Clean It Up

Friday night, I was down at The Dakota Tavern for an early show. Richard Laviolette was the opener. Armed with a guitar and a collection of Country Americana, he serenaded us about black birds and spring. It was a nice set at the beginning but as the bar volume grew, you could barely hear him. As an aside, despite its reputation as a great musical venue, both its tiny size and reputation as a "friends hang-out" place makes The Dakota one of the worse spot in the city for loud chatter. Any solo artists or purveyors of soft, emotional music should set their sight elsewhere.

Blimp Rock, the "corporate band" whose aim is to raise money to have a music festival in a blimp, has amazingly gone from a 1-album to a 3-album "joke". So tonight, we were here to celebrate the release of Soap Opera. There's plenty of inside jokes and lead singer Peter Demakos also made an amiable emcee leading us through the many lows (not too many highs) of the band's history including a legal fight with the Blue Jays and a tiny blimp bird-house venture. He also read the numerous hate comments online about the band because of their great trolling (in the old-school internet sense) techniques.

The songs also had plenty of inside-baseball and fan-service winks. Sometimes literally, as per the new song Oh, Basketball which is a callback to their baseball ode from the first album. But despite the drollness, the tunes off Soap Opera including Wet Hot Canadian Summer, Duet with the Devil, and Raccoon Nation 2 were rocking and Ode to Faults, sung a capella and joined in by the crowd, was even touching. Fans of the band was able to get their hands on their new album, which came as a downloadable card embedded inside a bar of soap. Why? First, Blimp Rock is always trying new merchandising idea and second, it's their response to "fast music" (Spotify and other streaming services) by offering "slow music" (it'll take a few baths before you'll get that card).