All aboard the SIN WAGON

Anyone in favour of a four day work week? I’m! Weekends are too short. Something always gets neglected somehow. We weren’t home much this weekend. B.’s nephew had two birthday parties, one with friends the other with family, we were at both. It was fun. B.’s sister had the basement ready to entertain a bunch of five year olds. I thought it looked like Toys ‘R Us exploded in their basement. The highlight was clearly Outrun2 hooked up to a large LCD monitor playing with a steering wheel, brake and gas…it really was arcade-like. Black Ferrari Spider. Mmm. B.’s nephew cleaned up pretty well. His interest in cars very apparent in the gifts and all the birthday cards.

Sunday evening was the Dixie Chicks concert. We started with dinner at Jack Astor’s downtown. It was ok. Place was busy as always, the food was only ok. It appeared that there was cheese-whiz on my $14 Nachos. WTF. (The Nachos also gave me GI grief all night to boot ~ sigh) We met a bunch of friends of B.’s friend Bonnie who were also going to the show. The crowd was pretty pumped to see the Chicks. There were several rounds of the ‘wave’ and various let’s go clapping patterns. The opening band the Damnwells were interesting. I didn’t really get the band though. They started the night with two rocking tunes then starting playing tame boring stuff off their new album. I didn’t like the change. They were much more entertaining when rocking out. They had another song off an itunes compilation (or something like that) that was killer. I figured it was their last song. It wasn’t they ended with more weak stuff off the new album. All I can say is their new musical direction sucks. The band should stick to the rock. There are plenty of pop acts out there to do ballads and ‘crap’. They do have potential though. Ho-hum. Rarely is the opening act a reason for showing though and the audience was clearly there to see the Chicks.

There were many cowboy donning 20 somethings. A special thanks to the women showing off excessive cleavage that walked up and down the stairs many times in section 323. Looking for some attention maybe? *smirk* Anyways, music, after a few songs I (and B.) were pretty underwhelmed by the sound of the chicks. It just seemed to be lacking something. The vocals also seemed a little unclear at times. For all the drama about how political the band is — they were pretty tame. I think Natalie made one reference to the President (which the crowd roared to). I think the soon-to-be-released movie of theirs ‘Shut Up and Sing’ will explain their side of things in more detail. Clearly the Chicks are talented and innovative performers. They used all sort of instruments during their performance. I was surprised to enjoy most of their material. It seemed to me that Natalie was a little tired tonight, maybe due to all the touring? The lighting and TV screens behind the stage weren’t as impressive as other concerts I’ve been to. If the Chicks really had a political agenda I think the images behind them would have reflected that… instead the screens showed blobs and ink blotches… which I didn’t find added much at all to the performance. The Chicks played three encore songs….again I thought the order of the songs was very odd. I’ve always thought bands play some of their more popular or upbeat songs during an encore. Seeing that the Chicks had already played Sin Wagon and Earl they had to do a cover song and some slower material for their encore. –Shrug- I didn’t get that. Overall it was fun. I didn’t feel well most of the performance however (see Nachos for dinner) so I felt pretty immobile.

And the Sabres streak comes to an end. It took a shootout to do it. It was a great run and is clearly the start of a great season.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!