The Beautiful Were Never Meant to Suffer
Or, Oh Great, Another Cryptic Title Stolen From Song Lyrics
Or, General Unclassifiable
So last night I went out with Carly and her boyfriend to see Clem Snide play at the Horseshoe. Has anyone else here ever heard of Clem Snide?
I have trouble describing the music I enjoy. People ask me what I like to listen to and I reply, "I, um ... well, I, um ..." (With such clever utterances, I should clearly be a writer.) It's not that I don't know, it's just that I sort of pick and choose from all over. Yes, I like some rather mainstream/unsurprising things. But even then, they're sort of an odd collection: REM, and Alanis, and Counting Crows and Paul Simon. And then there are the groups that don't even fit into one category on their own.
Take right now. As I type, I'm listening to my favourite Miranda Sex Garden song, "Gush Forth My Tears." Miranda Sex Garden has been classified as rock, pop, gothic, classical, folk, new age, dream, miscellaneous and "general unclassifiable." Lovely. Very easy to sum up. But how else do you describe a group that sings unaccompanied madrigals and loud, electric guitar types of songs?
Clem Snide is another of those groups that doesn't fit nicely into one category. They're rock, folk, country, blues and "general unclassifiable." Fantastic lyrics, and the lead singer has such a lovely-distinctive voice. One of the guys plays a banjo with his hands, a violin bow, some sort of laser-type devise and his teeth. It's just astounding. And even more so when you're watching it live.
If you haven't heard Clem Snide, you should. Just try. My favourite song of theirs is actually a short, quick one (that they played as one of their encore songs--woohoo!) called "Ice Cube." Hard to download, though. But I guarantee you that there are a great many copies of "Moment in the Sun" floating around there on the internet, as it was the theme song to Ed during season 2. (Ah, a show that squandered all its potential goodness, that's what Ed is. Even the cute Canadian "if I wanted water" guy couldn't save it, I'm afraid.)
It was a fun evening. The marriage proposal during the show was a bit surprising, and I'm pretty sure that we could have convinced them to do a second encore but everyone else in the crowd apparently decided that as it was 1:15 AM it was high time to go home and just turned around and left. Sniff. They were probably right though, because as it is I only got about 4 hours of sleep. Which would explain why this sounds the way it does.
