Festival: Pride 2010 (Sunday)

Pride Toronto 2010 (feat. FITNESS / Señor Kasio / Heavy Filth / People You Know / Diamond Rings)

Alexander Parkette. Sunday, July 4, 2010.

Parade day! Despite being out rather bloody late the night before, dragged myself down to meet A. Just like it usually seems to be, it was a hot one, sun pouring down as we squeezed our way along the parade route to try and find a shadow-y spot that offered a decent vantage point. The Pride Parade is such a huge thing that although I go every year, pretty much, I don't think I've ever seen the start and the end of the same parade.

After the parade — and after some shady rest — more time to wander. We had somewhat competing agendas, as I was mostly eager to check out some of the bands at the always well-programmed Alterna-Queer stage in the Alexander Parkette beside Buddies in Bad Times. A., meanwhile, wanted to wander more, and check people out, grab more of those free samples and check out what was going down at the drag stage. (Which is, admittedly, rather good fun too, usually.) Given that, I had an amusing run of catching the ends of sets on the Alterna-Queer stage, so these first few notes here should be seen as a bit tentative and fragmentary.

c. 5:20 FITNESS

Wandered into the park¹ to the sight of spandex and leg-warmers on stage, an aerobic musical workout by the aptly-named FITNESS. Their sound was squelchy synthpop conducive to the workout the crew was doing on stage — the dancing/aerobics were decidedly not secondary. From the part of the set I saw, it seemed perhaps something more of an participaction-minded "entertainment experience" than just a band playing on stage, so your enjoyment might depend on how much you're willing to get into the goofiness of it.²

c. 6:15 Señor Kasio

I'd seen this crew of electro-punk insurgents on this same stage a couple years back and had enjoyed them, though our paths had not crossed since. From what I remember, what I heard when we approached the stage this time was a bit more of a low-slung rock sound, but that was undercut somewhat when frontman Steve Diguer announced, "this is the gayest song ever," as his intro to an enthusiastic cover of Toni Basil's "Mickey".³ Also of note was their closer, statement-of-purpose song "I Wanna Fuck", a smart-dumb bit of work which can get caught in your head a bit with its relentlessly repeatable chorus.

c. 7:20 Heavy Filth

After one last wander-round with A., he headed home for a nap, and I got back to the parkette with enough time to catch just the end of Heavy Filth's set. They appeared to be rawking with no-bullshit authority, but I don't really have enough data to say too much about 'em. Sounded invigorating, though.

8:00 People You Know

By now, I was settled in and managed to catch all of People You Know. The trio (bass/guit/drums) hit the ground rolling with a fiery run through Joan Jett's "Bad Reputation". Now, leading off a set with a cover is a bit of a risky proposition — what if your own stuff can't live up to that?

There was also the more immediate problem that guitarist Aimee Bessada attacked the song with such vigour that she broke a string, and didn't have a second guitar on hand, creating the prospect of squandering that momentum right away with some string-changing dead time. By luck, someone in the audience had a guitar handy, and she played the rest of the set with a lender.

"See and Be Scene", the first of the band's originals, had a choppy guitar part and rode the hi-hat during the verses, but wandered around a bit too much in the chorus — a situation that'd be replicated with some of their other songs. There was a nice edge in the delivery, but the songs' construction didn't quite do it for me.

Bessada's guitar lines often had a pleasingly rough edge, but the compositions and her vocal approach were more straight-up pop — perhaps appropriate for a band that lists both Sleater-Kinney and Milli Vanilli as influences. It's an interesting line to navigate, and the fact that I'm far more endeared to the rougher stuff at the edges as opposed to the pop side colours my reaction some. The band haven't quite yet written any killer songs, but perhaps they'll yet come up with their own "Bad Reputation" — they've got the right attitude for it.

9 p.m. Diamond Rings

Well — what more can I say about John O'Regan's Diamond Rings project, having discussed him no few times hereabouts? It risks sounding like empty hype or crass flattery to suggest that the trajectory seems ever-upward, but O'Regan keeps bringing more confidence and swagger to his sets, which in turn give him the room to lay out more depth and vulnerability in his songs. It was that swagger that was evident off the top as he kicked this set off with "Show Me Your Stuff"⁴. Meanwhile, O'Regan still tempers the kick-ass flamboyance of the music with the same unpretentious directness between songs, here talking about being out of breath from biking over to the gig. It makes the upshot of the whole thing less diva-like and more 'I'm fabulous, but I'm just like you — so you could be fabulous too!'.

After the keyboard jams to start, O'Regan picked up his guitar for the rock-ier portion of the set with "Wait and See" and "Something Else". But most intriguingly, he closed out the set with the slow-jam "It’s Not My Party", arguably the night's highlight, where that aforementioned vulnerability was more strikingly laid out. But there was no way that the crowd wasn't going to call him back for "All Yr Songs", now welcomed like a canonical classic. Has all this happened in a year?⁵

Listen to a track from this set here.

There was one more set to go on the day, with Katie Stelmanis and band. It would have been well-worth staying for, but by this point it'd been a pretty long day and I was done in, so I headed home. But it was a worthy day. It says something about our city that most of these bands weren't rank strangers to me — most of 'em they play at the sort of shows I'm going to otherwise and they certainly aren't waiting for Pride to come around to have a space to play in. But the Alterna-Queer stage is a nice environment and it certainly is exposing these acts to an audience that might not be going to seek them out in the clubs.⁶

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¹ Thankfully, the parkette was not a licenced area this year, making it easier to come and go. Making the stage all-ages also seems eminently sensible, given that this is, in theory, also serving a more youthful sort of crowd.

² The band are playing a 50 River gig in the Imperial backroom this Thursday (October 28). The Imperial Pub might be the last place on earth I'd have expected to see an aerobics throwdown, so it should be interesting. Bonus: Light Fires (the Gentleman Reg / James Bunton electro-dance unit) are also on that bill. And I also see that FITNESS are also playing at Rancho's Hallowe'en party, which would work out perfectly if you were planning on going as 80's-era Jane Fonda this year.

³ "I've been wanting to do that since I was twelve!" Diguer confessed at the song's conclusion.

⁴ Have you checked out the video for this one yet?

⁵ The onward and upward path for Diamond Rings takes its next big step today (October 26th) with the release of his full-length Special Affections. Go grab yourself a copy!

⁶ On thinking back on these shows and the memories they create, I note with sadness the untimely passing of Ari Up, who played a vibrantly memorable show on the Alterna-Queer stage in 2008 — we can hope that someone in that crowd was fired up and maybe inspired to be in a band that will be up there in years to come.