Hot Hot Heat

Okay, as a first posting on Life on the C-bus, I should do something of great significance. Something that I can only hope will change the direction of the world or at least my community. Something that will make people rethink their lives. Something that will inevitably alter the course of the future.

Nah.

Instead, I'm going to talk about the Hot Hot Heat show last night at The Basement.

I got to see them in the CD101 Big Room earlier in the day. The band has done the Big Room before, so they knew the drill and got set up pretty quickly. They were really nice (not just friendly, but genuinely nice). They did a good set of three songs with Columbus radio icon Andyman doing the between-songs interviewing. The band signed some stuff for fans and then were off to continue to recover from the night before where they reportedly drank Snow Patrol under the table.

Okay, first off, I'm not a crazy-huge fan of this band. They're great and I like a lot of their stuff, but I wouldn't be able to sing a single song of theirs all they way through without doing a rendition of Wayne and Garth's Adams Family theme somewhere within the first verse. With that disclaimer, it was a really good show. This was their last stop before heading back to Vancouver, so maybe that made them in a good mood or maybe they're just this good all the time. The sound was great, the energy was amazing and they won a mediocre fan over to being a mediocre fan that will probably go over to iTunes, listen to a bunch of 30-second clips of their songs, and decide that I ought to download some of their stuff someday.

The Basement is a tiny little venue. You have two halves -- the front half where the stage is, and the back half where the bar is. If you're in the back half, you can't see a damn thing, but at least you can drown your sorrows in a few beers at the bar. If you're in the front half, you can see great, but your damned to hours of beveragelessness unless you're willing to lose your spot. We were fortunate to grab a couple drinks and find a miraculously unoccupied area on the side of the stage to the right. Well, okay it was a bit more complicated than that, but I've gone on long enough.

And lead singer Steve Bays has a lizard tongue. Seriously. Stuff of comic book villians.