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TORONTO - Last year, Good Charlotte headlined Edgefest at the Molson Amphitheatre, but were peppered onstage with plastic bottles after being upstaged by Billy Talent and Alexisonfire.
This time around, the Maryland band, on a Canadian leg of its Noise To The World tour, played the same venue to diehard fans. And after the 90-minute, no encore show, two words sprang to mind: Cute and harmless.
Cute in how mothers brought their young sons and daughters with them, jumping in unison to songs like Girls And Boys. Cute in how the new Good Charlotte tour T-shirts being worn by these same sons and daughters drooped down to their knees or beyond.
Good Charlotte has polished a rather ordinary, radio-friendly punk style over the course of three albums, including last year's The Chronicles Of Life And Death, and are harmless.
The band, whose stage set-up consisted of two gargoyles, a tombstone and a cast iron fence with an arch that read NEVERMORE, has taken this formula to the bank. Bassist Paul Thomas drove the point home briefly before the horrid I Just Wanna Live by playing the bass line from Pink Floyd's Money.
Led by the brothers Joel and Benji Madden, the band opened with The Anthem from 2002's Young And The Hopeless. Joel Madden, in black and wearing a sleeveless Misfits T-shirt, spent a lot of the time between songs professing his love for Toronto. The compliment seemed a bit stale by the 20th time it was stated, though.
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The crowd, predominantly teenage girls filling roughly half to two-thirds of the seated area, shrieked and shrilled throughout, when not waving their hands or singing along to the slow-starting, keyboard-tinged S.O.S. and the power punk feel of Predictable, which sounded, er, predictable.
After The Young And The Hopeless, during which Joel Madden gave a middle-finger salute, the group missed the mark with The World Is Black, leaving most lukewarm to it. Then the group left Benji Madden to perform two acoustic numbers, Wounded and Emotionless, resulting in a huge campfire sing-along.
The second half of the show had its moments, especially during the tempo-changing Hold On and its suicide prevention message. Here the group seemed to gel behind walls of guitar. A highlight was watching new drummer Dean Butterworth pound the skins. Butterworth, who performed earlier in Toronto this year with Morrissey, was spot on from beginning to end.
Other highlights were Mountain, as Joel Madden waded briefly into the front of the crowd, his guitar hovering over the audience's outstretched hands, and, of course, the closing Lifestyles Of The Rich And Famous.