ALBERT HAMMOND JR. + The Dead Trees @ La Tulipe

By Katie Seline - Wrong Side of the Bed - 06/12/2007

Somewhere between the beginning of my love for non-pop music and my discovery of such wonders as the drum machine, synthesizer, ridiculously loud guitars, overly fast kicking of bass drums and screaming, intense vocals (not the emo or screamo kind but the kind that tells me that a singer is really, intensely passionate about what he is singing), I seem to have lost my love for basic rock ‘n roll.

I had known something was up a while ago when I was constantly flipping through my computer play list that was set to shuffle. It was only at the Albert Hammond Jr. show at La Tulipe on June 12th; however, that I really understood what was going on.

To be fair, I was fresh off of an incredibly intense weekend of fabulous music at Toronto’s NXNE music festival which ended the day before the show. Maybe I was tired, maybe I was biased, but something about Hammond’s show just didn’t do it for me.

The whole evening was quite odd as I arrived at La Tulipe, on of my favorite venues, right around 8:30 pm thinking I’d still be able to catch some of the opening band. Of course, I was wrong, because for some reason someone decided it was a good idea to start a 2 band line up show right at eight o’clock. With that said, The Dead Trees already had their stuff cleaned up off the stage and Albert Hammond Jr. was ready to go at 8:45. Who headlines a show and starts that early?

Hammond started off his set quite well and I was happy to see three guitar players and one bass player. His lead guitar player was incredible and when they all played in tandem the sound was amazing! However this novelty got old quite fast when only one or two guitar players would play while the other moved on to light keyboard or just vocals. Maybe the stuff is just a bit too poppy for me, but I’m assuming not since I did really enjoy the album, Yours to Keep.

Being the former guitar player (sometimes lead guitar player) for The Strokes, Hammond’s set really felt like a lighter, watered down version of one that would be performed by The Strokes. I guess if that was the case, I just really felt like the set needed to be louder and that there needed to be more edge, more raspy vocals familiar to Julian Casablancas’. Don’t get me wrong, the set was solid and musically and technically perfect but, simply put, it bored me. Having only one album, they whipped through all the songs in under an hour, and then when asked back for an encore, announced that they had already played all of the stuff that they had. Hammond decided to play a song that he had just written acoustically, which was good, and you could tell that once the rest of the guitar and drum parts were written, that it would be a great song.

The show was over by 10 pm, which in all honesty, suited me just fine.

- Catch Wrong Side Of Te Bed every Wednesday from 5 to 7 pm ET only on CJLO!