Miracle Fortress / Karkwa
The Theatre Centre (Summerworks Festival Music Series). Thursday August 6, 2009.
After a pleasant evening of patio sociality, headed over over to Queen and Dovercourt for the first show in the Summerworks music series. This musical adjunct to the theatre festival's stage offerings is now in its second year, and after seeing a couple generally satisfying shows last year, I'd been planning to take in some more this time round. There are some problems inherent in putting on a rock gig in an active theatre venue — mostly in getting the PA set up after the day's last stage performance — and some first-day roadbumps were indeed evident, leading to a nearly half-hour delay in getting the doors open. Fortunately I was in an upbeat frame of mind and had conversational line-neighbours to pass the time. Once everything was cleared and the soundcheck complete we were let in to the performance space. Ended up being a good-sized crowd, the place full but not feeling packed with a generally mixed crowd, the venue attracting both a few young folks and also some skewing older who looked relieved to be seeing a gig outside a bar.
The Theatre Centre is the less-grandiose venue underneath the Great Hall — a horseshoe-like U ringing the main space below with stage, a flat area in front, and about six rows of chairs on risers. Managed to snag a spot in the first row of chairs and settled in to watch Karkwa1, a band I was totally unfamiliar with. Casual queries in the queue lead to the relevation that that were a Montréal band that sang in French, but not much else info, so I was going in with a blank slate. The music turned out to be a not-unpleasing sort of britpop, reminiscent of some of those bands trying to present a sand-down-the-edges version of Radiohead to the masses.2 Which is to say that I found their forty-five minutes enjoyable enough, but not so much that I was going to fling myself out of my chair to get any closer to them. The audience as a whole seemed to be of a similar mind, giving warm applause, but generally staying passively seated.
There were some hints of musically interesting touches, like a two drummer setup, but it never really led to any explosive moments. Strictly mid-tempo or less, it hinted a few times at a nicely swooning type of vibe but wasn't ever quite all the way there. Of the lot, highest marks for keeping things engaging go to keyb player François Lafontaine, who added some interesting textures that gave the music some barbs. I have nothing bad to say about this band, although I don't reckon their music will really stick with me. Might work well for Radiohead/Coldplay-loving types who want some stolid cancon in their rotations.
After the set's conclusion, headed down to the floor in front of the stage to chat with some familiar faces while Miracle Fortress set up. Another band I was less than fully versed in — I'd listened to Five Roses a bit in '07, and'd mentally filed it as something I'd enjoyed enough that I'd meant to come back to it, but in fact I had not — nor had I gone out of my way to see what was a generally well-regarded live show. Although often expanded to a full band for live performances, tonight we were getting Graham Van Pelt in solo formation, with a notebook full of new lyrics, a case full of electronics, a guitar and a single, naked light bulb.
Pressing the button on a trusty Roland 404, Van Pelt launched into his set, featuring high falsetto vox and a dance style that implied heavy exposure to the video for Talking Heads' "Once In a Lifetime" as an impressionable youth, combined with a charming, aw-shucks Owen Wilson-like stage persona. Much of the set was composed on new material that, while enjoyable, brought to mind the soundtrack of every movie I rented or saw on TV in 1986,3 which might simply have something to do with the sequencer-heavy nature of the tracks in his one-man-band incarnation. What might have been the best of these songs featured a bit of "live rock indeterminacy" when, thanks to some in-house electrical demon, the beats disappeared mid-song, creating an unintentional bridge that Van Pelt still managed to nicely recover from. With it having been so long since I'd listened to the album, the new material seemed as inviting as the older songs that the fans in the audience welcomed warmly.
My earlier thoughts about Talking Heads were validated when Van Pelt covered "This Must Be The Place" for the one-song encore. An enjoyable set, though I wouldn't say it knocked my socks off. The gig also kept me up later than I was expecting, which might explain a slight sense of sleepy diminishing returns by the end.
1 The name unilluminatingly translates to "because what", if memory serves me right.
2 For a few days after this, I was humming vaguely-remembered tunes from Keane's first album to myself, which is the sort of post-Coldplay kinda vibe that I got from Karkwa.
3 It has seriously been a while since I thought so much about Devo's contributions to the Doctor Detroit soundtrack.
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Afterthoughts:
ReplyDelete1) Although I'm still vaguely amused at the notion that Karkwa's name might've been meant as as an interpretation of "car quoi", according to Wikipedia: "The band's name is a phonetic rendering of carquois, the French term for a quiver of arrows."
2) I mostly take pictures just to break up the yakkity text, but about one out of every hundred kinda actually works out — and that Miracle Fortress pic is actually kinda aesthetically pleasing.