What a wicked thing to do

Wow, I sure have a lot of catching up to do here. The highlight of last week was the HIM concert on Saturday at the Showbox SODO, so I guess I'll finally write up my mini-review.

I went with our friend Dave (no blog) since TJ was still out of town, and he really isn't a concert kind of guy anyway. The ticket said 7pm so we got there around 6:45. Of course, once we got there I realized it meant 'Doors open at 7pm' so we were stuck standing outside for 15 min or so. And because I didn't want a heavy jacket inside, I left it in the car and then proceeded to freeze while we waiting in line.

Waiting in line gave us the opportunity to people watch. Lots of teenage goth girls. And goth boys. And ambiguous gender people. Pretty much everyone was wearing black. Fortunately I was smart enough to comply so I didn't stick out too much as one of the old uncool kids. (At least not at that point.)

So they finally let us in. The venue wasn't bad, at least layout-wise. There's a bar area/beer garden in the back of the hall, and a nice one on one side, and enough bathrooms, which were even clean. Dave and I hung out in the beer garden because it was mostly empty, given all the underage folks at the show. We leaned on the railing and even had a table to put our drinks on.

The opening band, Bleeding Through, SUCKED. Crappy speed metal. But they get props for having a female keyboard player. And when the lead singer actually sang, instead of yelled or growled, he actually didn't sound half bad. And the drummer was actually quite good. 45 minutes was too long to sit through that garbage, but I was pacified by the nice lemon drop martini made by the fabulous hip bartender.

And then HIM came on, finally, around 9:30pm. A long time to wait, but well worth it. It was an awesome show. Too bad the acoustics in the Showbox completely suck. And I'm no audiophile, but even I could tell. The band sounded just loud and sort of jumbled/muffled. The show would have been truly AMAZING in any other location, but the lack of good sound really took a lot away from it.

They played a ton of songs from the "And Love Said No" Greatest Hits album I have (and love). They played a few from their newest album, of course. No "The Sacrament", though, which made me a little sad. The other odd thing was that Ville did almost no talking between songs, and when he did it was unintelligible. Not just because he has an accent, but literally he was mumbling. Or maybe it was the bad acoustics again. And they did no encore. Just quit abruptly at 11pm. Very odd.

Unfortunately I had one too many drinks (which for me was 3) and got very chatty with the folks nearby, much to Dave's chagrin. Not to mention the killer hangover I had the next day. Next time, only 2 drinks for me. Sometime in that chatty evening, I gave my email address to some dude, promising that TJ and I would come and see his band. At least I had the presence of mind to give him my spam address. I hope he doesn't email me.

I would love to see HIM again, in a better theater. (The Triple Door, or the Paramount - swoon!) I also found out that Nightwish is coming back in May 2008 to tour Canada and some other US cities, so I'm definitely going to see them, either in Vancouver or Las Vegas.

Yay for concerts! Now if I could only find someone to go with me to see M.I.A. or Tori Amos, I'd be all set for the rest of this year...