Concert Review - Teenage Bottlerocket

I really should be working on my thesis or marking final exams but I decided to put those on standby and pump out my first post-vacation blog.

The vacation started with Al and I leaving Montreal on August 16th to help my friend Kash move to Toronto. Moreover, I had a more underhanded reason in driving for 7 hours to the black hole of Canada as Teenage Bottlerocket were performing that evening. After settling down at my uncle's house after the big move, Al decided to go for dinner with our friend Brian instead of coming to the concert. I was all prepped to go by myself but my uncle offered to come with me and I was pretty stoked; bringing my 50 year old uncle to a punk rock venue is definitely my idea of a good time. Moreover I pitched the band to him by saying "they sound like the Ramones."

Unfortunately, I missed all the openers because the bouncer at the front didn't believe I was 25 years old and I didn't think to bring my passport to a punk rock show. So after a few back and forth trips from West Bloor to Queen Street I was able to make it back just in time to catch the headliners.

Now since my CD review of 'Warning Device' was pretty glowing I had high expectations for the band...and boy did they deliver. Each song was pumped out with such tight and succinct pop-punk goodness that even the most snooty music elitist couldn't help but bob their head to their catchy riffs. Even better, they played an even number of recognizable favorites from earlier CDs (such as 'Radio') and plenty of new songs from 'Warning Device' (such as 'In the Basement' and 'Pacemaker'). In all fairness any pop-punk band gets pretty annoyingly common after a few songs (there's only so many things you can do with 3 chords) but the shared vocals between the guitarists made it just interesting enough so that the set didn't get boring. However, the band played into pop-punk musical stereotypes as the drummer chanted "1, 2, 3, 4" before every single song. Really funny at first, but annoying as the set progressed.

On a plus side though, Teenage Bottlerocket played a single from their upcoming split with The Ergs and to my amused surprise they cover 'Having a Blast' by Green Day which more or less had me re-living grade 8 over and over again (in a good way). I definitely wasn't the only one singing along.

Sadly, like the Kap Bambino show, such a great band was welcomed to Canada by a lukewarm audience. Toronto I'm ashamed of you. Moreover, while I can somewhat forgive Montreal for not having a lot of people of color represented in its audience (reasonable accommodation is racism) I see no reason why a punk audience in a multicultural city like TO had only a 25 year old kid from Montreal and his 50 year old uncle as the only non-white people in the crowd. Okay, maybe it wasn't that bad, but considering how many Asian people populate the GTA I really expected more. I guess most of the hipsters where out watching Radiohead (who also played that night). Psh. I'll take 'Bloodbath at Burger King' over 'Creep' any day of the week.