KULAS : TORONTO ELMOCOMBO CLUB 23.8.03

Setlist: Anyone Else, Star Land, Instamatic Camera, Glasgow Rain, Having and Losing It All (solo acoustic), Beautiful Day, Pavement, All The Rage, Beginning of the End, Encore: Hallelujah (solo acoustic)

review by BRD

After disappearing from the Toronto music scene for a couple of months, tonight was an all Kulas night.  Mike bookended his own full band set with appearances first supporting Katie Griffin with lead guitar & backing vocals for 45 minutes, then closing the night backing Robbie Roth for 35 minutes in the classic power trio format The Sensitives playing bass and contributing more vocals.  The Katie Griffin set was comprised of essentially all of her new Kulas produced cd "Kiss Me Chaos", and featured the Kulas penned "Anyone Out There" and came to a rocking close with the Kulas co-written "Size It Up".   The too short set backing Robbie Roth was a fun high energy mixture of Roth's Ray Davies & Joe Jackson influenced song writing (heavy on the clever lyrics) and the sound of the Ramones - certainly cleaned out the eardrums!

Kulas feature set was pretty well a song for song repeat of his last electric appearance at the Rivoli in May, just substituting his emotional solo acoustic cover of "Hallelujah" in place of a full band take of James' "Sit Down" for an encore. Stand outs included the yet to be released "Star Land" and "Pavement" as well as the near reggae touched "Beautiful Day".   In place of any new songs in the set, Kulas played around with some of the vocals tonight, for instance during the also unreleased "Glasgow Rain" and in particular a new middle part in his solo acoustic delivery of "Having and Losing It All".

The night was not without its challenges for the performers and the audience.  Last Thursday's historic North American east coast electricity blackout (impacting 50 million people) delivered a double whammy: due to the ongoing shortage of available electricity generation, Toronto was still in a state of emergency which required the Elmocombo's air conditioning system to be shut off despite the hot humid weather; and keyboardist/backing singer Olivia Pallenstein was stranded in Vancouver and MIA due to the inadvertent two day shutdown of Air Canada which resulted from the blackout. As a result, on occasion tonight we were joined by the spirit of Olivia in the form of backing tapes and programming. To top it all off, the dancehall above the Elmocombo was rented out tonight for a loud party, which resulted in music bleeding into the club, which was particularily noticeable during the handful of acoustic songs performed tonight.

Despite all that, the performers soldiered on and delivered reasonably tight sets. To top it all off, Kulas took time during his set to say thanks to everyone "for coming out and supporting the music". The pleasure was all ours.