Imaad Wasif opened. Big fat rock guitar sound. "These are songs of love. These are songs of longing. These are songs of the universe."  Imaad sporting white pants, white shirt, long hair.  Singing about the rapture. Seems like an intense dude. Here's a pic of him from his MySpace page:

Then The Dodos. More emoting. No bassist but two percussionists.  Acoustic guitar. Lots of major pentatonic songs and tonic/subdominant changes with syncopated percussion, sort of high school marching band-like meets the Kodo drummers. At some point, someone from audience yells "Take off your shirt!"

The New Pornographers then marched on stage, all nine of them.  That band name always been slightly disturbing -- afraid to type it into a search engine. The name transgresses while the band stays so clean.  Check out this great piece in Magnet Magazine where the journalist going to Canada to interview them gets stopped by Canadian customers because of his notebook with "new porno" written and has his laptop searched (in which his porno collection is found) and then confiscated. Too funny.

Neko Case got to belt out a few but mostly was as back-up harmonies with a tamborine.  Interesting to see her in that role now that she's so huge.  Got serious pipes that's for sure.  Songs with Neko on lead were choice.  Audience seemed to react as such. More Neko! And Kathryn Calder tore it up with harmonies.  This band puts down some serious power pop. Ended with "Bleeding Heart Show" -- drummer getting his fill of fills on the final anthemic refrains.

Didn't get any pics from last night shows, but here's some exclusive pics Adam Forslund took of them at Sasquatch earlier this year as the sun set:

photo by Adam Forslund

photo by Adam Forslund

photo by Adam Forslund