Tranzac New Year's Eve (feat. Octoberman / Sandro Perri / The Wilderness of Manitoba / The Rural Alberta Advantage / Light Fires / Hooded Fang / Sister / I Am Robot And Proud)
The Tranzac. Friday, December 31, 2010.
Deciding where I was going to go for New Year's Eve was pretty much a no-brainer. Instead of going to a bar and feeling dour, for the past couple years I'd enjoyed the friendly-faces vibe in the Tranzac's shabby living-room surroundings — the fact that there was good selection of local bands playing is almost just a bonus.1 At least that's the sensibility I tried to approach the evening with, as more of a fun and social time than a musical event to be observed and documented. That the notes below veer in and out of thoroughness is a sign of my mixed success at the endeavour — try as I might to just hang out, my brain usually gets caught up in the gig at hand.
Pre-show festivities out meant that I got into the Tranzac around 9:30 — early for a gig, never mind New Year's Eve — but it did mean that I'd missed an early set by Laura Barrett. As it was, just managed to catch the end of Octoberman, which is essentially a vehicle for the songs of Marc Morrissette, as far as I can tell. Sometimes he plays solo, but here he was backed by a group of friends — I recognized some of the people with him on stage, including violin player Randy Lee. I didn't have more than a passing notion about the band going in, but the vaguely Wilco-y material that I heard intrigued, putting the band on my radar for a fuller accounting.
Listen to a track from this set here.
Popping into the main hall, caught a bit of the end of Sandro Perri's set2, but didn't stick around too long, heading back to the smaller Southern Cross Lounge to snag a spot for The Wilderness of Manitoba. As the acoustic guitar and prayer bowls sounded the extended opening to "Hermit", I wondered if the NYE crowd would stay quiet to listen to this. But though the chatter picked up a bit as the set went on, it was far better than I expected.
Like a lot of local bands, The WoM had played some of their earliest gigs in this room, and their homespun, rootsy sounds still felt quite right here. Fairly packed with people, despite playing opposite The Rural Alberta Advantage, the room was boilingly hot by set's end, which was acknowledged with the otherwise-unseasonable "Summer Fires". A nice capper to a successful year for the band, the set drew mostly from their full-length When You Left the Fire, but dipped back for the older "Evening" (by now a clap-along standard to the audience). And mixing up the setlist, the band played the brand-new "Chasing Horses", a sign that there's more to come.
Listen to a track from this set here.
And then back to the main hall — where the big digital clock projected above the stage was at about quarter to eleven — for the end of The Rural Alberta Advantage's set. Didn't feel too bad about missing out on the rest, having caught them at Lee's a couple weeks before. It was surprisingly roomy for a set by a band that'd sold that much bigger venue not long before, with a small cadre of folks up front, and a lot of elbow room and people chatting further back. And it was rather unusual to see Paul Banwatt to the rear of his bandmates in the "usual" drummer alignment instead of being lined up with them at the front of the stage — though that was explained as singer/guitarist Nils Edenloff thanked Hooded Fang for sharing their gear before they wrapped up with "The Dethbridge in Lethbridge"
I only saw a song-and-a-half of RAA, which is okay, as on this night I was more looking forward to Light Fires, who I'd been interested in seeing for awhile. I'm generally interested in anything new from Reg Vermue, for whom this has become an outlet for something different than Gentleman Reg, his "name" band. But though usually considered as having come from the troubadour school, he has long shown an interest in electronic music — the electronic stylings of "We're in a Thunderstorm" having been presaged by some other dancefloor dabblings. Further giving this a distinct identity, Vermue performed the set as Regina Gentlelady, his drag persona, foregrounding all the brash fabulousness he can muster.
He was backed up on stage by the more subdued James Bunton, best known for his work in Ohbijou. Here, the drummer was working with an entirely different set of rhythmic tools, standing barefoot behind a table of electronics working the beat in real time.
As they got ready to play, Vermue teased the crowd with a few a capella lines of Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance", and if I were a more with-it observer of popular culture — in fact, I had to google the lyrics to figure out what song it was — I'm sure I could whip off some astute observations on the aspirational connections at play here. Instead, though, I'll just have to let Vermue's pithy, slogan-worthy choruses speak for themselves, and the most memorable of the lot — "If you're bored, make it up!" — does the job nicely.
