Live Concert Review-Enter The Haggis, Rising Regina-Club Cafe-1.20.10

By Kevin Meehan
Published: January 24, 2010
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If you ask me, sitting down at concerts is for old people. Sometimes you do get tired of standing and feel like taking a seat for a spell, which is perfectly understandable. On the other hand, what isn’t perfectly understandable is eating a whole meal while sitting and watching a concert. I suppose that a place called Club Café lends itself to that sort of behavior though (notice how it has both the word club, used here as the dancing and/or music type, and café in its name) maybe it shouldn’t seem so odd. Pair that with a band called Enter The Haggis and the whole picture starts to look a little more normal. At least until the show’s beginning nears and you, the table-sitting-probably-old-person, are surrounded by all the folks who didn’t arrive in time for the early bird, seat-taking special. Dinner theater this is not. But I digress, there’s an actual concert to talk about here. And once you adjusted to the different atmosphere chances are you found the show quite enjoyable.The opening act was a local band known collectively as Rising Regina. The five-piece band used an interesting array of instruments from the standard acoustic guitar to the more rare stand-up bass and even a mandolin on a few songs. Using these instruments and playing songs with names like “Whisky”, it’s no surprise that they came across sounding country. This might be insulting to the band and off-putting to potential fans but I can assure you any country sound they have is of the traditional variety not that nauseating Toby Keith kind with all the songs about trucks and being more American than everyone because you wrote a song about war or soldiers. I guess what I’m getting at is that Rising Regina was a good lead-in to the main event.

Enter The Haggis, or ETH if you’re into the whole brevity thing, is a band that’s hard to categorize. They have a country/folk vibe of their own on some songs – especially "The Ghosts of Calico," a jam band sound on others and by most descriptions they are a Celtic rock band from Canada. Hearing that one might be turned off because the first thing they think of is that Dropkick Murphy’s band that everyone pretends to like around St. Patrick’s Day. The key difference between the two is that ETH is not quite as hard, stupid or overrated. In fact, it can be said that they are very much underrated, although based on the vehement support of their diehard fans that might be hard to quantify. These fans were whooping and clapping (politely so from the table-sitters) at the conclusion of each song, most notably “The Death of Johnny Mooring” from their 2009 album 'Gutter Anthems' on which many fans could be seen singing along. It was, however, the songs without words (which by definition I suppose are not technically “songs”) such as “Twirling Towards Freedom” that stole the show. The aforementioned song in particular featured much of the musical styles mentioned earlier all in one. There were Celtic-sounding scales played on the keyboard, a fiddle and some distorted guitar soloing all backed by a pounding drum line. The part of all this, though, was band member Craig Downie who at times was playing bagpipes (known to be one of the more challenging instruments to play), a flute-type thing of some sort and a harmonica. The range he showed was a microcosm for the talents of the band as a whole.

They were certainly not lacking in any respect, the only problem was probably that their sound was too big. Actually the same could be said for either band. With all these not-normally-seen instruments like bagpipes, mandolins, etc. and the wide range of styles used by both Enter The Haggis and Rising Regina such as rock, country, folk and jam a larger venue would have been more suitable. Club Café does have it’s charm, though, thanks to the at times overwhelming intimacy. Surely this fact, like the music, did not go unappreciated by the fans. Even those pesky table-sitters.