Sean Nicholas Savage (Dr. Ew / Army Girls)
!059. Saturday, January 15, 2011.
For a while now, I've had a sort of ambiguous relationship with the less formal venues in this city. Like pretty much everyone, I love the idea of shows-not-at-bars, and in theory I really dig the notion of there being different sorts of places to see bands play. On the other hand, seeing corners cut with what is most assuredly entrepreneurial gusto often sets my internal alarm bells ringing, nanny-state caution monkey that I am.
Also, when I head out to see a band, I'm the sort who likes to pay attention with a certain kind of focus. So if that performance is taking place in the context of what is essentially a giant house party, where not nearly everyone's agenda matches mine... well, I guess you could just call me a party pooper. It might have been those instincts that had hitherto kept me away from !059, a well-known "semi venue", that until recently played host to musical shows and a slew of other artistic endeavours. Located in a residential strip that's almost in the shadow of Casa Loma, it's a little off the beaten track (though hardly remote) and the sort of place you'd just pass by if you didn't know what you were looking for.
Not good at party time, I actually arrived in the relative early going, with just a handful of people lingering in the main area, which had once been a living room with a wall removed to open the space up further. There was no stage so much as a zone at one end of the room against the front window overlooking the street outside, now cluttered with gear. One of the long walls of the rectangular room was taken up by a staircase — there was a coatrack up there, as well as the bathroom and the locked-off rooms belonging to the house's occupants. Not much furniture in the main area, just a couple chairs below the stairway — and opposite that on the other long wall a sort of three-sided wooden step below a bay window. That was the spot I staked out — I figured a little elevation never hurts in trying to see a band play.
And indeed, once the floor started filling in, I was glad to have claimed my little space. By about eleven, it was starting to feel full, with about fifty or sixty people on hand. The crowd included a lot of guys who were comfortable wearing their toques inside, and maybe it was just because it was the dead of winter, but flannel usage looked to be up about 15 per cent.1
One of the main reasons I wanted to come down for this was to see Army Girls, who were playing first. Although I had seen Carmen Elle and Andy Smith playing together before, that was before they'd even settled on a name. Now, they were more focused on Carmen Elle's new songs (with the last vestiges of her earlier "solo" stuff stripped out of the setlist) and were showing more comfort with each other, with an easy and natural interplay that animated their stripped-down but not spare sound. Smith's drums pushed without calling too much attention to themselves, keeping the focus on Carmen Elle's adroit guitar work and fabulous vox. "Always" was pretty kickass, and there were some other top-notch songs like "Here It Comes" that should be showing up on their forthcoming EP.2
The house-party sound was a little rough, and the vocals might have been bumping up against the limits of the PA a little, but in any room Carmen Elle's voice is capable of expressing a yearning that suggests something more complicated than either toughness or yielding surrender. And the pair's basic guit/drums sound works like that too — not quite scrappy, but certainly not soft. Closing with "The Power", the set was only a tantalizing EP-sized six songs — "we don't have any more," was the confession at the set's end as the crowd called for another. There's so much talent on display here that I'm taken aback every time I see this duo — and they're good enough that I've gone out of my way to see them a couple more times since this show.
Listen to a song from this set here.
If the room was comfortably full as that set had started, with the next fifteen or twenty people to show up it started to move to feeling crowded — and there'd be a steady stream of more people arriving all night long. And it was an out-for-a-good time party sort of crowd — definitely not like a temperance meeting. When a burning smell wafted through the room before the next set (over and on top of the pungent smell of weed in the atmosphere) my inner Fire Marshall flinched big time, that familiar voice in my head crying WATCH OUT WATCH OUT as I thought about alternate exit routes. And opposite me, the stairway (which had no banister on its open side away from the wall) was getting filled up with people standing on the steps, making it a perilous passage for anyone headed past them up or down — an accident waiting to happen in a room full of invulnerable-feeling drunks.
