Music/Movies
Nightwish Edmonton Show Review
May 21st
Wow this took awhile to get around to doing. This past weekend I had the chance to check off the third of my five favourite european metal bands off my “I must see these bands” list. I was truly surprised to find out that Nightwish was coming to Edmonton to play a sold out show at the Starlite room. I was surprised that they were coming, and I was also surprised that they sold out faster than the other two bands I saw: Sonata Arctica and Stratovarius. Maybe it’s the female singer that makes them more attractive to more people. Not sure.
Anyways, Diane and I arrived a bit late to the Starlite room, and already an impressive looking line had formed all the way down the block. So there was nothing for us to do except go to the back of the line and wait for about 35-40 minutes to get in. Such is the state of going to the Starlite, since that has been the way of things in the past. On the plus side, the weather was beautiful so waiting in line wasn’t a big deal.
While in line the opening band started up. It didn’t really look like we were missing anything, and I didn’t even bother to find out who was playing. Then again, it’s really hard to tell since the volume was turned up so loud. *sigh*. The problem with live concerts.
So Diane and I found our spot on the right side of the venue on the stairs descending to the floor. It was packed in there though, so it took awhile to squirm into a good spot. It took a long time, as usual, for the main band to have all their gear setup and sound tested, but after the long wait Nightwish finally came on stage.
Nightwish has undergone a bit of turmoil in the recent months. They fired their distinctive lead singer after the band decided that they were not on the same page concerning the direction of the band (or something, I’m not really familiar with the situation). This made for some troubling times as the band tried to find someone to replace her. I’m not sure they ever would’ve found someone with quite as deep and powerful a voice as Tarja, but they did find someone who does a pretty darn good job. The new vocalist didn’t sing too many classic Nightwish songs, but the ones that she did do she did pretty well I’d have to say.
Here’s the setlist for the night:
- Intro + Bye Bye Beautiful
- Dark Chest of Wonders
- Who ever brings the night
- The Siren
- Amaranth
- Islander
- The Poet and the Pendulum
- Come Cover Me
- While Your Lips are Still Red
- Sahara
- Nemo
- 7 days
- Dead to the World
- Wish I had an Angel
All in all the show was amazing. The various members of the band are quite good at their respective intruments. The keyboardist isn’t as flashy as the one in Stratovarius or Sonata Arctica, but that’s okay. One of the guitarist’s sported a rather epic beard/hair combination.
It’s been a few days since the event, so I don’t remember too many details. Also I wanted to get this post up before I forgot about it entirely. I took some video that I’d like to share, but I need to post process it so I can upload it somewhere useful (I was thinking flickr). That might take a little while.
Anyways, it was a pretty good show, and I was quite happy that I got the chance to go!
Heraldk
Eileen Ivers Concert Review
Apr 4th
A few months ago, Diane asked me if I wanted to go to a concert with her in April. It was an awfully long time in the future, but I booked it in. Last night was the concert in question, and it turned out we were there to see a fiddler by the name of Eileen Ivers. Now, I’ll admit that while I do love the style of music, I haven’t been very proactive in finding more of it to listen to. I have a few Leahy CDs, but that’s about it. So I was pretty excited to find another collection of quality fiddle music.
Eileen has a pretty impressive resume. She has won nine All-Ireland fiddle championships, and she toured with Riverdance starting in 1995. So that’s pretty cool. The band she was touring with featured several excellent musicians in their own right. They put on quite a show.
The music they played varied quite a bit with several pieces fusing a few genres. In the last song before the intermission, they played a song called “Gravelwalk” that she described as Celtic fiddling meets the Bronx. Early on, I was surprised that she broke out a wah pedal for her fiddle. I became astonished as she began to make her fiddle sound like a full out distortion guitar. Huh. I mean, I know and like Apocalyptica, which does distortion Cello, but I didn’t expect to see it on the violin.
Edit: here’s the only video I could find of Eileen playing gravelwalk. It’s too bad it’s just the distortion part, because it sounds much better in context.
(as a side note, Apocalyptica is getting air time on Sonic 102.9, a local radio station. I think this is fantastic).
The show was wonderful and the only thing missing from the audience clapping and singing (for 2 songs anyways), and foot stomping fun was a couple pints of Guinness.
