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News read by Cassandra Keating and produced by Erica Fisher.

Stories written by Dominique Daoust, Aisha Samu, Celia Ste. Croix, Joel Balsam and Sofia Gay.

Alright, so like most people I first got a taste of Finger Eleven in the mid 90s.  I heard "Above" off of Tip and I was sold, and after The Greyest of Blue Skies came out I really started to follow them heavily.  I managed to catch them for a whopping one dollar and five cents at a show in my home town that was put on by a local radio station.  The show was fantastic, and after that I even made a trek three hours away to catch them in Pittsburgh.
 
Those days seem like a million years ago as they've released one great album since then (Finger Eleven), and two mediocre at best travesties (Them vs. You vs. Me and Life Turns Electric).  Maybe they're not awful, but they are boring…so very boring.  I guess they're stuck on releasing a version of "Paralyzer" over and over again amongst a bunch of crudely written tripe in an attempt to sell albums without much work.
 
My last bastion of hope for them was that at the very least I could see them live and they might remember what it is to write music that people can actually listen to and enjoy.  This theory half let me down when I saw them after their 2007 release, where they played a good amount of stuff off the new album and a whole bunch of things off previous, better works.  This time there are two albums of boredom to pull from, so what would they do this time?
 
Before I got to see how the band would fare, I had to sit through two openers.  One was named Elias and the other was called The Envy.  I got in probably about ten minutes into Elias' set.  It was pretty generic, radio-friendly light rock –kind of like The Fray.  All in all, it was inoffensive, but not life changing in any meaningful way.  I didn't hate it... I didn't love it.  It just sat in the middle.
 
Then came The Envy.  Now, I'm not really sure what kind of goal this band is trying to achieve, but I'm pretty sure they missed it.  If they were trying to be revolutionary, they decidedly were not.  In fact, they were as revolutionary as Elias, being that their music styles were so damn similar.  If they were trying to be some generic band that can make a career with boring music, they should look into…well... being less douchey.  The truth is that when they started, I was ready to be underwhelmed, and in that regard they didn't disappoint.  The problem is that they put up such bland, inoffensive music that they circled back around and became unbearable –unbearably boring, unbearably inoffensive.  I mean, come on, a guitarist that has his shirt unbuttoned the whole way so his bare chest is on display for me, and a singer that’s wearing a shirt that's half a t-shirt and half a wife beater (don't ask me), what the fuck is that? 
 
To top it all off, about half way through the set the lead singer announces that their EP... their five song EP, took them 5 years to put out.  5 years?!  What? Could you not scrounge up the money from performing to get into the studio more than once a year to record one of your boring masterworks?  I can maybe see two years.  You get into the studio after writing a bunch of songs and scrounging up the money to record and something happens and you have to postpone recording until you get some more money…fine.  Two years tops for an EP.  But 5 years?!  Did your music put you to sleep when you started playing it, so your studio time was spent napping?
 
So anyway, while this was going on I took some time to look around the room and I noticed something weird.  I thought about all the times I had seen Finger Eleven before, and I looked and noticed that I was one of the older people in the room. The first time I saw them, however, I was one of the youngest people in the room by far.  It's as if Finger Eleven's fan base has been getting younger as the band gets older.  Perhaps this is because (at least with their last two albums) they've done their best to alienate all their old fans who wanted to hear darker, heavier tracks in lieu of putting out bland, adult contemporary things.  I don't know, but enough postulation.
 
So, after that prolonged yawn-fest, Finger Eleven went on stage and proceeded to play a last-two-new-albums-heavy set.  They played nineteen songs in total, seven of which were off of their first three albums.  Of course I liked all the old songs they played, and strangely the highlight was when I heard the first riff from "Sad Exchange," which they didn't even put on an album. I got all excited, but they didn't play it... which made me sad. I did at least get to hear "Above," and "Drag You Down," and a bunch of other stuff that I liked. 
 
All in all, I'm not really sure if I liked it.  I guess it was good, but ultimately it was like seeing someone who you used to really like, but now after not seeing them for years they've become kind of uninteresting. And though they reminisce with you about old times and you like that part, you don't really care to hear about the intricacies of their new desk job and how cool it is having a Blackberry with them all the time.
 
If this particular show is coming near you, skip out on the first two bands, and then go catch up with your friend Finger Eleven.  Sure, they won't be the same person you remember, but neither are you. I guess even though we all get more boring as time goes on, as long as we can still recapture the little parts about us that made people interested in us in the past, and allowed us to connect to them in some meaningful way, we'll never really become too boring or outdated after all. 
 
The Envy though... fuck those guys... for real.  Fuck 'em.

- Catch Andrew WIXQ hosting Grade A Explosives every Thursday from 3-5pm.

News read by Jason Rouah and produced by Erica Bridgeman.

Stories written by Erica Fisher and Jackie di Bartolomeo

Read by A.J. Cordeiro 

Produced by Melissa Mulligan

Stories by A.J. Cordeiro, Jessica MacDonald, Alina Gotcherian