Meanwhile, while I mused about safety and doom, wondering how difficult if would be to get out through the window I was standing beside, a quick changeover had Dr. Ew ready to go. The quartet jumped right into the brisk "I'm Not Mad At You Anymore", and from the top this was more rocking than the last time I'd seen Drew Smith (formerly of The Bicycles). This was a different lineup than the previous time I'd seen him with a band, with only Mike Le Riche (guitar, also of The Darcys) holding over. Here, he was joined by the Steamboat-y rhythm section of Matt McLaren (bass and piano) and Jay Anderson (drums). As far as I can tell, this has become Smith's regular group, and it was a fizz-pop sugar rush fully worthy of his songs, bouncing from one two-minute confection to the next. They also brought a tougher edge to songs like "The House Of Many Mansions".
The crowd was getting more boisterous, but to my surprise people paid attention to the quieter "Let's Make It Legitimate". "Did anyone just fall in love?" Smith asked the crowd as they finished. "I love you guys!" one dude drunkenly shouted back. After rocking out a couple more, the set ended on a softer note with "Stay In Place" and "Oh Human History" — "I miscalculated," Smith commented on not having saved a barnburner to close out on. Still, this was fabulous material presented by a top-notch band. As I've said before: Smith's bubblegummy songs and presentation make it easy to underestimate his skill and talent, but there's something seriously good going on here.
Listen to a song from this set here.
Setting up on the extended ledge in front of the window opened up the space on the floor where the bands had been playing, but the still-increasing numbers soon filled that up and the place was feeling quite jammed for Montreal's Sean Nicholas Savage. The last time I had seen Savage had definitely rubbed me the wrong way, maybe just because his ongoing lightning-fast evolution had turned what I had thought was going to be a folkie strummer into a disco crooner. And while I can appreciate his musical progression from The Everly Brothers to The Gibb Brothers, the karaoke-like nature of that performance just didn't work for me.
This time around was somewhat better. Savage was still singing over backing tracks played on a ipod, but somehow the fact that the music was a more stripped-down, basic midi sound rather than instrumental versions of finished album tracks made a difference.3 What can't be denied is how hard Savage is working to be an entertainer — he prowled along the ledge with magnetic energy, and the crowd totally ate it up as he sashayed into "Can’t Get My Mind Off You" (from his then-forthcoming Trippple Midnight Karma). "Disco Dancing" (from the barely-older Mutual Feelings of Respect and Admiration) was treated like a classic, with people singing along, and the crowd up front (including host Henri Faberge and Daniel Moon King Woodhead) slow dancing.
There was a large and enthusiastic crowd up front who were fully into this — though countered by the fact that a few rows back it was more just another background element of the massive houseparty. I can see why people find this fun, and I can see the hard work that Savage is putting into his live performances — I even enjoy his steady stream of fresh music he keeps putting out. But in the end, I have to confess, this kind of live show just doesn't do a lot for me. All the more room for the people who do get it, including all those who rushed up front when, in lieu of an encore, Savage selected "Sexual Healing" on his ipod and semi-lipsynced into an empty wine bottle, dancing and whipping up the crowd into a singalong frenzy.
The end of the "show" part of the night meant that the party proper was just kicking into high gear, but that was enough of a time for me. When I managed to make my way up the Stairs of Peril to retrieve my parka I found that all of the coats that had been hung up had fallen into a giant heap and were buried under layers of coats from more recent arrivals. That meant you had wade into a knee-deep pile, tromping on other people's coats until you could dig out your own, all while trying to dodge the line of people waiting to use the one bathroom. That could be a metaphor for the place as a whole — either that sort of thing is a minor impediment to your fun, or it's enough to make you wonder if this is the sort of fun you want to have.
1 Actual overheard conversation:
Hipster #1: After the show, we're going to take some drugs and go up to the castle.
Hipster #2: [brightly] *I* like doing drugs!
2 Entitled Close to the Bone, the disc was recorded by Ben Cook, and is now slated for a September release.
3 It maybe (probably?) shouldn't matter so much at all — but that's a whole other unpacking of my inner rockism that I'm not prepared to get into here.
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