Avril Bandaids homepage (10.28) declares: 'U.S. fans! Even though Avril didn't take The Black Star Tour to the states, she has definitely found a way to make up!' ...O rly? By playing 2 festival gigs this December and that's it in her entire home country. To paraphrase 'Apocalypse Now' (1979 US film), Oh man, the bullshit piles up so fast at Bandaids you need wings to stay above it. -- thewaymouth

Avril underwhelms at sparsely attended concert (The following is an online review of Avril's BST concert at Rogers Arena, in Vancouver, BC, Canada, Oct. 3, 2011) By Stuart Derdeyn, The Province, October 4, 2011  -- Thee upper levels were dark, the floor only a third full and the back of the stadium seats empty. A far cry from the packed venues of the Let Go era. Or even the Best Damn Thing days.

Four albums into her career, the Ontario singer just launched her Abbey Dawn “punky” fashion line and if everyone in Monday night’s crowd wore it, you would never know.

Katy Perry could launch a brand of candy-scented tissues that would command a market share. The Sk8r girl ain’t riding that wave anymore.

After New Cities’ well-received set of keyboard-based tweenie rock, the lights went up and a scan of the audience made clear that the kids who started with Avril have mostly moved on. The audience is mostly children and parents and tweens.

In other words, troubling to the product life cycle.

This isn’t to say that the nine-year-old girls in front of me weren’t excited. Borrowing mom’s iPhone to video tape the opener and tour title track so they could upload it to Facebook immediately, there were even some cheers. I could have believed she shouted “wake up” rather than “what up Vancouver” after.

“What the Hell” had the desired effect. It is the sort of hooky and upbeat track she built her career on and it got both the artist and the audience going. “Sk8r Boi” followed and Lavigne was in control — always had a soft spot for this song. At least as smart as anything Simple Plan or Hedley ever composed. And she said she lived in Vancouver for six months. And that her mother was in the crowd. OMG!

“He Wasn’t” included a lengthy hands up/hands down/yell/whisper section and then it was ballad time. She was sticking to the earlier material and sounded quite good.

Her singing voice has grown as she’s aged even if the lyrical content has lagged.

She certainly knows that the faster, louder material where those “hey, hey” choruses occur strikes a better response than the more adult slow songs. The set list was a balancing act. One that would play well at a PNE show.

It’ll be a decade or more before a lot of the most passionate in last night’s audience can catch her in a casino. The whole singing on the piano thing just screamed lounge act.

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Final A-M Poll Results: Thunderdome Battle: Which song would U like me 2 add next 2 my BST Setlist? 
Darlin
 76%
Goodbye
 24%
All votes: 33
By a wide margin then most folks would rather see Avril perform a song she wrote when she was 14 rather than the title song she wrote specifically for GL when she was 25... Ya, 4 real.