ELEVEN! Festival (Wavelength 515 – night 5) (feat. Ghostlight / Simply Saucer / Neon Windbreaker / LAST [Lullabye Arkestra & Steamboat Superstars Anniversary Band])
The Garrison. Sunday, February 20, 2011.
Perhaps the most focused of any of the nights at the festival, Sunday's closer (at The Garrison, Wavelength's spiritual homebase) was given over to bleeding ears and rock issued from aggressive guitars. Perhaps it was that a certain kind of crowd was attracted to this like moths to a flame, but there was a strange vibe on the night, as if menace and violence were lurking just under the surface. That can lead to some pretty compelling music, but sometimes you worry about it boiling over. Early omen: there was a drunken, middle-aged guy sitting at a table back near the mixing desk, pounding his fists on the table and kinda rumbling at no one in particular. He got tossed before the first band even began. He wasn't totally representative, but there was an older crowd on this night, perhaps reflecting that three of the four bands are very much more "established" than "up and coming".
Ghostlight (who'd fall into that former category) sort of went from soundchecking to playing in an impenetrable blur, which'd be one good description of their M.O. Another would come from Doc Pickles, who jumped up to the stage, delivering a tray of shooters to the band and singing his intro, repeating over and over "Let's get ready / let's get ready / let's get ready to melt faces!"
Sharing a heavily-overlapping membership, Ghostlight serves as a sort of Mr. Hyde to Mean Red Spiders' Dr. Jekyll, stripping away any of the Spiders' pop veneer — don't expect any Bacharach covers here. Rather, this was an eight-man face-melting unit, with three guitarists complementing bass and drums and a couple guys dedicated to adding textures with electronics and various knob-twistings, as well as flute/sax. But the music wasn't mere noise-jamming, there were loosely-structured songs moving in and out, with lyrics and all, although they mostly came in offhanded shouted bursts. One that I could make out was: "You won't know why!"
Besides leading off the set with those shooters, their onstage concepts included tinfoil (for hats and as a musical implement) and insane volume — it all made me laugh with joy. The music surged in a way that was totally ungroovy, but that's not a failing. They played for a half-hour, and the set ended with amps still rumbling even while several members had already started packing their gear. Awesome stuff.1
Listen to a track from this set here.
Ghostlight's zwippling rock chaos would turn out to be an effective lead-in for Simply Saucer. Making the veteran Ghostlight crew look like newbies by association, Simply Saucer formed in '73 and made unprecedented music in near-total obscurity before breaking up near the end of that decade, issuing only one 7" in their active lifespan. It wasn't until another generation of Hamilton rockers at the Sonic Unyon label gave their unissued recordings a more proper release that the band started to be acknowledged as a prescient proto-punk unit worthy of celebration.
That would eventually lead to re-formation of the band, both as a still-occasionally-working live unit and to their 2008 reunion album Half Human, Half Live. This incarnation came with four musicians behind singer/guitarist Edgar Breau and the set led off with a couple songs from that album. The band had the punk rock virtue of being loud as hell, and the main sonic curveball came in the form of Dan Wintermans' distorto-theramin, which added an unsteady buzzing undercurrent, similar to Allen Ravenstine's analog synth work with their contemporaries Pere Ubu. Instrumental "Exit Plexit" hinted at their psychedelicized early Pink Floyd side while "Takin' You Down" had an agreeable tough chug, even if it's less avant then one might might imagine. Some people want to write the blues out of punk, but as this proves that's probably just revisionism.
"Low Profile", a '77 demo recording which came out as a bonus track with Cyborgs Revisited was speedier live, and the band really hit their stride with the seminal "Nazi Apocalypse" which, again like Pere Ubu, looks into the heart of darkness for a metaphor for adolescent angst: "I'm cyanide over you," moans Breau to doomy chords and the haunting ripples of the theramin.
Things got weird during the bouncy misogyny of "She's a Dog" (one of the songs on the band's 7" single released when they were "part of the Toronto punk scene"). In a crowd that was, en masse, not moshing, a couple guys decided to start, bouncing off eachother and people nearby who were just minding their own business. They got shut down by security a couple times. And then, during "Here Come the Cyborgs", all hell broke loose, with a fight starting in front of the stage. As the doorman dragged one of the perpetrators away from the scene, a second scuffle broke out. Doc Pickles — who was right up front and busting some robot-inspired dance moves — seemed surprised to be in the middle of actual fistfights and would later relate, with much gusto, how it was Lindsay Roe of (defunct?) rockers Elbow Beach Surf Club, who waded in and broke that one up. It was almost like a mental hygiene film on the negative effects of punk music come to life — and, almost as if in response, the band finished with "Get My Thrills". I think it was bassist (and, along with Breau, a founding member of the band) Kevin Christoff who'd later comment, "Just like a Friday night in the Hammer!"
I wasn't sure what to expect going into this — there was the possibility that this could merely be a competent rehashing of quarter-century-old glories. And my slightly-worried lack of anticipation was filtered through what I knew about Breau's post-Saucers career, which musically mostly involved a more genteel folk style.2 But it turned out that this was a fully satisfying set. The volume and raw drive in the music managed to tear it out of Hamilton, and out of the 1970's and make it feel like it belonged in this moment, getting the blood flowing and the fists flying.
