The Concert Series Vol. 3 G Soul

Hello! Welcome back to the Concert Series! I know it's been a while but hopefully I can regain my spark soon. This Concert Series Blog post (video following soon) will be Focused on the G Soul concert June 4th 2024 at the Velvet Underground in Toronto, Ontario. Lets get into it! I will Preference that this will be opinionated and that even though I love G Soul I will be presenting and writing the truth about what I thought about the show.

Pre-Traveling

So I woke up at 8/9am or so because for those of you who do not know I currently am the midday host for the radio station 88.3 CJIQ here at my college for the summer and thus means even when I have concerts I still have to work (unless I take the day off or prerecord) from 10am - 2pm. So come 2pm or more so 1:50pm I'm grabbing everything from the studio and rushing home to plug my phone in to charge and grab/prepare for the concert.

Traveling to the Venue

Around 4pm I finally was ready and on the road to Toronto. Unfortunately for me though the highway near Toronto is currently under construction right now (for the next 3 years mind you) making the traffic into and out of Toronto brutal. and by brutal I'm talking what once took me 1 hour now takes me almost 3 hours. So I got stuck in stop and go traffic for almost 45 minutes and again in stop and go once I reached lakeshore Blvd.

Finally I arrived at the Green P parking lot just around the corner of the venue around 6:45 (and really needing to use the bathroom but unfortunately no businesses in Toronto leave their bathrooms unlocked) got my 19+ drinking wristband and just after 7pm I was in the venue and waiting for the show to start.

There was only 2 acts for this show, Eric Ryan and G Soul but regardless it was worth it even though it was a shorter concert.

Eric Ryan

Eric Ryan (Born and Raised in Toronto, ON) was on I think around 7:30pm-8pm I don't remember exactly unfortunately but him and a few of his friends made up his band including 2 other singers (1 female 1 male). 2 guitarist and a drummer. They were all amazing, the 3 singers including Eric were so lovely and their vocal tones matched together wonderfully. (I feel like bragging right now as well but as a radio host I have the joys of hyping and talking about musicians when I want and thus I gave Eric a shout out and now we follow each other).

G Soul

okay so for starters. I love G Soul and his music, his voice is so beautiful and rich and the notes he can hit are amazing....at least on record. G Soul was on stage probably a little after 8:30-9pm maybe a little bit latter, and he had a very friendly and funny DJ with him (I wish I could remember his name :() G Soul came on an everyone cheered although not very loud, not sure if that was because the type of the crowd just wasn't a loud one or something else but regardless he hopefully felt the Toronto love.

For some of the songs that G sang I'm not sure why but they sometimes felt short(er) than the recorded version and yes I know its a live show but it just felt short. It also didn't help that he had to have the crowd sing certain parts of the songs for him.

Yeah here is where it might get a little controversial but like I said I've got a duty to tell the experience as it was not as everyone wants it to be.

I'm not sure if G has vocal cord damage, just had a (many) off days with his throat or something else but there was a good many moments where he was just unable to hit a note or even get his voice to produce noise, this also happened while he was trying to talk which made me think it was strained vocal cords or something of the such. A few times he would have to have fans do the singing which I'm not against but at the same time it was a good more than 5/8 times he had to have the audiences help. He did kind of slightly mention about his throat/not doing the best with notes but not in a big 'this is why this is' way.

The show regardless was amazing G has an amazing voice when it comes to his chest and lower tone registers but when it comes to his head voice, falsettos and anything slightly higher than chest his voice would just not be stable, hold a note, be very off. He did play some of my favorite songs like Broken Record which I was very pleased with (aside from the vocal discrepancies) and he did obviously play his new single Window Pane (pretty lil thing).

Merch

Merch was pretty good, I did buy a tour tee with the show dates on the back. If you don't know I will only buy tour merch if it's 1. pleasing to the eyes (yes sue me bro) and 2. has the tour name or tour dates with cities on it. because well we all know how expensive tour merch is mainly due to the venues being dick heads and wanting cuts over 20-40+ % from the sales. Luckily I knew the range of prices for G Souls tour merch since Kohai posted it on their Instagram (although it was in USD so more expensive here in Canada) the Tee ended up costing me a wild $60+ so yeah big ouch from my college student budget. but I do love the design and the tour dates on the back so it was kind of worth it I'd say.

Home Time

The Traffic back from Velvet was honestly shit when it came to the streets in Toronto and the Highway around Toronto. The show ended around 10:30/11pm (my mom was still awake) so Traffic was still a thing around this time. There was also a street that went from 3 lanes to 1 because of police presence. So I got home somewhere between 12am and 1am. Which is good but also not good because I worked the next day and also had another concert the next day (That blog post and video will be up soon as well).

Over all the concert from the night was great and a change of pace from the concerts I've experienced previously and I would recommend going to a K R&B show or any Korean genre/musicians show!