Shiny Toy Guns
Aragon Ballroom – Chicago, IL
April 15, 2009

Chad Petree (guitar, lead vocals)

I moved to Chicago in July of 2006. I was working at the f.y.e. in the Harlem Irving Plaza (HIP) mall by August. Shiny Toy Guns became my new favorite band that October. Here’s what happened.  My co-worker/supervisor would play whatever music he wanted to when he was the manager on duty. Those were my favorite shifts to work because he always put in an album of some artist I had never heard before. It also rocked because it meant that we didn’t have to listen to the same playlist over and over on the corporate CD sent to us each month from parent company Trans World Entertainment. Barf. It was like listening to commercial radio. Same songs every hour.  I remember asking Chris (my boss) who we were listening to one night. “Shiny Toy Guns,” Chris told me. And there you go. I was hooked. I was in love with the music of Shiny Toy Guns after hearing only the first couple of tracks off of the band’s debut record We Are Pilots. I would listen to that record over and over for months after he let me borrow it and put it on my iTunes/iPod. The sad thing was, I could never catch the band live in concert when they came through Chicago. Well, that dry-streak ended on April 15, 2009 when more than two years after discovering Shiny Toy Guns I got to see them perform at the Aragon Ballroom. Yay!

However, the band has a new female lead singer on their latest album Season of Poison. So I never got the chance to see them perform with former band member Carah Faye Charnow on lead vocals. I really liked her voice! I got so used to it, you know? After all, I’ve been listening to We Are Pilots for the past two years! It was weird to hear newest member Sisely Treasure singing the songs recorded by Carah on Pilots. Oh well, band members come and go all the time. It’s becoming rare to have a group still around with their original lineup. The show was great and I can’t miss them again, that’s for sure. Although I didn’t grab a set list, here are a few songs I remember from the show:

Rainy Monday

Ricochet!

Starts With One

Ghost Town

Don’t Cry Out

Le Disko

More photos of Shiny Toy Guns after the jump…

Sisely Treasure (lead vocals, synthesizer, bass)

Jeremy Dawson (synthesizer, bass)

*Not photographed: Mikey Martin (drums)

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