Gig: Wavelength 500 (night 4)

Gig: Wavelength 500 (night 4) (feat. Constantines, Rockets Red Glare, Donné Roberts, Picastro, Danger Bay)

SPK Polish Combatants Hall. Saturday, February 13, 2010.

Night four, inside the friendly bunker of the Polish Combatants Association hall, turned out to be less, um, adventurous than the previous couple nights. Which isn't a comment about the music on offer so much as the crowd and vibe which left the focus squarely on the bands. There was also a bit more of a sense that this show was celebrating the past more squarely than the first nights — but also of not being chained to it. Perhaps best expressed in a line I found scrawled in my notepad after the show, cribbed from the last band of the night: "time can be overcome."

leading off the night was Danger Bay. Not, prima facie a retro-minded selection — the band has just put out their first EP¹ — but still a historically resonating one, as the band is the current musical project of Wavelength co-founder Jonny Dovercourt. Compared to the last time I saw 'em, I wouldn't say that the band has tightened up so much as become more deliberate in what kind of noise they want to create. To wit, Dovercourt's guitar was not so much sloppy as spatter-y, and similarly, the rhythm section is generating a sort of elegant but slovenly aggressiveness. Following that lead was vocalist Deirdre O'Sullivan, who, with a beer bottle in hand and wearing a homemade t-shirt reading "I ♥ SULTS" occupied the stage with a certain rock'n'roll menefreghismo, sauntering up to join the band as the set started and giving the impression that she could be doing this, or not. Some songs came in shorter bursts, which worked well, but equally enjoyable were the more extended instrumental passages, such as on "Pirates of Somalia". A half-dozen songs in twenty-minutes was short and sweet, but left a pleasant aftertaste.

Listen to a track from this set here.

Another usually forward-looking veteran taking the opportunity to look back a bit, Liz Hysen and her comrades in Picastro played a set that was largely focused on '07's Whore Luck. Perhaps that was down to the fact that current regulars Nick Storring (cello) and Brandon Valdivia (drums) were joined by Evan Clarke (guitar — and doing double-duty on the night), all of whom played on that album. Hysen's oft-grim and slowly creeping compositions aren't everyone's bag, and, indeed, the night's quietest set faced the loudest chatter from the floor. Unconcerned, the group turned in a very good set. The slow roil of "Hortur" sounded quite excellent, and set the table for some of the relatively more animated material such as "All Erase".

Like the cold from a prairie wind in winter, Hysen's songs get in your bones and linger, leaving you with a certain unsettled effect. Singular and uncompromising but not in-your-face, when in the mood for it I find Picastro's music to be particularly affecting and on this night it struck me just right. Good stuff.

An esteemed member of a different segment of Toronto's independent music scene than the one often found at Wavelength, Donné Roberts has helped bridge that gap just as he has done all his life. Madagascar-born and growing up in Russia, Roberts quickly became a notable figure in Canada's world music scene on his arrival here, eventually gaining notice for his work with the African Guitar Summit project. With a constantly evolving sound, his genre on this night might be summed up by the first title on his set list, "Afro Pow Wow", a product of his ongoing collaboration with First Nations musician Marc Nadjiwan, whose chants added a new dimension to Roberts' songs. The effect that this has had on his music can be heard in the difference in older, familiar material like "Wenge Yongo", which now has a dual lead vocal line with Nadjiwan adding an undertow to Roberts' brighter melody. The band was professionally tight although occasionally too smooth for my taste — with a trilling soprano sax, "Voromailala" didn't quite have the edge I was looking for, but moments like that were mostly outweighed by funkier fare. It's indisputable that Roberts is working on a pretty unique fusion of styles here, drawing out something that lies at the common heart of two different cultures. That, plus his virtuoso guitar skills (shown off here during the closer, an extended version of "Sadebake") show that Roberts is a talent to be reckoned with. And although this set was danceable and entertaining, it wasn't quite the flavour I was seeking on this night.

