Three hours, lots of packing, a little missed homework. These are sacrifices to be made in the name of concert-going.

Bands don’t really come to my city properly. They either play no-minors shows here to drunk bozos, or—these latter folk are the smart ones, mind—they eschew my town in favour of a larger one, which is a) three hours away, and b) still as full of drunk bozos, except now they’re mixed with screaming teenage girls too.

So usually, I don’t even bother with the road trip. I only go on special occasions, and this past weekend, with Metric on Friday and the Taste of Chaos tour on Saturday, I felt it necessary to maybe do a little traveling. A group of us went up and, frankly, had a blast. Metric’s show was compelling, energetic and closed with “Love Is A Place,” therefore officially making me ready for death. Taste of Chaos, well, Thrice and Thursday were there. That has to count for something, right?

But on both of those nights, there were a couple of bands who really could have made the weekend something else, something transcendent. And of course, neither showed up. There were reasons I wanted them there for. There were songs I wanted them there for.

Isn’t that the way it goes?

Islands - Where There’s A Will, There’s A Whalebone

Boy, was this a kick in the pants. I commented to a friend during one of the set breaks that, although the music was great, everything else about the show was pissing me off immensely. Strike one: Metric’s merch was either terribly expensive or just ugly as sin. Strike two: (Drunken bozos + screaming girls) = Mosh Pit. Yeah, I don’t get it either. And of course, strike three: Former Unicorns members Islands apparently dropped out of the tour in Vancouver. This, of course, was news to me and my “crew.” Openers Panurge and The Elected tried their best, but the former suffered from a dorky name and the latter suffered from a Rilo Kiley member sporting a terrible moustache.

This was my chance to buy the Islands album before really anyone I know would have the opportunity to even touch it. This was my chance to see one of the last big sparks out of the ever-less-hyped Montreal scene. And of course, this was my big chance to catch “Where There’s A Will…” live, in all its synth-coated, spaghetti-western-guitar’d, incredibly-rapped glory. Even though I love Metric, this felt like a twenty-five dollar kick in the teeth.

Pelican - Aurora Borealis

Now, I knew Pelican wasn’t going to show up. This didn’t make it any less disappointing, though, when I left feeling like about two and a half bands were worth the ticket price. Pre-hyped act Street Drum Corps came across as a bunch of mohawked Blue Man Group rejects, and a band I’d heard about on the Intern Net, Dredg, wound up being rude to the crew members and pretentiously long. Pelican I’d felt like I would be able to count on, and when I discovered they wouldn’t be there I felt sudden, ominous notions that the night would be irredeemably filled with terrible emo. Those notions were not far off the mark.

And, although I like Thrice and Thursday, they’re just not as musically interesting as Pelican. Pelican, who aren’t afraid to properly use a major key, who use acoustic guitar interludes—real interludes, not just reinterpretations of the main line of a given song—to great effect, who don’t sing and it really isn’t that big a deal, who are surprisingly sedate at times and at other times punishingly loud.

Instead, I got Atreyu. Ouch.

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