Sunday, March 20, 2016

Death Cab for Cutie + Metric tour






Death Cab for Cutie
Centre Bell, Montreal
March 19, 2016




Death Cab for Cutie started the show strongly by playing The New Year as they opened the show. They continued playing hits after hits:


1.The New Year
2. Crooked Teeth
3. Black Sun
4. The Ghosts of Beverly Drive
5. Title and Registration
6. Little Wanderer
7.No Sunlight
8. President of What?
9. I Will Possess Your Heart
10. Why I'm Lonely (Harvey Danger cover) (Live debut; played in honour of Aaron Huffman) 
11. El Dorado
12. You Are a Tourist
13. Cath...
14. Soul Meets Body
15. Bixby Canyon Bridge


They were rocking it throughout the show when they needed to and calmed the mood down when the songs required to be more introspective. Their performance was the best I saw of them, Ben Guibbard was really intense in his performance and mostly during his time playing on his keyboards.
The only slightly boring moment for me was when they played the Harvey Danger tribute song where they didn't seem to be completely in sync with each other and Ben was singing flat or didn't know how to sing that song.

Overall I was impressed with the show they gave.
They might be coming back really soon too...







 



Metric
Centre Bell, Montreal
March 19, 2016


Metric was the main event of this op-headlining tour with Death Cab.
To start this review I just want to say that Metric is one of my favorite bands, every Metric show I've been attending has been a major event and greatly entertaining without ever having me complaining about their performance.


If you had never seen Metric live before and you heard that Emily Haines in concert is exceptional and bringing the whole band up a notch, well it is usually true and that is why I love to watch them live, but it was not the case last night.  Emily's voice was way off due to sickness probably and her scenic performance suffered from the same issue and showed a definite lack of energy. I think she tried hard to move around and push her voice as hard as she could during the show, but it showed a lot. Emily pushed the limit by doing parts of 2 songs in acapalla which didn't help the songs at that time.
Metric tried something else that was new and nice to see which was to invite the Montreal Choir to sing "Dream so real" and the intention was great, but unfortunately the people in the Choir didn't sing and when they did we couldn't hear them well or at all which rendered the moment less stellar and off they were after that song.


Fortunately, Metric the band saved the show with a really great musicianship display of what they can do including Emily who is a great musician and really intense when she plays her keyboards. There is nothing I can say negatively about their performance as soon as they just played their instruments it was something else!

They made great alternative versions of some of their songs helped greatly with an amazing lighting show which changed songs and dynamics of these songs as they played along and interrupted by the light events. When they turned into robot like musicians with their glasses and the arrangements of the songs and beats for a song it was an amazing moment to absorb and I was blasted by those versions of the songs which was something totally new on this tour.

It was a good performance overall but obviously not the best I have seen of Metric unfortunately.


Set list:

1.IOU  
2. Help I'm Alive  
3. Youth Without Youth  
4. Twilight Galaxy  
5. Cascades
6. Hustle Rose (Acapella Snippet)   
7. Too Bad, So Sad  
8. Artificial Nocturne 
9. Dreams So Real (Acoustic, with choir)   
10. Blind Valentine (Instrumental snippet)  
11. Sick Muse  
12. Collect Call  
13. Other Side 
14. Black Sheep 
15. Synthetica  
16. Combat Baby (Acapella Snippet) 
17. Gold Guns Girls
18. The Shade
Encore:
19. Celebrate  
20. Gimme Sympathy (Acoustic) 
21. Breathing Underwater