Like every good Canadian band I go see, Pam turned me on to Nova Scotians Wintersleep earlier this year with their 2007 album Welcome to the Night Sky; y’all know me and you know that every attempt I every make to describe a band descends into incomprehensible comparisons to trees, but if somebody, in a polite Canadian fashion, put a gun to my head and asked me to describe Wintersleep, I’d tell you what I told the Cowboy in an email this morning: they’re somewhere between melodic indie rock and drone-y post-rock, huge songs with lyrical and melodic hooks that disintegrate into noise and enormous vistas and then resolve themselves back into the snap and sharp of their choruses. They were so loud, and so huge, that I thought they were going to blow the windows of Kings right out onto the street.

I stood in front by myself and cried during “Weighty Ghost”, which is maybe one of those rare perfect songs out there, and the rest of their set resonated in that spot under my chest the same way. Wintersleep was noisy and captivating and compelling; Pam, of all people, knows exactly what music to give me to push my boundaries, and they were one of those bands. An absolutely phenomenal show.