Working in this beat-driven domain, Vermue boiled his lyrics down to easy-to-grasp catchphrases, like in "The Better" ("the riskier the better / the butter makes it better") where his words were warped with an aggressive autotune effect. I liked the buzzy upbeat groove of "Let's Get Divorced", after which Vermue had to slow things down for a song that was less dance-y and more synth poppy — and actually one of the best songs they had. Meanwhile, as the pair moved through a full set (nine songs, all told) the crowd was keeping busy batting around the dozens of balloons that had been dropped from above. A good way to ease out the year.3
After that, a quick changeover so Guy Lombardo Hooded Fang could be on stage and ready with a couple minutes to spare before the giant digital clock hit midnight. As the crowd counted down to the new year, D. Alex Meeks greeted it with a drumroll and the horns kicked into "Auld Lang Syne", the rest of the band picking it up with an amusing slight lurch before veering off into an equally unsteady cover of David Bowie's "Let's Dance". As singer/guitarist Daniel Lee read the lyrics from his notebook, Nicholas Hune-Brown pulled a sweet 80's new wave vibe from his keyboards. It had an appropriately "let's get ripped and dance" sort of feeling.
After making notes that Matt Beckett (ex-Bicycles) was sitting in for bassist April Aliermo and considering the merits of a pleasingly ragged run through "Highway Steam", I remembered it was New Year's Eve, and reckoned I should try and have a happy and sociable time to try and start the year off on the right foot, so I made the unusual move of wandering around, and treating the music as background, so I don't recall what else went down in much detail, though there was an unprecedented second cover (even one is rare for Hooded Fang), with a sprightly clap- and dance-along version of New Order's "Age of Consent".
During HF's last song, moved over with a bunch of friends back to the Southern Cross lounge, which was running a little late. We managed to step in to catch pretty much the whole set from Sister, who I'd been waiting to see again after enjoying the first time I'd encountered them. They were still playing the snappy "Wishbone" as we entered, and I thought this might be another set where I'd be paying half-attention, but my friends settled attentively in right up front, so I ended up back in my usual mode.
So named for the connection between singer/guitarist Carla Gillis (also a local music writer of note) and her sister, drummer/vocalist Lynette, the trio (rounded out by Pete Johnston on bass) were mostly playing songs from their EP, as well as some that haven't been released yet, like "Imaginary Love Notes". A bit more considered and "classic rock" than the Gillises past work in well-regarded East Coast fuzz-poppers Plumtree, Sister's songs tend to stretch out to four or five minutes. Letting the groove cook a little, the journey is just as important as the lyrics, fitting for a band whose songs employ no shortage of travel imagery, from the "Off Ramp Up Ahead" to the train in "Orion". On the latter, Geoff Miller once again joined the trio on keyboards, adding a tasty saturation to the sound before the set closed with the jaunty "Feather on the Ocean Floor".
After that, a lot of the crowd started to make their way out, so by the time that I Am Robot and Proud were getting started around 1:30, enough bodies had left that I could grab a seat. And though there was still some boozy rambunctiousness afoot, it was staggery and muted, and this felt more like a regular Tranzac gig. All the moreso with the players on the stage being no strangers to this room. The brainchild of Shaw-Han Liem (on keybs and laptop), the live band is rounded out with Robin Buckley (drums), Mike Smith (bass) and Jeremy Strachan (guit). Those musicians can be found with Liem in a series of overlapping bands, stretching back from the Sea Snakes to more current projects including Tusks and Jim Guthrie's band.
The vibe for this instrumental project is technofuturistic optimism, smooth and sleek. This is the sort of music that should come with projections behind the band — perhaps computer-animated footage of an endlessly unfurling highway ahead, or an anime superhero flying off into the horizon. On studio recordings, the band is more strictly defined by Liem's keyb sounds, sometimes sounding like distant kin to Richard D. James Album-era Aphex Twin. But with the band behind him, there was more "rock" (even of a restrained, arranged sort) in the sound, and tracks like the fab "Making a Case for Magic" could easily fit in on a Sea and Cake album, with Strachan's sustained tone bending up against Smith playing the highest notes of his bass. The songs stretched out enough that there were only played five titles in the half-hour set, including a new one called "Circles" and finishing off with "Center Cities" from The Electricity in Your House Wants to Sing, a title which also sums up the band's vibe pretty well.
Casting a warm spell on the humanoids dispersing from the cozy Tranzac, the music gave me a shield of protection against the hell-is-other-people parade of Bloor Street at two a.m. on New Year's Eve. Goodness, was I ever glad I was in the Tranzac all night and not out with those people.
Listen to a track from this set here.
1 And, of course, the night was also important as another in the series of fundraisers to help get the Tranzac back on a stable financial foundation.
2 A., also searching for a non-bar NYE excursion, came out for the night. Having seen Hooded Fang before, I think he was under the impression that all the bands would be upbeat, poppy fare — y'know, something to dance to on New Year's Eve. That something as artfully askew as Sandro Perri could be featured on the main stage, even relatively early in the night perplexed him, and as we headed out of the room he asked me, "is there any music here that won't make me me want to kill myself?" With HF and Light Fires it mostly ended up a draw and he survived the night.
3 Light Fires are a natural pick for Pride, and will be playing the Alterna-Queer stage (Alexander Parkette, next to Buddies in Bad Times) on Sunday, July 3, 2011 at 3:15 — well worth ducking away from the parade for.
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