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Music

Billy Talent Played In a Hotel Ballroom and Sounded Pretty Good

The teenager inside of us was ready to be disappointed, but it turned out that the band had aged surprisingly well.

All photos courtesy of author

Back in 2003 when I was just a young whipper-snapper filled with acne and wet dreams, Billy Talent had just come out with their debut self-titled album. It was impossible to ignore, a pop-punk offering with teeth that gnashed at listeners as much as often as it smiled. Billy Talent’s first big hit “Try Honesty” was all over Canadian radio and television, boosting the Mississauga band’s profile to an almost Avril Lavigne-level status. So when I heard that Billy Talent would be playing a concert in Toronto for CMW, the teenage me became understandably excited.

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The venue that Billy Talent chose to play in for their big show was not a stadium, or even a grungy club, but a hotel. Specifically, the Sheraton Centre Toronto Hotel’s Grand Ballroom in downtown Toronto. It's a massive 20,000 square foot room that, according to the Sheraton website will, “impress even the most refined delegates.” Not exactly the best place for Billy Talent, as there’s something innately wrong with crowd surfing over carpeted floors.

But despite the bourgeoisie setting, Billy Talent still managed to rock the Grand Ballroom in a way that left an impression on everyone within the 20,000 square foot space. I'm not smart enough to know if it was the sound guy, or the band—or both—but it all sounded perfect. The guys in Billy Talent seem like they haven't aged in a decade, and the guitarist has somehow managed to maintain the same haircut the entire time. They’re still full of energy, and are just as excited to play the old hits as they are to play the new stuff, which is the sort of excitement that infectiously spread throughout the crowd.

The band blazed through most of their heaviest and fastest songs coming out of the gate. At one point, I worried that the show was going to peter out from lack of energy, but the band kept plowing along. They slowed it down at times with songs like, “Rusted From the Rain,” but those slower jams never felt out of place, just like a journey into a deeper part of their catalogue that tied their sound together.

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Any little hiccups were breezed over with genuinely entertaining stage banter. A broken string let the singer, Benjamin Kowalewicz, opine about how awful the Toronto Maple Leafs are, and how rad the bassist's mom is. Only two weeks ago she had a liver transplant, and was in the audience. “How fucking punk rock is that!?” he asked the crowd.

After the little fixes here and there, it was business as usual. After liking Billy Talent for as long as I have, I was afraid that seeing them now would make me feel like they were trying to hold on to something they lost a decade ago, like Blink-182 or Green Day. But Billy Talent's music turned out to have a maturity and timelessness to it that I didn’t expect, and would probably still not know had I not seen them prove me wrong in the flesh.

Though there was no encore (despite heavy chanting from the audience), the band talked a lot about their upcoming new album while they were on stage. Although they never played any songs from this soon-to-be-released project, the fact that Billy Talent is finally working on something new will be a good chance for more people to see that the band hasn’t lost their spark. Maybe next time they perform a concert in Toronto we’ll get to hear something new. And hopefully it won’t be on a carpet floor.

Erik Mclaren is a writer living in Ontario - @Erik01