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EDMONTON - The Barenaked Ladies brought a "feels like folk fest" vibe to Rexall Place last night.
Heck knows we needed a dose of those sunny Gallagher Park vibes in the dead of winter that's about to get even colder through the coming weekend.
The Ladies, the Naked ones, mightn't have historically been pegged as a folk act, but the band had all the socially conscious and eco-friendly informative swag positioned as prominently as their BNL T-shirts at the merch booth.
All around the Rexall concourse were kiosks for Nature Conservancy Canada, World Vision and, drop your knickers, Barenaked Planet.
Before the concert even began, the big screens on either side of the stage put up ecological factoids that seemed like missing slides from Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth PowerPoint presentation.
Barenaked Ladies lead singer Steven Page and the rest of the band even showed up in town in their environmentally friendly bio-diesel tour bus.
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The rest of us were struck with guilt, left to drive home in our damnable cars. Maybe humanity hasn't much time left. The Ladies gave us One Week - their opening track.
Let's not get too heavy, however. This is still one of Canada's biggest, if not the biggest, bands that's all about letting the good times roll. The fratty lads were certainly in a playful mood last night.
Page and co-lead Ed Robertson on guitar didn't take long to begin their Abbott and Costello-like banter on stage, keeping the crowd entertained with a freestyle rap about things like performing in the home of the Oilers to incontinence - well, the way the team's been playing lately ...
"Something's just occurred to me," said Robertson. "We started this tour in Victoria and it's been a fight to get people to stand up. But you come to Alberta and people are ready to party."
And if the crowd loved that, then ...
"We had a day off today," continued Robertson. "A day off in Edmonton! So we rented an ice rink and played hockey. And tonight, I wanted to have a typical Edmonton evening ... so I stayed in the hotel and watched four episodes of Battlestar Galactica on my laptop." It is that cold - what else are you going to do?
You could say the boys were "on" last night.
Page has one of the most distinctive voices in all of pop. He killed it on the go-go groove of Box Set, backing up Robertson on Who Needs Sleep, complete with air guitar flute, and, for that added dose of Canadiana, the Ladies' star-making cover of Bruce Cockburn's Lovers in a Dangerous Time.
The rest of the band (Jim Creeggan on upright bass; Tyler Stewart on drums; and Kevin Hearns on grand piano and accordion), through acoustic numbers like For You and old favourites like Old Apartment, benefited from sound so unusually crystal clear at Rexall that you could actually understand ever lyric. It proved that going home deaf does not necessarily a good concert make.
Also reaping the rewards of the often unsung sound tech's solid work was Tomi Swick. And there may be more rewards in store for one of Hamilton's favourite sons and his band.
Swick is up for two Junos on April 1: new artist of the year and pop album of the year for his debut, Stalled Out In The Doorway. This year's Juno nominees were just announced a couple days ago and Swick couldn't help but share the good news.
"It's one of the proudest moments of my life," he beamed.
The nominations aren't unfounded - Swick is the goods and his jangly, upbeat sound is well suited as a Barenaked opener. He's got a vocal inflection not unlike Radiohead's Thom Yorke, working through numbers like Wait Till Morning, a crowd-pleasing cover of Paul Simon's Graceland and a convincing rendition of the Beatles' Don't Let Me Down.
Nobody left Rexall disappointed last night.