Thanks sweety for getting us tickets 
Heraldk
Sonata Arctica Show Review
Feb 18th
This was a long time coming. I’ve been so busy this last week that I haven’t had a chance to talk about the latest Sonata Arctica concert here in Edmonton.
SA made their second appearance in two years at Edmonton’s Starlite room last week. I was able to get tickets and go, so I continued to support the band’s efforts to increase their North American fanbase. If they keep coming back they should do just that … this show was sold out!
My only real complaint about the show was that it was too short. They got on stage late due to the doors opening at 8:00pm, and two opening bands on the slate. The first opening band “The Order Chaos” was not too bad. They only played three songs, but I might have to look into their music a little more to see if I like it. The second band was called “Sanctity”, and they were … almost as different from Sonata Arctica as you could get and still stay in the same genre of music. Sure they had metal riffs on the guitars, but where Sonata Arctica is classy, melodic, and appealing, Sanctity was rude, crass, and unappealing. I couldn’t wait for them to get off the stage.
It’s too bad SA couldn’t play a longer set. They totally have the repertoire to play a two hour or longer set, but because of the late start there was no way that was going to happen. Still, they did play a good set, and I enjoyed getting the chance to try and take some band-in-action photography and video with my P&S camera. I think I did a decent job!
Big news as well, Edmonton… Nightwish is coming to town to play the Starlite room! I’ve already bought my tickets (you can get them in a presale from a link off their webpage). So once I see them, then all I’ve got to see is Kamelot and Rhapsody and I’ll have seen my top 5 favourite metal bands! How exciting!
Heraldk
Victor Borge
Aug 23rd
Last night, Diane and I saw the best fringe show that I think I’ve ever seen. It was Rainer Hersch’s Victor Borge. The show had received a 5 star rating in the Edmonton Journal, and they were totally not kidding.
For those who don’t know (I was among you before I saw the show), Victor Borge was a famous piano comedian for something like 50 years. His most famous sketch was one where he gives sounds to every punctuation mark which results in a rather humorous reading of a story.
So what happens in the show? Rainer Hersch jumps in and out of the Victor Borge character with ease. He probably spends about half the show as Victor, and half as himself as he talks about Victor’s life story and how he rose to fame. The show was incredibly fun to watch. The jokes are hilarious, the acting was superb (I later was talking to my first piano teacher whom I ran into at the show, and she said that Rainer had his Victor impression almost perfect), and I really think that most everyone should enjoy this show.
Unfortunately, I’m sure it is all sold out for all the shows that remain during fringe week. However, if they decide to hold-over this show, or you see Rainer Hersch’s name back in Edmonton, you should check him out!
Heraldk
Megan’s First Recital
May 13th
My sister held her first paid ticket recital today in Rimbey, Alberta for mothers day this year. It was, I think, an unqualified success. Megan was in good form playing through a couple hour set of a variety of different styles of music. We sold 33 tickets at $12 a piece, plus a number of donations — all of which is money that will be helping finance her upcoming trip to Ireland later this summer.
Why was the recital in Rimbey you ask? Well my grandparents moved (back) there a month ago or so and they are really quite good about getting word out about Megan’s upcoming gigs. So they helped organize Megan’s first ticketed recital. I’m glad that it went well for her! So she was able to play through her pieces to a captive audience. Afterwards we went out to dinner as a family to celebrate mother’s day (and the successful recital).
If you’re interested in seeing Megan play, she has an upcoming recital in Edmonton sometime soon. I don’t have the date just yet, but if you want to know when it is leave me a comment or an email and I’ll make sure I get the chance to sell you a ticket!
Heraldk
Spider Man 3
May 10th
Last night I got the chance to see spider man with Diane and most of her family. I didn’t really know what to expect. To be honest, I don’t actually know very much about the spiderman series. What I *did* know has already been covered in the first movie. The first two flicks were pretty good though so I was quite willing to go see the third one.
All in all, I thought the movie was very good. If you haven’t heard, they really crammed a lot of stuff into the show. With 3 different enemies to fight over the course of the movie, the action doesn’t really stop – which I suppose is a good thing for this type of movie. It did feel like you were getting a whirlwind tour of spidey’s enemies though.
Potential spoilers follow.
