Matthew Good made a long awaited return to Lethbridge, Nov. 19 to play a close to sold out show at Average Joes.
Opening act the Gentleman Husbands couldn’t make it due to the highway being closed. So Good observed “We’re not going anywhere because the highway is closed.”
He opened with Arrows of Desire, the title track of his brand new CD. Unlike the last show a couple years ago, which had people crammed in
to the room uncomfortably close together, which must have contributed to the problems, there were no show stopping loogans at this one, though one was taken out by security near the end of the show.
Good noted that he ‘couldn’t see shit’ without his glasses and may not have noticed them this time as last time he stopped his show to curse at the group of people fighting. Instead, as he promised in his interview with me last week, he provided a ‘communal experience’ for the good sized and seemingly good natured crowd, who were receptive to his set which mostly consisted of tracks from his new CD ‘Arrows of Desire.’
His set included some classics and lots of his more rocking material including my favourite ‘Everything is Automatic,’ his first hit from back in 1997. He did notice the technical difficulties at the beginning of the show and good naturedly cursed out his sound man about getting his monitors working properly, before wishing him a happy birthday.
While they were waiting for that, they played a few bars of ‘Walk Hard’, the theme from the movie ‘Walk Hard; The Dewey Cox Story, which pokes fun at all the things that can go wrong in the life and career of a touring musician.
He went back to the set list after that by playing crowd pleasing hit ‘Load Me Up’ and got crowd singing most of it, as he observed he couldn’t hear anything going on without the monitors, though they still sounded pretty tight.
‘Born Losers’ from Hospital Music was early in the set as was a 2004 hit ‘Alert Status Red.’
Highlights from new the CD included punk tinged crowd favourite ‘Had it Coming,’ ‘So Close,’ ‘Long Gone,’ and ‘Hey Hell Heaven,’ which segued into ‘Everything is Automatic.’
He switched between several guitars including a blonde Gibson 335, a Telecaster, a Stratocaster and a Gibson SG for ‘Hey Hell Heaven’ and ‘Everything is Automatic.’
He ended his show with several of his more mellow, ambient songs including a new one ‘Letters in Wartime’ from the new Cd. Good and the band began the encore with ‘Gardens of Desire’ from the new Cd, then played a few more before calling it a night with ‘Giant.’
While he played a lot of hits, he didn’t play a lot of others including ‘Hello Time Bomb ’ but included ‘Apparition,’ which was the second encore song.
