I could go on and on about how much I loved the Wye Oak/Neko Case/The National show last night at the ACC. How I'm consisently amazed at how such a rich, expansive sound can come out of such a tiny framed Neko. How the National's live performance exceeded anything I've enjoyed on record. How it was almost guilding the lily to have a second opening act in the form of Wye Oak, a band whose latest album is hitting the very top of some year end Best Of lists.

But you knew I'd gush about these anyway. More interesting was how each act handled the venue itself which, to be honest, almost put me off going in the first place. I hadn't attended a stadium/arena concert since the 1990s (U2, The Tragically Hip) and wasn't all that keen on on watching stick figures battle with an acoustically hostile environment for three plus hours.

Credit to the ACC, which seems to have figured out how to make the space sound-friendly, halving the available seating and creating a semi-circle of seating around one of the goal ends.

Wye Oak, whom we'd all seen last year at the Horseshoe, actually benefited from the larger space, where the band's frequent, sudden quiet-loud-distortion transitions can ripple out like a wave into the bigger space. The only drawback was that, taking the stage around 7:00pm (or just before then, we arrived around 10 minutes past), they played to only a few hundred people at best.

Of the three, Neko was the most uneasy in the space. She made several jokes about being in a hockey arena that came across as slightly nervous or maybe resigned to the absurdity of being there. When she lamented that the sad ballad she was about to launch seemed ill suited to a place that's usually filled with joy and celebration, the ensuing audience laughter was likely less an agreement with her assessment but a collective howl at the absurdity of the notion that a space whose tenants include the Leafs and Raptors could be incongruous with lamentation. Still, the strength of her vocals and set carried her through her approximately 1.5 hour set.

Even The National initially seemed to have trouble connecting with the audience, at least for the first third of the show. Their performances were great--polished but with a more dynamic urgency than one might expect from the often laidback vocal delivery one hears on the album--and the audience seemed appreciative, but there was an almost unspoken tension or distance between the performers and audience. As if sensing this, though, the lead singer completely took the entire dynamic into his hands, or rather, to his feet, by venturing into the aisles and inviting the audience down to the area in front of the stage. He'd return later during the encore to walk through half the lower seating area, while handlers scrambled to keep track of a microphone wire, its sheer length almost impossibly long or perhaps designed specifically for the occasion. From that point on, the whole mood of the place transformed from reserved appreciation to full on, rousing glee. It was amazing to witness.

Needless to say, no such reservations about future shows, especially if they feature this type of line up. Oh, and I liked it.