Heating up a cold Ottawa night with City and Colour and Nathaniel Rateliff

According to his between-song chatter, Dallas Green (aka City and Colour) has trouble convincing American bands that it’s worth the border hassles to play in Canada. But after the warm welcome Canada has given his month-long, cross-country tour with Nathaniel Rateliff and the Nightsweats, I imagine that at least that one American band will be happy to return. 

The relatively early start time for Ruby Waters’ opening set meant that a significant percentage of the eventual audience missed the chance to hear her dense and confessional lyrics or her locked-in band. Hopefully they’ll look her up on Bandcamp and find out what they missed.

 

By the time Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats crashed into their opening number, “Suffer Me”, the Canadian Tire Centre had filled up. The large crowd was immediately drawn in, clapping and singing along even without an invitation from the stage and then clapping and singing twice as loudly when the invitations came. 

The Night Sweats are a large band. In addition to the usual lineup of guitar, bass, drums, keys, the band includes a horn section that brings a little extra swing to the southern-accented mix of rock, folk, soul, funk and gospel. The dynamic arrangements put the whole band to good use, and kept energy levels high, even for the rare slower songs like “And It’s Still Alright”. At the end of the set, “SOB” and “Love Don’t” brought much of the crowd to their feet. 

The inevitable long break between sets at shows like this often cools down a warmed up audience, but for this show, that probably eased the transition between the uptempo and interactive Rateliff and the more emotionally intense but less electrically charged headline set from City and Colour. Each song drew some excited whoops of recognition and a big cheer at the end. The silences in between felt respectful, even reverent, giving Green space to sing the hell out of each of the deeply personal songs. 

He isn’t much for banter between songs, but the funniest moment of night came when Green dedicated a song to those who had been with him from the beginning, back when he was playing at Mavericks in the Byward Market instead of the Canadian Tire Centre in Kanata. When that got a rousing cheer from half the audience, he reminded them that about 10 people came to those shows so most of them must be liars.

The house lights cracked on for a split second at precisely 10:30, causing many of the people around me to worry that they weren’t going to hear some of their favourite songs. Whatever the source of that lighting miscue, it did nothing to end the night early. 

A four song encore brought out many of those missing favourites. Green returned to the stage alone to sing “Northern Wind”. He added one guitarist for “Comin’ Home” and then the full band returned for “Lover Come Back”. The mighty noise that finished that song had everyone fretting again that maybe that would be it, but finally the band delivered “Sleeping Sickness”. 

Only then did the house lights come up for real and send everyone back out into the cold. 

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