MEDIA

MEDIA

By the holy hand of Vishnu, I hope Greg Keelor gets this thing out of his system.

After giving himself a rather nasty crack on the head last year, the Blue Rodeo singer hurled himself into Hinduism and then wrote an entire album about it, bearing the fitting title of Gone.

Call it Warner Canada's gift for 12 years of faithful album sales - if he wasn't a founder of one of Canada's most popular bands, the album might never have happened, much less last night's torpid concert at the Myer Horowitz Theatre.

In front of less than 300 curious Blue Rodeo fans (more than what turned up for Bob Wiseman's last gig, mind you), Keelor's show made Leonard Cohen look like Colin James. If he was any more laid back, he would've fainted into his guitar.

After a country-flavoured opening set from Keelor's bassist Johnny Borra - ladies and gentlemen: the future Bob Snider - Keelor plunked himself into a chair, the incense wafting and candles standing by, and warned the crowd: "You don't know what you're in for at all."

Uh, oh ... This patient crowd surely didn't expect a Blue Rodeo concert, but I'm sure it didn't bargain for the new age, atmospheric exercise in self-indulgence that followed. Keelor and his band opened with a minimalist dirge called I See You, after which Keelor joked, "As you can tell, this is not going to be a dance party. So if you feel like a snooze, we'll still be here when you get back."

He may have been touched by the hand of Ganesh, the four-armed, elephant-headed Indian deity (which is credited on the album as "concept by Ganesh"), but he hasn't lost his sense of humour - just about the only thing that saved the night from complete dullsville.

The next dirge on the list, Redemption, was even slower, though it contained one of those brilliant bits of vocal harmony that occasionally crops up in Blue Rodeo's work. Keelor's raspy vocals blended nicely with those of Anne Bourne, who also played piano and cello.

Keelor didn't say, "well, we're going to bring it down now," but, incredibly, the title track, for which he dispensed with the bassist and drummer, was even more laconic. Exploring themes of death and alien worlds with minimalist noodling, it sometimes seemed that the song might just dissolve into complete nothingness. It earned only hesitant applause, with many in the crowd probably thinking "is it over?"

Oh, no, we still haven't got to the poetry. After a brisk little strum - singing something along the lines of "in the graveyard of my heart" - Keelor treated us to some free verse: "So ... what difference does it make, really? You say you're part of the game now, but what difference does it make? ... it doesn't make any difference," and so on.

After last night, even Blue Rodeo at its most mellow is going to seem like a "dance party."