Contrast is Beauty

When I last wrote here I didn’t expect this month to start of quite as hectic as it has. It’s been good for me to dive into this time with such a momentum, even though it deviated from my plans. Having deadlines and events not self-imposed has been a blessing. A month dedicated to imposing structure should rightly start with some.
Tuesday morning I was informed about a job I’ve been recommended for. That night I hurriedly pieced together a resume and cover letter that I think are the best I’ve produced to date, which doesn’t say much since I’ve been lucky to get most jobs I’ve had through reputation and recommendation alone and have composed few successful resumes and cover letters. I feel confident they will be well received, though.
Wednesday afternoon I cut off my first beard. In high school I had a goatee but never a full beard. I had actully grown to like the new look, which surprised me; I’ve not been fond of having facial hair for a long while.

Later that day I spent some time with my friend Nathan and with him picked up some tickets for a Thursday night concert featuring Uncut, Controller Controller and Death From Above 1979. Later still the two of us visited his friend Robert and on the way became lost, a situation I made an audio journal entry about. All in all it was a pleasant, though unexciting, time. I ended my night reformatting my resume and cover letter as suggested by my intermediary (my boss, who has recommended me to join her team at the new hotel). I was told I wrote an impressive cover letter.

Thursday began with some cleaning of my home but quickly I was pulled into the excitement of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. That film is damn good. If you’ve read the books on which it was based you’ll miss some of the hilarious narrator lines. Otherwise, I found everything from casting to pacing to special effects to be expertly done. I laughed plenty. This was certainly as worthy of Douglas Adams’ books as anything I could have expected from a Hollywood film. If I gave out stars tHGttG would get a solid four out of five.

Over an hour of wandering and ice cream consumpton later Nathan and were in the door at The Attic, where I’d soon be seeing my first concert in nearly (or just over?) a year. Until then I did some meditation exercises as we sat. It’s quite a challenge to find stillness in the midst of blaring music and loud chatter but I managed some moderate success at it.

Uncut opened the night with a solid performance. I initially found them a bit derivative (“Taken In Sleep” reminded me a whole lot of Placebo.) but they impressed me in the final three quarters of their performance. Musically they’re quite tight but one vocalist of two wasn’t delivering well. It didn’t take long for the crowd to get into the moshy, weight throwing mood, which I basked in. There’s nothing quite like giving way to music.
While the crowd was fairly into Controller Controller, they were forgettable to me. Musically they didn’t do much for me, though the vocalist was rather good. To be fair, I may have thought more highly of them had they not been performing between the other two acts that night; they were simply not of the same calibur as the others.
Death From Above 1979 were fantastic. They blew us all away from the opening note and left me all smiles. A bass / synth and drums / vocals duo, they delivered a full sonic assault that one would not expect from so few performers. The bass could produce remarkably guitar-like sounds through distortion and other effects and the vocals and other instrumentation were impressive as well. The crowd lapped up the sexy deathwave (a term my friend Jeff coined when I introduced him to the band this week, indicating a cross between new wave and death metal) offering and were as energetic as any I’ve been a part of in a club setting. There’s a reason this band has been creating quite a buzz and getting on the charts; I was left sweat-soaked, concert-high and with a new band to add to my list of favourites.

If you’d like, you can read read my friend Nathan’s “Back in 1979 People Died in Style: From Above.,” a slightly more lecherous account of the show.

Walking home I spent the time chatting with Nathan about some of our usual topics and previous exploits. The usual fuzzy cotton feeling of my ears was obvious the whole while but it was otherwise nice to be outside in the cool (but not cold) air after sweating and being barely able to breathe (due to heat and close quarters) by the end of the concert.

Contrast is beautiful.