The Tragically Hip aren't big on splashy entrances.

For the first of two Saddledome concerts last night before a capacity crowd of 11,000, the five Kingston lads just sauntered onstage with absolutely no fanfare. Aside from long-haired guitarist Bobby Baker, they didn't even look like rock stars. Junior high school teachers, maybe. Or mailmen. Or Zamboni drivers. Yet, in the words of an old Boomtown Rats song, watch out for the normal people.

What ensued, after all, was an edgy, thrilling rock show with just a touch of madness (thanks to the Hip's unhinged frontman Gord Downie).

They started the show with the sprightly new song Something On, before seguing into the watery and atmospheric Fully Completely and Grace Too.

Listening to the fluid bass runs and textured guitars, you're struck by how much the Hip have improved as musicians since early Calgary gigs at the now-defunct Westward Club and the Silver Dollar Showroom, when they were merely a promising riff-reliant rock band.

Their sonic palette has expanded greatly since then; almost as importantly, they've become masters of tension and release.

Take last night's version of Gift Shop, for example (in which Downie inserted some lyrics from the Rolling Stones' Beast of Burden.) The intro was quiet and deceptively serene, but you could just sense the pressure building until Baker and Paul Langlois' guitars exploded into a breathtaking climax. The trick was also used to great effect on Nautical Disaster.

Of course, the Hip also sunk their teeth with rabid, animalistic fury into a Hip oldie, Blow at High Dough, which turned the audience into a buzzing, throbbing mass.

The excitement in the 'Dome was palpable and contagious.

My nerve-endings were tingling, my adrenalin was pumping, my limbs were twitching involuntarily.

"This is called The Millennium Took My Baby Away -- a blues number," Downie said before the band launched into Ahead By A Century. It's one of the Hip's prettiest songs, yet, like many of the performances during the evening, the song kept building momentum until it took the turns at dizzying speed and threatened to jump the rails.

In great Hip tradition, Downie plucked a band from Canadian indie-rock obscurity and installed them on the big stage as an opening act. Unfortunately, the vast majority of Hip fans arrived during the set of By Divine Right, a Toronto quartet whose music sparkled and sliced like a shard of glass.

There's a little bit of The Pixies and The Breeders in the way their pop hooks and the sweet, girlish vocal harmonies peeked above the jagged guitar riffs and chugging, syncopated drumming.

It was terribly infectious stuff, and when the guitars swirled dreamily into the psychedelic ether, or belched out big bursts of noise or grinded up against the rhythm section, By Divine Right's music transformed from something instantly likable into something formidable.

There are still tickets available for tonight's show.

I suggest you don't miss it.