Good delivers the goods
Old is new again, from vinyl records to cassettes to the oldstyle rock performed by Canadian rock icon Matthew Good at Kelowna Community Theatre on Sunday night.
Good switched from acoustic to electric guitars but the sound was all driving rock from his opener, Giant, to his final piece, Weapon. The focus, though, was on his new EP titled I Miss New Wave: Beautiful Midnight Revisited. Every ticket purchased for his sold-out cross-Canada tour will be accompanied by a digital copy.
The inside joke, of course, is that New Wave music is a musical genre of pop/rock created in the late 1970s to mid-1980s with ties to 1970s punk rock. To confuse things even more, Good’s early musical career involved a variety of folk demos and a stint as the lead singer of a folk band, the Rochester Kings, in the early 1990s.
His original Beautiful Music album in 1999 became hugely successful, thanks to the singles, Hello Time Bomb, Load Me Up and Strange Days, all of those leading off Kelowna’s two-hour concert. They were accompanied by less-known I Miss New Wave, Suburbia, Let’s Get It On, Jenni’s Song, The Future Is X-Rated and Born To Kill from that album.
For his four-song encore, however, he went back to 2007 with Single Explosion and Born Losers (first single from Hospital Music), Apparitions (from Underdogs in 1997) and Weapon (from Avalanche in 2003). The video for the latter from his solo album debut was nominated for a Juno Award for Best Video of the Year.
Unlike some of last summer’s concerts where he didn’t say much, the 45-year-old joked with the 800-plus at the Kelowna theatre about Donald Trump, his first taste of tequila in Mexico and the history of Kentucky bourbon. But his bandmates were never introduced.
However, the crowd jumped to its feet immediately, began unison clapping and sang along to favourite choruses like “apparition, apparition.”
There were also stranger moments like Good grabbing a microphone attached to a 30-metre cord and singing while walking out into the theatre lobby.
“You couldn’t see me; just know it was cool,” he said on his return to the stage A 150-metre cord could mean he could visit a local coffee shop, he joked.
Like the Sam Roberts Band concert at the same venue on Feb. 5, almost all of the lighting — glaring white spots, strobes and assorted coloured lamps — were behind the band, so members were often only silhouettes.
And before Good came on, a fan asked technicians at the rear if they could clean up the sound after he had a lousy auditory experience in the front rows during the Roberts’ concert. Good’s voice was clear during his monologues but at times, his lyrics were muddy and only recognizable by his most ardent fans.
The warm-up act was solo guitarist/vocalist Craig Stickland who was making his first appearance in Kelowna. His haunting vocals — much cleaner than Good’s — received a rousing welcome with unison clapping on his second number and sustained applause at the end. A one-man band, thanks to looped sound technology, Sticklan admitted it was “surreal” to open for Good after listening to his songs on the radio while growing up.