CANCER BATS with DANCE LAURY DANCE at Lee’s Palace, Friday, October 18. Rating: NNNN
A Cancer Bats show is a lot like a Justin Bieber show. They both feature a schwag-wearing crowd rapturously echoing every utterance from the good-ol’ Ontario boy behind the mic. Headbanging and throwing up devil horns are a common occurrence. (I think. I’ve never been to a Bieber show.) A significant difference, however, is that Bieber will never enjoy a homecoming as intimate and enthusiastic as the one CB put on Friday at Lee’s Palace.
Leading off were Dance Laury Dance, who despite looking cramped onstage, hit the slowly growing crowd with 45 minutes of fine Quebecois hard rock. Unfortunately, the mix tended to distort or drown out a good amount of the Danzig-esque vocals. Or maybe not unfortunately – judging by lead singer Max Lemire’s gestures, most of those lyrics were about his dick. The crowd seemed reticent to give back the energy they were getting: The pit was completely empty for the first half-hour, like a wedding dance floor before everyone gets liquored.
Cancer Bats had no such problems with crowd love. The audience piled in and was white-hot in their response to lead singer Liam Cormier’s dramatics. Shark-like, he was incapable of standing still he cavorted incessantly around the stage while the rest of the band marched in lockstep through riff after riff. When, halfway through their hour-long show, they stopped to mention that this was the first show they’d played at Lee’s Palace in eight years and played the relatively slow Raised Right, it was a break for both both the band and fans.
(The show was also a lesson in how NOT to stage dive: One mis-timed leap straight to the floor drew an extended look of concern from the band and an audible “ooh” from the crowd.)
After an hour of originals, they returned as Bat Sabbath, tribute-band extraordinaire (why not Black Sab-Bat? Too subtle?) and pumped out another hour of their take on the legendary band, blazing through the hits (Paranoid, Iron Man) and finishing with a rousing singalong version of the campfire classic War Pigs. The crowd left exhausted and deliriously happy, and I’m pretty sure the band felt the exact same way.
