Okay--the Battle of the Bands finale happened last night at Your Father's Moustache. Just to get the suspense out of the way right now, the winning band was Mike Trask and Mudhill. They were really good, the lead singer had a vibe that sort of reminded me of Buck 65, although I have no idea why, and they came onstage drinking out of antifreeze jugs and then reminded us not to let our pets drink antifreeze. Jeff is convinced they won "because they had a moral!"

No, seriously, very good band, and luckily this week the sound was somewhat better so you could actually sort of tell what everyone was supposed to sound like.

We got tied up at dinner so we arrived late and missed the first two songs by Ryan Mcgrath and the woodenhouse, which was disappointing but they have a lot of shows listed on their MySpace so I'm not too crushed--we'll meet again. Dirty Poets' lead singer was apparently once in a metal band a couple of the people with us used to go see a lot, and you know, I can imagine that guy busting out the Cookie Monster death metal voice. Dirty Poets is heavy and features a viola player (I am told it was a viola and not a large violin) and by the end of their set we decided their genre was sort of gypsy metal. Stray Satellite was also good, featured a guitar player we decided looked like Russell Crowe in his much younger, non-cell-phone-throwing days. And last time I didn't really take to The Sorrys because they suffered a LOT in the sound mix and seemed uncomfortable, but then due to the wonders of the Internet I've actually been in contact with their lead singer, who seems like a cool guy, and that made me want to like them and I'm only saying this because last night I actually really did, you could hear them a lot better and their second and fourth songs especially came over really well. The whole gang I was with noticed a sort of British thing going on, possibly because of the shout-sing thing the lead singer does (it's a style, I'm not complaining) and they seemed to be having fun.

And this computer is about to shut down (public library) so I'll just add that Gloryhound sounded good, played "See You Round," "Free Of You," "Long Arm" (good idea, I thought, having two good singers) and "Far Behind" which is Jeff's favourite of theirs. You could hear everyone and they represented themselves very well.

More another time!