And then for what might have been the most hotly-anticipated set of the night, a reunion of Rockets Red Glare, a bright light of the local scene at the time of Wavelength's inception and defunct since '03. Before my time for paying attention to such things, I mostly vaguely knew the name as a "here's what happened on the last episode" kind of note in some articles about Feuermusik. Certainly a different sound than what one usually hears these days from Jeremy Strachan, here playing bass. Evan Clarke, back up on the stage after his turn with Picastro, was more aggressive here in his musical approach. Musically, call it what you will — post-hardcore, say — though in a dirge-y way. Songs generally featured a melodic bassline carried by Strachan, with Clarke's guitar — abrasive but not noisy — chopping against it, not needing squalls of feedback or distortion to make its point. Gus Weinkauf's drums were un-fussy, but had a bit of a shuffle when needed.

With Clarke's anguished, flattened sing-speak vocals, the music mostly connoted a sort of dread, or a sense of a cold, stark landscape. Fairly bleak stuff — "bury yourself" was a a typical lyrical sentiment in one song. Austere and dark, yet not necessarily grim to listen to, in that paradoxical emotional spell that music can cast — catharsis, I guess, to pull one over-used trope out of the bag. With expansive songs that you could wander around in, so to speak, it was bracing and exciting to hear, and though I have no point of comparison, the band was amazingly tight.

As to the benefits of having a reunion, there are always those boxes of CD's in the basement to get rid of: "we have some merchandise for sale," Strachan (who handled most of the banter) said, sounding somewhat bemused by that. Otherwise, for a band that lasted til '03, ending before the age of blogs and other contemporary memory enhancers, RRG mostly existed like a myth or urban legend, so a nice chance for them to, if nothing else, stake out their place in local music history a bit more firmly.

Listen to a track from this set here.

And finally, a different sort of retrospective set from the Constantines. With keyb player Will Kidman under the weather, the band took the opportunity to "play some old songs" as a four-piece. Given that, and the special occasion of the Wavelength show, the band decided to try a bit of a "Classic Albums Live" experiment and tackle their first album (2001's self-titled effort) in its entirety. Even with having dug through their back pages at their recent string of 10th Anniversary shows, this one had the feeling of being something a little different, and special. So although they'd tackled some of the mainstays of that album recently, it was cool to hear the tunes tumble over each other in sequence, played with a fair amount of fire (though Bry Webb's claims of "the songs used to be faster ten years ago" were to the contrary). Playing the whole album also means including tracks that you wouldn't imagine hearing much live, such as instrumental "The McKnight Life" or "To the Lullabies", which was treated like a bit of a skeleton in the closet although it was pulled off pretty well.²

Playing the album made for a tasty fifty minute set, and then the band came for an encore. Launching into a fiery "Young Lions" and then "Hotline Operator" had a big semi-moshy crowd worked up — I'm glad I wasn't on the side of the room where someone was spraying their beer around. Maybe just because it had been another lengthy night, but I was starting to feel worn down and definitely experiencing diminishing returns as the encore stretched out to an unexpected length, though this may have been my tiredness talking, as the band were playing the newer songs with the same intensity they'd exhibited through the main set, and seemed in a mood to play as much as they could, Webb telling the crowd, "I think we're just gonna keep playing 'til we get cut off". Frankly, I could have done with a couple songs less, as we were over the half-hour mark of the encore by the sixth or seventh song, but the final blast of "Nighttime/Anytime" gave me a nice feeling to go out on. The past is with us still — sometimes it's right there in front of you. Turn it up!

Listen to a track from this set here.

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¹ The band's recent Non-Canonical EP is a cassette-only release, of all things. Certain to raise an eyebrow in some quarters with its obsolescent-format-love, I must admit I have less of a problem with this than vinyl fetishism. Maybe perhaps because I came of age, musically, listening to cassettes, it brings a bit of a gleam to my eye, even if I don't particularly miss 'em all that much. I did pick a copy up at the merch table after the set and, truth be told, even if it came with a code to download the MP3's, I'm far more likely to listen to the cassette — I still have a Walkman in good shape that I pull out every once in a while to listen to something that I haven't been able to upgrade.

² "This is a deep cut," Steve Lambke said before that one, to which Bryan Webb replied, "some might say too deep."

"I don't think we've played this in eight years — it's a whole lot of jibber jabber," Lambke noted.

After, Webb was self-critical: "Nothing Fugazi about that song," he said, self-mockingly. "Nothing at all."

"That's off our album Steady Diet of Nothing," Lambke deadpanned back.