Welcome to the next step
Billy Talent wows 11,000 in its first headlining gig at MTS Centre
Mike Warkentin

“One album, two years, four singles and two awards shows — when are you guys going to record a follow-up?”

That was the gist of what local music maven and Lawsuit guitarist Shaky smugly asked the boys in Billy Talent backstage at the Juno Awards in 2005.

Well, it took screamer Ben Kowalewicz, bassist Jon Gallant, guitarist Ian D’Sa and drummer Aaron Solowoniuk almost two more years to return to the MTS Centre with fresh material, but on Jan. 29 the band arrived with a new disc, three more singles and a complete arena show opened by Moneen, Anti-Flag and Rise Against.

Kicking things off with This Is How It Goes and Devil in a Midnight Mass, the quartet proved to all that it is indeed ready for the arena stage, even if D’Sa, Gallant and Solowoniuk didn’t look quite as comfortable as their animated, elvish and eventually half-naked frontman.

D’Sa’s signature guitar work is a powerful calling card that’s instantly recognizable, but Billy Talent lives and dies with Kowalewicz’s singing, and if the band has a fault, it’s that in a live setting Kowalewicz can come dangerously close to pulling a Raine Maida and sounding just a little too shrill and harsh.

That was the case on early offering Line and Sinker, but the band did well to load the back end of the set with songs such as Fallen Leaves, using D’sa and Gallant’s backing vocals to offset Kowalewicz’s nasal yawp.

Though BT hasn’t broken through into the U.S. as they had hoped to, they’re absolute staples on Canadian radio, meaning nearly every song was instantly recognizable to the 11,000 cell-phone-carrying fans in attendance, though the boys would have been hard-pressed to stretch the 17-song, 90-minute show much further.

As the band opened the three-song encore with Nothing to Lose, all those cell phones were raised to the rafters, and no doubt all those cell phones were used to text parents and ask for rides after the show ended with River Below and Red Flag.

In all, Billy Talent’s first headlining arena show was a decent one — we’ll see if it takes another two years for them to come back.