Metal Gods

I'm back in Vancouver now, playing lots of Oblivion and slowly shuffling items around my apartment in a poor semblance of packing. I don't actually leave Canadia for a full month, but there really is quite a bit to do, and days tend to evaporate far too quickly when good times are being had. Speaking of good times, I had an excellent twelve days in Salt Lake City with the soon-to-be-married Cam and Clair. Even though snowboarding wasn't on the menu, I managed to cram a ridiculous amount of stuff into my time there. I took over 500 photos with my swanky new Canon SD600, and I'll be piping them up to my Flickr stream in sets when I'm not distracted by sleep, rugby or computer games. To whit, here's Metal Gods.

Metal Gods hit the stage every Thursday at Liquid Joes in SLC. Essentially they're an 80s metal / rock cover band, but since they're actually pretty good, it's tons of fun. They go the whole nine yards with their outfits as well, sporting massive fake wigs, chaps, shoulder pads and sweatbands, and leap around the stage like, well, 80s glam / hair / power rockers. When they're not blasting Def Leppard, Van Halen, AC/DC, Bon Jovi and all the rest, they're thrusting their pelvises and telling the girls in the front row to get their tops off.

The whole group I was with were on the VIP list, so we didn't have to queue outside at all, which was just as well as Clair's hot pink Pat Benatar outfit would probably have drawn Mormon missionaries from miles around. The music was great, the crowd was jumping, but the one downside of the evening was the cigarette smoke. Since Canada banned smoking in clubs and pubs years ago, I'd completely forgotten how nasty the stuff was. My eyes burned, my throat grated and my clothes started to smell like smoke and ass. We did have a great time though, with my neck sore and fingers stuck in the devil horns position for days afterwards.