Seeing Canadian rockers Helix, Nov. 27 was a little anti-climactic after seeing Ken Hamm set the fretboard on fire.
I arrived midway through their set at Average Joes where they were playing a couple songs from their new CD (which I didn’t immediately recognize) for a quiescent crowd. But they soon hit their stride with a lot of rock anthems like “Here Comes The Night featuring several harmonized guitar solos from Brett Doerner and Kaleb Duck. Throughout the set, vocalist Brian Vollmer showed he still has an impressively piercing voice.
Vollmer took time to thank Lethbridge Herald arts reporter Al Beeber, before launching into a diatribe against record companies and modern rock radio.
“They don’t play new music from bands like us and Loverboy. Screw them, we’ve got the support of the fans,” Vollmer told the cheering audience who were slowly warming up to the band’s big hits.
They played a new song about playing clubs called [Make Em] Sweat,” and had the crowd sweating and dancing up a storm by that point.
He said they released their first album “Breaking Loose” in 1977 independently and got Doerner to sing “Billy Oxygen.”
They also played “You’re a Woman Now,” which gave them their first big hit in Texas and lead to their first tour of that state.
He introduced “Gimmie Gimmie Good Loving,” by saying it appears on their unplugged CD, but first appears on “Walking The Razor’s Edge.”
“People think that album title is about doing blow. Well we never did that. We were typical Canadian hosers, we were drinkers and smokers,” he said.
They played songs from all eras of their career including the hits, older songs like “Heavy Metal Cowboys and “Running Wild In the 21st Century.”
The whole band got their chance to shine with a drum solo, a bass solo and a harmonized, classically inspired harmonized guitar solo, which Vollmer triggered by shouting “Gentlemen start your engines.”
Of course they returned to play their big hit “Rock You,” which had the crowd shouting along.
They were called back for an encore of their song “Dream On.”
