Currente calamo: CMW 2012 (Thursday)

CMW 2012 (Thursday)^*

While these shows are fresh in my mind I want to get some quick notes down. I'm a nerd for not wanting to throw my full reviews out of sequence, so there'll be a fuller accounting of the night by and by.

5 p.m.: Martha Wainwright @ Sonic Boom

Nice to run into some familiar faces as I settled into the stage area at Sonic Boom, starting off my festival with some afternoon action. It's been a few years since I last saw Martha Wainwright — since Canada Day 2008, in fact — and to be honest, my first impression was how much more she looked like a McGarrigle than I recalled. For this quick set, she was playing the stuff that was at the forefront of her mind: all-new material from a just-completed album. As I recalled from seeing her before, I was more drawn to her wonderful voice and on-stage physicality than her songwriting — though the last song with its recountings of "make-up sex" was engaging.

Listen to a track from this set here.

6 p.m.: Simone Felice @ Sonic Boom

With a four-piece band and backing vocals shared all around, Catskills singer-songwriter Simone Felice brought a rambunctiously fragile rootsy sound. Felice's countenance made every song seem like hard-won battle, and this was good stuff, though I can say it's not really a musical direction that's going to captivate me all too often.

7 p.m.: Great Bloomers @ Sonic Boom

This is the second time or so that I've heard the new songs from Lowell Sostomi's Great Bloomers that'll be coming out soon on the band's sophomore album. And while there doesn't seem to be anything as indelible as, say "The Young Ones Slept" (which the band included in this set), there's a couple tunes there that I'm keeping an eye on. Overall, I do like the more rockin' direction that the music is going in — a more muscular approach that was reflected with the set-closing cover of Television's "See No Evil".

8 p.m.: Chains of Love @ Sonic Boom

Suffering from a bout of post-SXSW rock'n'roll flu (an ailment that was known locally this week as "Grimes disease") Vancouver's Chains of Love took the stage in a fevered haze that had nothing to do with musical enrapturement. They still managed to crank out a solid set, building a miniature wall of sound behind a series of songs that were as solidly constructed as a pair of boots that were made for walkin'. Nathalia Pizarro and Rebecca Marie Law Gray bring a lot of brassy attitude (and maracas!) to the stage — enough that I expected some JD to drive a motorcycle through the front door and up to the stage and squeal off into the sunset with them at set's end.

9:30 p.m.: Cold Specks @ The Music Gallery

Former Etobicoke resident Al Spx seemed to suddenly burst out of nowhere when it was announced that her band Cold Specks was signing to Arts & Crafts. I hasn't looked into the project that much, but wanted to take this in to try and get a feel for it without too many preconceptions. She brought a four-piece backing band (presumably mostly from her current home base of London, England, though local hero Jay Anderson was in the drum chair) and while they did an admirable job in fleshing out the songs, this felt very much more like a solo project than a "band."

Fortunately Spx had no shortage of talent to carry a longer-than expected set (going nearly an hour) where everything served as a setting for her powerful voice. Not a belter by any means, her vocals packed a low wallop without ever getting too showy. She was a nimble guitar picker, too. Cutting in a few different directions, this had a singer-songwriter heart underneath it all. And for all the talk about "doom soul", Spx leavened the tumultuousness in some of the songs by not being afraid to be goofy — at one point filling in a tuning break with a rendition of the theme song from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

She certainly won the crowd over, garnering a standing ovation before closing out the night with an a cappella (and microphone free) rendition of "Old Stepstone" filling the Music Gallery's church sanctuary space. Ultimately, the connection to Arts & Crafts isn't so strange if you consider her to be more akin to fellow new signees Snowblink than, say, Trust or any of the electro-y dance-friendly bands they've just signed.

Listen to a track from this set here.

11 p.m.: John K. Samson @ The Great Hall

A long wait for a streetcar after that made me think that there was no way I'd be able to make the start of my next set — even assuming that the venue wasn't already at capacity. But through a stroke of good luck, I bounded up the stairs of The Great Hall to hear the roar of the crowd and the sound of "Highway 1 East", the miniature that serves as the opener to Samson's Provincial album. As I found myself a space above the crowded room the four-piece band was seguing into "Heart of the Continent", and for awhile, it looked like Samson might just be playing the album start to finish.

It took a couple more songs following the album's tracklisting before there was a curveball, with the backing band leaving the stage for Samson to tackle the Weakerthans' "One Great City!". From there, he'd throw in a few more Weakerthans tracks, with the members of the band coming onstage to join him as needed. A bassist moving from electric to double bass provided a wide sonic range to support the songs, and the dynamic lead-guitar chair was ably filled by Shotgun Jimmie, who'd opened the evening at The Great Hall with his own set. During "When I Write My Master's Thesis", Jimmie put more vigour into backing vocals about academic citations than I ever imagined I'd see, holding his arms in the air above him in triumph as he belted out the word "Sources!".

All told, this was a really strong set, from the arm-raised-in-a-toast recitation of "Elegy for Gump Worsley" to a performance of "Pamphleteer", my all-time-favourite Weakerthans song, which I'd never heard the band do in all the times I had seen them. For another curveball, as the band got back to the louder material they did a cover of Jawbreaker's "The Boat Dreams From the Hill" and after closing the set on the quiet domestic note of "Taps Reversed", Samson strapped on the bass in the encore to play "Anchorless" (sounding baffled on reminding the crowd that the song was twenty years old) before closing the set with an unplugged, unmiced singalong version of "Virtute the Cat Explains Her Departure". Completely satisfying.

Listen to a couple tracks — something old and something new — here.

midnight: The Autumn Portrait @ Gladstone Hotel Ballroom

That pretty much took care of the planned portion of my night, and I found myself wandering down Queen Street, ducking into The Gladstone more or less on a whim. Didn't know who was playing, but it turned out to be The Autumn Portrait, who had driven across the country to play for about twelve people. Although their melodic modern rock wasn't particularly my thing, I sorta felt for the trio, but they made lemonade by inviting up the most eager members of the crowd to join them onstage to dance.

But it was satisfying that I ran into some friends there — random social encounters being as much of a festival reward as "discovering" a band. That felt like enough for the night, and I decided on my first evening of CMW I wanted to get home in subway time. There'll be a couple long nights to follow.

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^* A note on nomenclature: for years both the industry showcase and music festival components were known as Canadian Music Week. But as of 2009, this was deemed to be too simple and straightforward, and the music portion was "rebranded" as Canadian Music Fest, under the aegis of the larger Canadian Music Week. I see no reason to put up with this and will simply refer to everything as CMW. This year, the name situation has been made more ludicrous with the addition of a top-level sponsor that has been smushed into the festival's name. I don't know what product they're selling, and frankly I don't care. I have no plans to acknowledge them by name and I suggest you do the same.