I went to the Destroyer/Frog Eyes concert on Friday at WISE Hall, just off Commercial Drive. I hadn't seen a show there before so I didn't know what to expect. I found a parking spot easily on the street just around the corner and it wasn't till I got to the front I realized why. Bikes, everywhere. All the cool kids had rode their bikes to the show. And not like cool bikes, like the rusted leisure bikes of the Netherlands.

Inside was full of mostly dirty indie kids with hair that needs shampooing and asian indie kids with painfully coordinated outfits. This is what I get for liking beard rock.

I was alone, since most everyone else I know who has listened to Destroyer thinks he sounds like a vampire. I wasn't drinking cause I drove, so I got bored quite quickly. I put on my headphones and listened to my ipod Shuffle. Take that indie kids, I out-assholed you all!

Local band Book of Lists were first and they were pretty good for an opening band. Good music, ok vocals. The howling beast that is Carey Mercer and his band Frog Eyes came up second. If you haven't heard Frog Eyes, you'd probably hate it, unless you like stuff like The Books and Animal Collective. Carey was wearing a long beltless naval trenchcoat. Combined with the beard, he reminded me of Chris Farley's "fat guy in a little coat" bit from Tommyboy.

I've only heard the previous album, The Golden River, which is hit and miss for me. I'm assuming he was playing songs from mostly the new album so I didn't recognize any. The first song was pretty good, but the rest were hard to listen to. I'm all for howling vocals, after all I am a Mike Patton fan, but I couldn't get into this. I think Carey's vocals sound great as background vocals for the Destroyer songs, but I can only listen to a full song worth of his howling for 20 mins or so.

Dan Bejar played guitar for a few of the Frog Eyes songs with his back to the audience, and then left. He must have gone to the Miles Davis school of Performance instead of the Armand Assante School of Smoldering Intensity.

After a break, they all returned for the Destroyer set. If you were disappointed by the recent Notorious Lightning and Other Works EP, I highly recommend the CBC Radio Session they did. Whereas the tracks on the EP are a bit more subdued, the tracks on that CBC Session are faster and much more immediate. The show was a combination of the two, some slower and quiet tracks ("Don't Become the Thing You Hated"), and some loud and urgent tracks ("An Actor's Revenge"). They only sang one older track, and almost everything off of Your Blues except for "It's Gonna Take an Airplane" and "What Road", which are coincidentally, my favourite tracks from that album. But it was fun hearing the full band versions of all the other songs, especially a non-interludish version of Fox and the Hound and Carey's vocals at the end of Notorious Lightning. Great show, and the sound at WISE Hall was surprisingly good.

Also:
The Ratio is currently running an All Destroyer Special Issue.