06.18.2009 Wintersleep / Chris Bell (Hamilton)

This show was sort of a warm up show for Wintersleep as they would be playing NXNE the next day. What was cool about this show was that the venue is a lot smaller than what they would normally play these days. (at least in Canada) Downtown Hamilton (The "Hammer!") is kind of a sketchy place.



I had a chuckle when I saw who was the opener. Chris Bell does sound for Wintersleep. He's from Hamilton so it would make sense for him to open at this particular show. He's also happens to be the drummer for Sons of Butcher. Yep that Sons of Butcher, though I don't think he was ever featured on the cartoon. There are a lot of mediocre singer song writers out there, but Chris isn't one of them. I was pretty surprise how good it was. There seem to be some Neil Young and Radiohead influences going on. He should do the solo thing more often.



I should really stop doing Wintersleep reviews. this blog has done too many of them. Technical difficulties, kept the doors to the Casbah main room's door closed until around 30 min or so before Chris was scheduled to go on. Wintersleep actually started sound checking pretty late, in fact, after the doors were supposed to open. If you were standing by the door, you would have heard Astronaut and a sort of Jam on the Temptations' classic "My Girl". As for the main set, it was one of the longer Wintersleep sets I've seen, around 100 min. The only new song played was Baltic. Astronaut wasn't on the setlist. Insomnia was added to the encore, which was nice because it isn't played often enough. I think I'm starting to like Listen now as an encore. Having seen the band so many times in the past couple of years, it was nice seeing them in a packed small venue.

Setlist:

Miasmal Smoke & The Yellow Bellied Freaks
Archaeologists
Caliber
Jaws Of Life
Drunk On Aluminum
Baltic
Weighty Ghost
Murderer
Search Party
Astronaut (not on setlist)
Oblivion
Laser Beams
Orca
Danse Macabre
====
listen [listen, listen]
Insomnia (not on setlist)
nerves normal. breath normal


$40/$0