Avril Lavigne (concert review)

Concert review from The Movie Snob

Avril Lavigne. Okay, safe to say that this was not my idea. A friend of mine dragged me to this little musical event, although I will say that I did not protest too much since she paid. Anyhoo, I am not exactly an Avril fan--pretty much the only song of hers I would say I'm very familiar with is the one about "Why'd'ya hafta go and make things so complicated?" But I was game to hear what the younger crowd is listening to these days. First, the opening act was a band called "Boys Like Girls." Judging from the number of "Boys Like Girls" t-shirts that I saw being worn, this band has at least a decent following here in the Dallas area. But I thought they were terrible. Just very loud noise, and unnecessarily vulgar. Fortunately I brought cotton balls to stuff in my ears, or I would have gone half deaf and had a terrible headache to boot.

Avril's set was much more pleasant, although still loud enough to justify cotton balls. I was expecting her to be much more punk, but as a friend of mine at work remarked, she's leather and cotton candy, not real punk. She wore tons of dark and glittery eye makeup, and I guess her clothes were sort of punk, but she was so friendly and smiley the whole time that there really was no punk effect. Also, I was very distracted by her striking resemblance to my cousin Anita (minus the ridiculous eye makeup, and her nose is bigger than Anita's). I sort of recognized probably four of her first five songs, which was nice, but even the songs I didn't know were decent. And to make the evening even better, my friend didn't care to stick around for the encore, so we didn't have to sit in traffic forever to get out. That's what I call rock and roll!