There’s a couple of complaints I did have though. First, does anyone else think that the Sandman’s defeat at the end of the movie seemed a tad random? It seemed like he was able to recover from every hit and bomb and everything that was thrown his way until he inexplicably crumbles after taking a couple more bombs. I don’t get it. The second complaint is that for a movie promising to showcase Venom as Spider-man’s main nemesis, you really didn’t get to see much of him. Venom really existed for a span of about 15 minutes of movie time – and most of that was the final battle sequence. Hmmm.
The movie was very formulaic, though I suppose you can’t really fault them for that. It has the typical movie-romance difficulties including Peter Parker being totally stupid with MJ. *sigh*. I really don’t like watching that sort of thing go on. I know it’s hard to come up with scenarios that don’t make the main characters look dumb but still put them into a difficult positions… but why can’t you at least try?
So, that’s what I thought anyways. It was good, but as expected it wasn’t very deep. What’d you think?
Heraldk
Elton John Improvising
Mar 27th
This is pretty awesome. I don’t actually know much of Elton John’s music, but there’s no denying he’s got some talent.
Enjoy!
Heraldk
Busy Times
Nov 30th
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been pretty busy. My thesis continues to get a facelift as Darse gives me low level feedback on it. I think my thesis will be a whole lot stronger due to his help. In other news, I should have a confirmed defense date set soon! Admittedly, the prospect is a little nerve wracking, but we’ll see what happens with that!
The ultrasound I had returned with “results being normal”. I’m not too sure what that means since my stomach still isn’t the happiest camper in the world. Oddly enough, it appears the foods that my stomach has the worst time with is milk and cheese. I really hope I’m not lactose intolerant all of a sudden! In general, I’m finding that I can eat most foods with no trouble outside of that category, so life isn’t all that unpleasant at the moment. I still very much miss milk and cheese though! My mom convinced me to call my family doctor, someone who I haven’t seen in ages, and book an appointment. Surprisingly, I was slotted in on Friday. So we’ll see what he has to say about the whole issue.
I saw Stranger than Fiction a few days ago, and was rather surprised at how much I enjoyed it. It is definitely a very different movie than the standard run-of-the-mill ones. Personally, I found the film quite enjoyable so I recommend you take a peek at it. In other flicks I’ve caught, I saw I Happy Feet with JR, Shelly, Andrew and Leah a week or two ago. It was a pretty fun show all in all, though it got a little weird for a children’s film near the end. Oh wells.
Also, Battlestar Galactica continues to impress. That is all.
Heraldk
An Inconvenient Truth
Oct 31st
I finally sat down and watched this movie last night … something I had been meaning to do for awhile, and I found a heck of a lot more compelling than I had thought it would be. To be honest, I didn’t know much about Al Gore besides the whole US election in 2000 thing. There’s a great deal more in the movie than I had expected, and it is greatly alarming.
I think about the future with what is probably a more-than-unhealthy dose of cynicism. I’m scared of the kind of world we’re gonna find ourselves in 20-50 years from now, and a movie like this certainly isn’t helping me feel safer. What scares me more is how are we going to change the way the world is going? It is easy to feel powerless in a world where there are billions of people who either don’t care or don’t understand the problems.
I don’t really know how true Gore’s statements are. A brief survey of posts on the subject though seem to indicate that Gore is relatively accurate in what he says. This is scary … very scary. If you haven’t had a chance to watch the movie yet, please do, and let me know what you think.
Heraldk
New Stabilo Album
Mar 25th
This is the first record that I’ve gotten excited about for a long time. Part of the trouble is that my music library is so vast that I have a hard time giving the songs I already have the listening that they deserve.
One of the latest bands that I really latched on to is Stabilo – a band out of Vancouver (if I remember correctly). They had one fairly big hit song called “Everybody” which I really liked. I saw them play in Edmonton at Klondike days, and picked up one of their cds when they were called “Stabilo Boss”. I fell in love with their music then, and since then have listened to the two discs I have from them regularly.
I had wondered what happened to them recently since they haven’t released a CD in a long time. Thankfully, they’re still around and they released a new single recently called “Flawed Design”. I got a chance to listen to it today, and it’s simply awesome. What I love about Stabilo is they aren’t afraid to write a whole bunch of really cool lyrics. The songs have cool rhythms, singable melodies and some harmonics you don’t hear a lot in rock music.
All in all, I’m really impressed with the new song and I’m gonna go buy the new cd “Happiness and Disaster” as soon as it hits stores. I think that’s on the 4th of April.
Heraldk
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