a bit like someone who'd play at the lake on Canada Day, which is probably more of an insult than it sounds and is probably harsher than it ought to be. I don't know. I liked the one song when the not-lead singer sang.

Matt Mays was great. He's much better live than on the studio albums. More life. More everything. He used the word 'noggin' which... I don't know. And he talked about breaking up with Sam Roberts (in the sense of having to end a tour he did with him in the past). Which is an interesting way of describing it. He wore a Guns n' Roses shirt. And a blue ballcap. He kept pimping out band members to all the ladies. And the guy at the merch table is single, ladies. Ladies, the guy on keys is single. They did two encores. The first time around Matt Mays played a solo acoustic song, and then El Torpedo came out to do a song with him. When they came back a second time, they did a cover of... a Bruce Springsteen song, I think he said. I wouldn't know who sang it originally, anyway. I wouldn't have known he hadn't written it himself. It was good. Not the last encore in specific, just the show in general.

They kept talking too about how great it is to play Saskatoon because other places you play and don't get such a good response, and they usually don't play two encores but Saskatoon was making them feel good, or whatever else rah rah Saskatoon, and the second song of the first encore was written in Saskatoon, just after he'd played at Lydia's this one time, and I don't know. It feels like such bullshit for someone to say it. Who knows if it's true, or if it isn't the same thing he says everywhere, except then with the song he wrote in Edmonton that one time or some other song somewhere else. It makes me think of Sarah McLachlan, who I saw once when I was... 16ish and who talked about how playing her old songs now was like seeing an old lover and realising finally that they really aren't so bad as you'd thought when you broke up with them. And then reading on the internet a few days later about some show she'd played in the US somewhere where she'd the same thing, almost exactly as she'd said it here. I wonder how much is planned, how much is real.