Listen to a track from this set here.
The least-established of the night's band's, Neon Windbreaker might have collected as many blog posts and column inches as all of the other bands on the bill combined in the months leading up to this show. Not bad for a group existing in a grey zone between joke band (which is what it basically started as) and serious project, all while writing songs after having started playing gigs and adding/subtracting members at a prodigious rate — at this show, the band acknowledged the drummer's first gig with the band while bidding farewell to a guitarist, while also dedicating a song to yet another former member in the crowd.
The set started with a bit of a bait-and-switch, with guitarist Johnathan Dekel leading off with a doo-wop styled introduction ("Can I get more slapback?" he asked before starting) that led right into Eric Warner's more aggressive vocal stylings, ranging from forceful shouts to throat-shredding yowls.3 "Melodic shoutcore" might be the best genre tag here, although the instrumental attack often comes off a bit more mannered than Warner's vox.
"We just released a sandwich a few weeks ago," Warner commented non-nonchalantly between songs, despite the prima facie strangeness of that statement. That would be a reference to their Sandwich + Fruit EP, released at a show where, instead of creating any sort of physical manifestation of their "product", a download code was sold with food items.4 Besides their handful of originals (most in the sub-two-minute range) the band also apparently has a soft spot for mid-90's CanCon radio-friendly alt-rock, covering Limblifter's "Tinfoil". And set-closer "Furniture" was similarly introduced with the assurance that "this song is not a Silverchair song."
Not my sort of thing musically, but for a joke-origin sort of band, they were certainly no worse than a lot of bands who take themselves very seriously. And, more importantly, the band was fun on stage — or off stage, as the case may be, as nearly all the members took a turn hopping down from the stage to play amongst the crowd. Warner started the set there, Dekel would later jump down to wrestle with someone (while still playing), and the bassist was down there during the final song. The sense that they're out for fun and not taking themselves too seriously made this go down a lot easier.5
Listen to a track from this set here.
After all of that, there was still a keyed-up crowd to end the night, eager for headliners (and community-minded Wavelength regulars) Lullabye Arkestra, who were promising something more expansive than their usual performance. In fact, it started off like a regular LArk set, with a billowing smoke machine obscuring the room during a lengthy ambient intro with a keyboard drone providing a spine as bass and drums slowly built up. Justin Small and Katia Taylor then segued into three songs in their usual duo format, ending with "Nation of Two" before they were joined by three additional players from local soul-rock titans Steamboat. The combined unit was dubbed LAST (for Lullabye Arkestra + Steamboat) for this set, and they played with a hard rock ferocity that would have merited tossing in a lightning bolt slash in there: LA⚡ST.
Although one might think of Steamboat as being genteel water to LArk's oil, there's no shortage of connections here. Family is the first, with Taylor welcoming her brother Nick to the stage to take up the guitar.6 Meanwhile, Matt McLaren and drummer Jay Anderson (who'd also played percussion the night before as part of Maylee Todd's band) are no strangers to harder-edged sounds in their Biblical project.
With the extra players joining in without a break in the sound, they tackled a few numbers from LArk's catalogue, filling out "We Fuck the Night" and "Fog Machine" with additional crunch and several guitar solos that fit in quite nicely. Nick Taylor took lead vox for one of his own songs, bringing in some dual guitar leads which was a nice lead in to a mini-set of classic rock covers, leading off with the heavy vibes of Pink Floyd's "The Nile Song"7 and Joan Jett's more playful "Bad Reputation" (Kat on vox here), then traipsing through some Motörhead and Deep Purple (McLaren taking the mic for "Space Trucking"). The main set ended with the "Hail! Hail! Rock and Roll!" call to arms of "Ass Worship", and then an encore (reverting back to just Small and Taylor) brought the set to a robust seventy-plus minutes. A little exhausting, but good fun.
Listen to a track from this set here.
Last years' tenth anniversary festival, celebrating the end of Wavelength's weekly incarnation, ended with a big spectacle and a wrap-it-all-up group hug — a widescreen moment of a thing done. This year's festival just ended like a regular show, which was less celebratory/sad/emotional, yeah, but also more like it's part of a flow — like there's still more to come.8
1 Although they don't play with great regularity, Ghostlight do pop up playing live from time to time. They're also closely affiliated with the boutique inyrdisk CDR label, which puts out limited-edition runs of all sorts of strange, wonderful noises.
2 I remember seeing Breau opening for Richard Lloyd back in '08, and he was singing strange, possessive songs about Nico and gentle, dull songs about oceans — a far cry for the work he's best-known for.
3 Dekel is a noted local rock writer, while Warner is a concert booker and head of the We Are Busy Bodies record label.
4 The "unmastered, live off the floor EP" remains available for free download here.
5 The band remains active, but have slowed down from a heavy live pace they were maintaining this spring. They have a blog, but apparently no other official online presence.
6 The pair have also collaborated on Nick's Church & State project, which is his main vehicle for his own songwriting and production work.
7 This might perhaps have helped to plant a seed in the mind of some members of the local music journalism establishment with regards to Pink Floyd's recent return to "cool" status.
8 Next year's Family Day falls on February 20, 2012, so mark that down and start planning now to celebrate at the next Wavelength festival.
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