Difficult Music

I went to Roadbed's album release gig at the Railway on Friday. Roger Dean Young and Tin Cup opened up with their laid-back deep woods music and In 3's played last, with a guest violinist and a set of mostly improvised tunes, punctuated with quotes from Radiohead, U2, and a whole Roadbed song.

I marked the Roadbed exam. Super gave me instructions to select the most unique scores for consideration. Well, there was only one perfect score (6/6) and one person who got zero (that would be Shockk), and a huge pile of fives and threes. A couple people had doodled all over their exams, so I decided it should be an art contest instead of a Roadbed trivia quiz, and submitted those to Super when it was time to pick a winner.

What I love about Roadbed is that they play a lot of unrecorded material, and one of the new songs inevitably becomes a new favourite. In the early days it was "Scarb Jacket," (which ended up on Knockout Hits) and lately it's been "King's Quest" (which I only got to hear a couple times live before it showed up on Last Dance @ the Shockcenter). Now my favourite Roadbed song is the one with this crazy Iron Maiden triplet part that comes out of nowhere. No idea what it's called. They played it about three songs in on Friday night.

All in all, a good ploy to keep me coming back for more.