A couple weeks ago, Lal, Alan, various and sundry spouses and I went to see Great Lake Swimmers at the Church of the Redeemer. It was my second concert in 10 years, so I was psyched.

We saw the early show, which began around 6:50 with the lead track off their new album, Onigara, called Your Rocky Spine. It was exactly what I'd hoped they would start with. It was banjo-riffic and instrument-laden and the female harmony and echoing made it feel rather holy (the buzzing speaker and patchy jack in singer Tony Dekker's guitar only distracted me only slightly and sporadically).

As it turns out, I like my live music much like I like my opera—loud and full. My favourite songs were the ones with heavy support, which at times included a bass, a violin, the aforementioned banjo, something I like to call an accordion in a box, and some sort of sitty-organ-looking-thing that had pedals at the knees. My least favourite were when it was Tony and his guitar. That said, his voice is so lovely and the pews so comfy that my only real complaint is that I could have fallen asleep had he done more than two solos in a row. 

It was certainly my favourite concert in the last 10 years, and we all left the church wishing we'd bought tickets to the 9 p.m. show as well. GLS plays Toronto and area quite frequently, so I'll have to watch their site to see when they'll be back.

Don't want to take my word for it? Check out these live recordings from the concert, and stay tuned to CBC radio, cuz they were taping it.

So, I went to see a concert for the first time in eight years this week. It was Mark Kozelek, of Sun Kil Moon fame, at it was at Lee's Palace on Thursday night. The frigging thing started at 10:50 p.m. What the fuck? Alan says that Lee's always waits until nearly midnight to start its concerts. I don't get it. Mark's music is anything but rocking, so even those people who love him to death were starting to droop by the end of the two hours.

During the first 45 minutes of the concert, I have to say that I wasn't impressed. After every song, he and his backup guitarist (who Sh tells me was one of his bandmates in Red House Painters, but who could have been some kid he pulled off the street for the amount of coaching he had to give him) discussed the next song for what felt like 10 minutes and tuned their guitars for another five. I was pretty tired to begin with (I'd donated blood that evening; and besides, my bedtime is normally 10 a.m. to compensate for the 6 a.m. I have to get up at for the commute into the city each day), so these moments seemed to just make me more tired. At about the 45-minute mark, however, he lost the accompaniment and did about five songs in a row—several of which I actually recognized—and the audience really started digging on it. But then the accompanier came back and we finished up with more stalling and hesitating.

I'd had no idea coming into this concert that Mark was so into the guitar aspect of his music. One song he played the opening, er, bar? riff?, about 10 times before he started singing, and in another song he jammed for a long time after he stopped singing. That was either the last song before the encore of the one before that, and I think that was the moment that stood out the most for me afterward. Mark, focussed on that guitar, playing a lovely, simple set of strings and holding the attention of 250 people while the bartenders cashed out and the club upstairs blared out its dance music. It was really a lovely moment, and well worth the late night, and the hour and a half of stumbling, to get to it.

Of course, it didn't help my mood much the next day that when I got home at 1:30, I had to read 30 pages of Sarah Dunant's The Birth of Venus. What a great book.