The Scope

Hello Wonderful Scope People!

Welcome to “Throwing Stones at You” a new part of The Scope website. A place where I, your host, will astound you with my shakey amateur videos of locals bands, long-winded show reviews, occasional bits of news I find interesting and ill-conceived angry rants for when I need attention.

This blog is new to The Scope but has been running pretty regularly over at this place for the last 7 months or so. As a word of warning, during desperate times when I’m strapped for content I might go back into the archives and bring out videos for a “best of the old blog” segment, but I figured I would start things off here in my new home with some fresh videos I took this weekend while I was at the reportedly last show for local face-painted masters of horrorbilly punk rock The Satans.

Things were loud, sweaty and sticky that night. I was looking forward to what I heard was a new air-conditioning system for The Levee, but the near-capacity crowd of writhing hooligans proved to be too big a challenge for this new a/c system. Many of them were in face-painted skulls and leather gear, which I can only imagine was super comfortable.

The Satans were in fine form, even though the packed bill didn’t have them getting on the stage until sometime after 2am and didn’t finish until 3:30 it was one of the more energetic performances I’ve seen them do. But I guess the late nights don’t affect them that much, being zombies and all.

Audience participation was everywhere, I particularly love the swarm of delinquents attacking the microphone during the chorus of “Arterial Spray”.

In this video they have the lead singer of opening act La Malediction (whose set I missed unfortunately) joining in guest vocals for a verse in this short number.

The Satans are on prolonged hiatus for a couple of years as lead singer Chapel Ruin takes off out of province. It’s a shame, since I’ve always been a big fan of his voice. He can growl and wail with tremendous force but also croon very sweetly with the same effectiveness.

Here he is singing the only ballad of the evening, “Date with The Dead” the theme song of the new black comedy zombie short of the same name.

That Saturday night I also took a couple of videos of some of the other bands playing in the building. Upstairs at Distortion I was curious to hear what the new drum and bass rock duo The Last of the Creamed Eels were all about.

I was pleasantly surprised at the weird and hypnotic grooves Steve Ailward and Paul Tucker churned out with some decent oppressive chunk. I didn’t really find them that interesting to look at, so I gussied up the video with needless visual effects.

With song titles like “Anne Murray is not my Jesus” you can’t go too wrong.

Also it was my good friend and drummer Devon Milley’s birthday. His band Kill Popoff played just before The Satans at the Levee and even though I covered them on the old blog not too long ago and even though this video didn’t turn out that great — the sound is crap and why is Devon the only one in the band without a spotlight? — I figured I’d put the video up anyway to document the occasion.

They played a very violent set. The by’s came close to doing some expensive damage with their thrashing about and I’m still kicking myself for putting the camera away just before Andrew Waterman ended up punching his guitar repeatedly while it lay on the ground. It was all good though.

Anyway, I’m super excited to be a part of The Scope site now. The Scope team are working hard to give you readers out there the best arts and entertainment magazine in the province, and I’m just glad to be a small part of it.

I love to hear feedback, so if you lovely people have any suggestions for the blog feel free to leave a comment or two.