KULAS TORONTO REVERB CLUB 23.8.02

Setlist: She's All the Rage, Anyone Else, Pavement, Glasgow Rain, Burning Down Hollywood, Shine, Starland, Beautiful Day, Lust For Love, Beginning of the End.  encore: Hallelujah

review by BRD

Summer vacation’s over: new look (new haircut, new glasses, new tie), new bandmates (new bassist, new drummer, keyboardist missing due to an acting gig), a new live sound (no backing vocals, no keyboards) & maybe a new recording contract.  Kulas returned to Toronto after a two month absence over the summer, playing a harder edged show in west Queen Street’s Reverb Club.

This evening's Kulas setlist didn’t introduce any new songs.  Instead we got a reworking of the arrangements of a number of great tunes that Toronto audiences have heard from Kulas since his return to the city in January, such as Anyone Else and Beautiful Day from the now out of print second Kulas cd Another Small Machine (ASM).  And unreleased songs such as Pavement and Glasgow Rain – now crowd favourites greeted with cheers as their opening chords crash through – continue to tease Kulas concert goers with the yet to be answered question “what will this sound like on cd”?  Rumour has it that we’ll get the answers early in the new year when Kulas’ third cd is to be released. 

Tonight acoustic guitars continued to be the bane of Kulas’ musical existence.  The band decamped mid-set after thrashing through Burning Down Hollywood, from Kulas’ first cd Mosquito, leaving Michael to do a mini solo acoustic set.  Unfortunately Kulas’ acoustic refused to co-operate resulting in ASM’s Shine being done on the electric guitar and then promptly followed by the full band’s unscheduled return to the stage to run through the great Spiders from Mars-ish Starland.   All was not lost however, as Kulas closed the night doing his solo version of Hallelujah on a heavily reverbed electric guitar – I find that the electric provides a far better contrast to the impassioned vocals of this great show closer.