Trans Am
with Adult and Magas
Friday June 14th, 2002 @ The Horseshoe, Toronto

It was another hot, sweaty, jam packed show in Toronto, lending proof to our good friend Chian’s suggestion that virtually every concert in “the big smoke” sells out. Was I surprised that this many people were out to see a Trans Am show? Yes, but then again, it was a Friday night, and it also seemed that a lot of people were there to see the opening bands too.

Speaking of opening bands, the first opener wasn’t a band at all. It was a single man, who goes by the name of Magas. He came up on stage with long wispy hair, wearing a denim jacket and Mark Mothersbaugh-style glasses, pressed a button on his sequencer and began to lurch around the stage in strange, erratic movements. His music consisted of a lot of loud electronic beats and beeps and as he jumped around he would occasionally step up to the mic to scream something. Whether these were random exclamations or actual parts of the songs, I couldn’t be sure. Despite his off-rhythm dancing, Magas did manage to get the people pumped up. Unfortunately he kind of overstayed his welcome too. He kept saying “Wanna hear one more song? We’ve got time for one more, right?” to which a few people in the crowd would respond enthusiastically, encouraging him to launch into another song.

The second band of the night was a two piece outfit from Detroit who are apparently making waves over in the European scene. Adult brought their infectious synth-pop to the stage and for the most part, delivered an enjoyable set. They opened with “Contagious”, which incidentally is probably the most contagious song off their LP, Resuscitation (which many people appeared to be well acquainted with). They had the crowd eating out of their hand, despite the fact that they weren’t all that exciting to watch in a live environment. I guess that is a problem inherent to electronic bands of this nature… the music is cool, but it gets a little boring when they just hit a few buttons on their laptop and sing. The male member of the band did occasionally play some live bass guitar, but he didn’t move around very much. It also didn’t help that they had some technical difficulties early on with their vocoder. As with Magas, their set was a little longer than it should have been and by the end their performance was getting monotonous, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between songs. Personally, I was just getting anxious to see Trans Am play.

When Trans Am finally plugged in, it was worth the wait. The numerical progression in band members was thrown out of wack when Trans Am took the stage with an unexpected 4th member who started out by adding extra percussion to their opening song (a vaguely familiar rendition of a song off The Surveillance?) but later added some extra synth in some other songs as well.

They were wearing cheesy 80’s outfits similar to the ones in the photos from their new album TA. It’s always nice to see a band that doesn’t take themselves too seriously. Of course, that doesn’t make their new album any easier to swallow. For someone who was seeing Trans Am for the first time, I kind of wish they hadn’t been touring for this new album, because they played a lot of new material and it wasn’t anywhere near as interesting as the songs from their previous records. I think the rest of the crowd had a similar sentiment, as they were quite excited to hear older songs like “Television Eyes” from the Futureworld album.

Trans Am also played a bunch of great songs off their last album, Red Line, such as “I Want It All”. The band members alternated back and forth between dual synthesizers and a guitar/bass combo, managing a well-balanced mixture of instrumentals and songs with vocals. A definite highlight of the night was their performance of the song “Slow Response” from the Who Do We Think You Are EP, which features a dual bass guitar attack.

Their performance was accentuated by a projection screen in the background, on which they had various 3-d graphics and abstract images being shown. The set ended with the drum kit being lit on fire — a classic rock n roll stunt that never gets old. It was obvious that Trans Am had a lot of fun playing, and I think that even an audience member who had never heard a single Trans Am song before would have enjoyed themselves on this night as well. Their playing was tight, precise and impressive, and the swapping of instruments and along with the extra visuals held everyone’s attention until the very end.

One other thing about this show… it was extremely loud. For once, I actually remembered to wear earplugs, and I was thankful. Others were not so fortunate. So if you have the opportunity to see Trans Am live, don’t miss out… but if you value your eardrums, wear protection! Remember: no glove, no love. — Sean