Still reeling from intensely brilliant David Usher Concert at the MOD club

I think the worst part is that I'm not sure that I'll ever have another concert experience nearly as incredible - the bar is simply set too high. I'll start with the opening act - NLX: Natasha Alexandra. I had to buy her albums after an brilliant performance. As a long-time fan of Tori Amos, this was like Tori but way better... maybe like Tori crossed with David Usher and Depeche Mode. I'm a totally convert fan - check for the new link on this blog soon. So, I was pretty impressed by the time she was done --- and then David came on and while he is always awesome live - this was the best of some pretty good locations for me. We were dead centre maybe 1.5 m back from the stage and besides he took a bit of a trip through the audience right through the middle of the group...

So... perhaps I should start at the beginning. We drove downtown - thanks for taking one for the team G. - and then set out to find somewhere to eat. We wandered down college and were about to turn around, when I saw Sneaky Dee's. Now, I haven't been there in years, but I thought that since none of the rest of them had heard about it... they had to at least go in and see it - just to say they had. Some of the cool paintings were gone, replaced with a lot of graffiti, which I don't remember so much, but still it still kind of different. Everyone was excited about mexican food and their prices are pretty reasonable, so that solved our find a place to eat dilema and it was a memorable place.... a good start to the evening for sure. Then we wandered back (well, Geoff hailed a street car to beat the ticket guy back to the parking lot that had some annoying pay windows, so we had to buy a second ticket for the evening.) We stood in line and noted the fashion trends (I, dressed in a t-shirt and fleece really didn't fit in... but hey... its a concert...and I'm a 90's kid at least I did eventually lose the braids) and smokers and discussed a variety of things until they read us the riot act, checked our bags and let us in.

Once inside, I was struck with a certain amount of Deja Vu.... I'll have to see if I've been there before. Its possible - it definately looked familiar. We immediately staked out our place near the front and centre and then hung out until the opening act came out.... she was awesome, as noted above. Aside from a few dashes (got lost on the way to the bathrooms and bought NLX cd's - :D) to the relatively clean and secure bathrooms downstairs - i.e. someone actually pressed the soap container for my hands... although it might have been because I was confused and trying not to accidently whack the security gaurd with my clumsiness. Okay.. the bathrooms weren't that exciting.... back up the stairs and through the crowd. Thank goodness for tall boys - easy to find in a crowd.

Wow... my English is getting progressively worse as this post goes on. I'm going to have to take my entire blog off the internet when I start job hunting or erase my name somehow....

Okay. So, they start playing thriller and out comes the band and then David Usher singing Message Home. The rest of it I don't think can be described well enough to give credit to how mind booglingly amazing it was. I remember standing there thinking that this was just a good headspace - the music was awesome, much rockier than the albums and there were tonnes of hilarious exchanges between David and the crowd...including someone yelling "Take off your shirt" and David questioning "Take off my shoes??". The set list was drawn from all of his albums with a heavy weighting for Little Songs including F-train, Saint Lawrence River, Forest Fire, Trickster, Jesus was my girl... He also did Long Goodbye (my favourite from the last album) and about 5 songs from the new album. For the encore set he invited a bunch of the girls in the front up on stage and they all sat in a semi circle cross legged. I chickened out, I was close enough to make it, but I had no idea what my hair was doing after 2 hours of freedom and bopping up and down (although I found out later that it apparently behaved itself). Anywho. It ended with "Saint Lawrence River" which is my all time favourite song in the world and it just rocked.

So back to work for me... I might have to come back and edit this post... I'm just gushing at this point and the number of elipses will surely get me in trouble.... If you have a chance to see David Usher live... seriously... do it.

Yours googlingly...

Jennith Peart