REVIEW: City And Colour And A Concert Etiquette Lesson (House of Blues 12/5)

Concerts shouldn’t have to be lessons in how to be a decent human being. Sometimes, online they are.

About 40 minutes into City and Colour’s set on Saturday night at the House of Blues, nurse things very nearly descended into chaos. When most crowd-performer relations go sour, sales it starts with a drink (or four). (Did someone say whiskey sours?)

Someone threw a drink up onto stage, singer Dallas Green pointed it out. And after a brief moment, another drink was hurled a few feet from Green’s head.

The crowd was more than willing to out the bro who tossed his drink, and get him tossed from the building. Green was more than willing to let the dude have it: “I’ll give you your money back, too. You can have a free t-shirt on your way out, too, you fucking idiot.”

A brief aside: House of Blues’ drinks are not cheap. They’re small cups, and maybe not the strongest drinks — but throwing an $8 beverage anywhere except back (as in, into your own damn mouth) is insane! Don’t do that. It’s like renting an apartment in Boston, you might as well light your hard-earned money on fire.

Anyway, the dude got ejected, and Green offered the main advice concert-goers should take with them and really internalize before they get drunk and get ejected.

“Nobody in here is better or more important than anyone else,” Green said. “That’s including me, including anybody here [on the stage].”

I swear we’re getting to the music in a few paragraphs, but one more note on the crowd. This was a surprisingly drunken crowd — I observed quite a few instances of fans doubled over near the walls by the bar. The show had a 10 p.m. curfew, for crying out loud! And it wasn’t until later, when Green asked why there were so many hooligans in the streets of Boston dressed up as Santa Claus, that I realized the demographics of this show might line up with an event that had wrapped up earlier in the day. Note to touring bands: maybe avoid playing a major city when SantaCon is happening. (Maybe the city of Boston should just ban SantaCon in general, too.)

Now, the music. City and Colour, touring in support of fifth studio album, If I Should Go Before You, seems to have achieved a full evolution. The new album is a far cry from the singer-songwriter folk project Green started years ago.

“Woman,” the show opener, is a nine-minute operatic rock anthem that builds and builds. It upends previous expectations, more so than on other records from the band. The rest of the album — and thus, the rest of the show — never quite reached that kind of grandiosity. New songs “Wasted Love” and “Mizzy C” are both barnburners in their own right.

It benefits from the band having spent so much time on the road together, it seems. This band is very, very strong — with guitar work from Dante Schwebel and bass from the Dead Weather’s Jack Lawrence. Schwebel’s solos on “Grand Optimist” and “Sleeping Sickness” were particularly impressive bits.

Green and company played a very — methodically, even — balanced setlist of around five songs per album. It’s a difficult feat as a band rotates in new material, and it sacrifices some of the freshest songs (new album cuts “Runaway” and “Map of the World” were missed). However, there’s reason to play to every person in the crowd including those who aren’t familiar with the new material — and this album cycle is very young.

Green encored with three solo songs, including “Northern Wind,” a lovely ballad. The band returned to close out with “Hope for Now.” It was a blistering finale to an out of sorts evening.

Bahamas opened for City and Colour, and brought almost-normal, almost-ethereal folk to the stage. Indeed, Bahamas is a contradiction, the songs seem to meander, while its intent is lurking just beneath the surface. “Waves,” off 2014’s Bahamas is Afie, is a fine example of this phenomenon.

It feels like almost a crime that Bahamas has made so few stops in the Boston area of late. Saturday night’s show, plus a show at Great Scott a year ago have been the only two stops in as many years. Let’s hope it won’t be too long before the band headlines a date here soon.

See City and Colour’s tour dates here. See Bahamas tour dates here.

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