Ottawa, ONT - Congress Centre
July 22, 1997



Offspring Show Delivers

"Hey, we've got a real rock 'n' roll show going on here," Offspring's singer Dexter Holland announced as he surveyed the snarl of 1,300 moshing fans last night at the Congress Centre.

That's the Gilded Palace Of Sin to all you Marilyn Manson detractors.

Well, what did Dex expect? Despite the California-based band's indie-punk credentials, the show they put on last night and the music on their current album, Ixnay On The Hombre, is as accessible and brash as anything currently riding the charts.

The songs are built around the choppy guitar work of Holland and hulking co-axeman Noodles and tireless drumming of Ron Welty, and the presentation was superbly supported by a brilliant lightshow, which used disorienting strobes and dramatic backlighting to enhance the songs' chant-along choruses.

I Choose and All I Want were highlights from the new material, but the response to Come Out And Play was all out of proportion with the rest of the show.

An unlikely mix of overdrive riffing, chiming snake-charmer guitars and a frog-throated, Trashmen-style chorus hook ("You gotta keep 'em separated!"), it's a mini-masterpiece. As fine as the rest of The Offspring's show was, everything else they tried huddled in that one song's shadow.

Montreal's Doughboys have kept such a low profile in recent months, I half expected their faces to pop up on missing person ads on milk cartons. So it came as sweet relief to see the group still able to muster their incendiary brand of metallic pop during a sharp opening set.

Guitarist John Kastner and bassist Peter Arsenault can still lock into harmony with laser precision while surging through turbo-charged anthems like Shine -- still one of the highlights of the recent history of Can-rock.

Ottawa's Punchbuggy long ago perfected the art of the bullet-fast pop song. With a new guitarist and keyboardist, the group has now reinvented its sound and the results are startling and very promising. The record they're about to record should be a world-beater.

THE OFFSPRING, DOUGHBOYS AND PUNCHBUGGY

Sun Rating: 3.5 (OUT OF 5)

By Paul Cantin, from Ottawa Sun

Read another review of this concert from Ottawa Citizen