Vehemently Vitriolic

Last night I headed down to the Fabulous Commodore Ballroom™ to check out the guitar orgy that is Dragonforce.

While I don’t normally plunk down $40 for a single ticket (well, $32.50 plus extortion charges from Ticketmaster. Do NOT get me started), I felt this was a special case. I go to a lot of live shows, but I’m more the $10-at-the-shittiest-dump-in-the-city-and-get-beer-of-questionable-origin kinda guy.

My love of Through The Fire And Flames started when I first finished Guitar Hero III and the credits rolled. I had a sense of accomplishment. Of being. And then for no obvious reason, the biggest skull-fuck of a song came on. I was only on medium at the time, but I instantly thought this was some sort of joke. Like the developers threw in a huge random number generator and the screen was being filled in some massive while-loop of random notes designed in part with the powerful finger prosthetics lobby to drive business their way for broken digits. Or an Easter Egg to try and illicit a seizure.

I also loved the old video game sounds they incorporated. I have had long discussions with my wife about where some of the riffs came from. I say there is a heavy Castlevania and Mega-Man influence in that song. My wife disagrees and says “What the hell is a Castlevania? Can’t you be interested in boobs like a normal male?”.

I knew then that my friend (who we’ll call ‘G’ becuase I don’t remember how to spell his first name properly), who is an actual really truly professional guitar player, who knows how to actually hold a guitar neck (as opposed to grappling with and choking the life out of a mutant ostrich. This is the technique I prefer) and can do stuff like read notes would love this. I routinely sit through a DVD of something called “G3″ at his place where a bunch (3) of well known guitar guys essentially have an orgasm on stage for an hour holding their instrument (pun intended) becuase he loves to watch these guitar-gods. Something something technique something something. So I knew he would LOVE to get ahold of Dragonforce. I sent him this video, and within hours was summoned to his house.

We decided to play on Expert, and for more than a year now have faithfully played just about every Saturday night. I can now get a respectable 77% correct (he beat me twice. I’m not saying GHB was involved when he did, but I did wake up the next morning in hospital and had to have the morning after pill)  and even setup a 19-foot high tarp to project it against at his cabin last summer so we could play outdoors. (Funny aside story: We play this song on average 12-times every Saturday. No joke. Over and over like meth heads. Our wives HATE this song now. G’s wife was pregnant with their daughter most of the time we would play. Over and over and over. So, when their daughter was born we were over on a Saturday night, and the baby was on the couch in a different room of the house with the lady folk. We struck the first notes and babies head jerked around wildly as she tried to find the sound. She KNEW the song in utero. The song was interrupted as we heard screams of ‘oh my fucking god’ and various other expletives leveled at us. Like having an appreciation of video games and metal is something to be frowned upon at 3-weeks old). We watched the videos on YouTube, and thought Herman Li was as close to guitar nirvana as one can get. They came through town once last Christmas, but we could not make the show. So when they came back last night, we jumped at the opportunity to go.

The opening band was….awful. They were called Taking Dawn. They chose this name chiefly becuase their first choice of name, “Generic Long Hair Dressed In Black Metal-ish Sounding Group #8″, didn’t fit on the banners they had printed.They were trying to whip the crowd into….something. Somehow forgetting they are a non-local opening act for a touring band whos entire job is to simply play anything, and that whatever follows sounds better by virtue of them NOT being on stage. Apparently they didn’t sell many CD’s from their merch stand as at the end of the show, all the band members were waiting by the doors with a stack each of CD’s begging people to buy them for $5. You almost felt like telling them you’d buy them a sandwich at Burger King, but that if you just gave them money, all they would do with it is waste it on more recordings.

The second opener was a band called Sonata Arctica. They had some promise. The opening notes sounded great, and then the singer started. I did a quick lookup on my trusty Android phone on wikipedia and found they are a Finnish band. Which made sense to me as they sounded like Finntroll, a fantastic Finnish band. As they continued, I came to the realization that they were a watered-down version of Finntroll. They weren’t metal-y enough, and simultaneously not folks-y enough. The only metaphor I could come up with was if Hannah Montana or the Jonas Brothers decided to create a side project singing Finntroll covers. It was “safe” Mall Black-Metal™

While we waited for Dragonforce to leap on stage and set shit on fire, we walked around the various merch booths. Sonata Arctica had these T-shirts that looked incredibly familiar, but I just could not place them. G then mentioned the same shirt could be purchased at any postal outlet in a mall, the ones that will print anything on a mug and do iron-ons on their own shirts with witty sayings like ‘I am Canada’. Yes, for only $30CAD you too could have a shirt with a picture of a wolf howling at the moon (no I’m not joking) or an eagle feather. I’m sure Taking Dawn had some stuff, but by this time I was worried I would accidentally burn it, so we walked past. The Dragonforce merch booth was interesting. They went out of their way to round up all the out of work airbrush artists from the 70′s who have been out of work since no one wants wizards, dragons or mostly naked women with lense-flares airbrushed on the side of their vans to make T-shirt designs for them.

Maybe I’ll just continue this in a Part II so those of you already bored can stop reading now before I accidentally say something interesting.