Picnics! Everybody loves a picnic. Birthday parties, too, and guitars. And many people enjoy wine! Ergo, what better way to celebrate Rebecca's birthday than to bring wine, sammiches, and guitars to High Park and have a picnic? That definitely made for an awesome weekend. High Park is a pretty magical place; it's right in the middle of the city, but it's so lush and quiet that you could altogether forget where you were as long as you don't look south and see the Lakeshore condos peeking over the trees. Also, Toronto seems to have the most docile geese ever; some stupid kid was chasing a dozen of them yesterday, and they actually ran away. If he tried that trick in Waterloo, he'd be lucky to walk away with his eyesight and all of his fingers.
Not too much else is going on. I've been to a few too many goodbye parties for departing coworkers, and I'm fighting a losing battle with my reading list (I just got transferred back upstairs to fiction, and there is so much I want to read. The fiction staff are a terrible influence), but life is still mostly just the steady cycle of work, sleep, visiting friends, and relaxing at the apartment. Not especially blogworthy, but pleasant.
My summer of concert awesomeness just got a little bit less awesome. Inside Out reneged on their tour budget, and it doesn't look like Pain of Salvation or Beardfish will be joining Dream Theater in Toronto this summer. That's two times missing out on seeing PoS in concert now. Bah humbug.
Speaking of Dream Theater, I got their new album, and it's...well, exhausting is the first thing that comes to mind. I still lovelovelove their 1990s/early 2000s material, but my joke about their becoming the Harlem Globetrotters of Metal is becoming sadly true. They've never been a band you listen to for the lyrics, but (with the possible exception of "The Shattered Fortress"; it's hard to fault a guy for finding refuge from alcoholism in writing music) one gets the impression that they've truly stopped giving a shit about the vocal side of their music and are just using it as filler between the mind-bending solos. This, of course, means that the breezy ballads in the middle are ear-bleedingly pedestrian, and the gigantic epic that closes the album also sounds phoned-in. I don't know if the clumsy lunge toward melody is a sign of an aging band that can no longer sustain the polyrhythms and shredding of their glory days, or bullying from their new label, or just an ill-considered change in direction, but it's really not working. There's playing on that album that is up there with their best, but it feels like I bought a wilted salad for the croutons. Time to take some advice from the man whose son they'll be touring with this summer: shut up and play yer guitar.
