Passion, sweat and grit at the Warehouse
The Toronto Star
By Ben Rayner
Review
POP MUSIC CRITIC
There's a couple of ways to look at this week's sold-out, two-night
stand at The Warehouse by The Watchmen and Big Wreck.
One: Wow, what a thrill it is to see a pair of hard-working, honest- to-goodness,no-frills rock bands - both unruffled by the shifting winds of fashion - kickin' it live to an appreciative throng of 3, 600 (split over Wednesday and Thursday).
This sorta-CanCon double bill (The Watchmen hail from Winnipeg, while Boston-based Big Wreck's frontman, Ian Thornley, was born and raised here in Toronto) is the most successful Canadian tour of the fall. Proof positive, one might assume, that ironic pop-culture scavenging and dweeby techno are simply no match for raw passion, sweat and grit.
Two: These are two of the most thudding, unimaginative jock-rock bands on the circuit.
There's nothing grossly offensive, at least, about The Watchmen - fine, road-tested musicians who've built an audience the old-fashioned way, working their way up from grotty clubs to mid-sized venues over a decade.
That said, though, Wednesday night's draggy set seemed more like an exercise in unwarranted self-indulgence than a hard-hitting display of bar-band bluster. For a group that commands such a rabid following, The Watchmen's music is astonishingly pedestrian, and certainly not deserving of the lengthy, going-nowhere-fast interludes they kept dropping into their songs.
Competent, economical, if rather one-note, rockers like ``Lusitania' ' or the decently bristling openers ``Stereo'' and ``Run And Hide' ' at least held your attention. But even the die-hards in the crowd seemed distracted whenever a slow number veered off into pointless ``jam'' territory while Daniel Greaves conducted his vocal exercises on top. And what's with the endless a capella version of ``Eleanor Rigby''?
At least Journey - I mean, Big Wreck - was amusing.
This quartet does have a knack for tossing the odd memorable hook into its faceless, stadium-wannabe bombast. But even the guilty pleasures of that Cure riff from ``That Song'' or the big, chiming U2 finish to ``Blown Wide Open'' evaporate after a few overwrought minutes of Big Wreck in the flesh.
With nary a nod to subtlety or dynamics, Bono-worshipping, Jesus Christ- posing Thornley and his merry men stomped through every plodding monster- of-rock epic, including a pointless encore mangling of Led Zep's ``Immigrant Song,'' as high melodrama.
Without, unfortunately, even the winking self-awareness of Melrose Place.