Recording: Johnny Dowd

Artist: Johnny Dowd

Song: Emily/Meryl^*

Recorded at Comfort Zone (CMW 2012), March 23, 2012.

Johnny Dowd - Emily/Meryl

Full review to follow, but my quick notes for this set can be found here

^* Thanks to a commenter for passing the title along.

Currente calamo: CMW 2012 (Friday)

CMW 2012 (Friday)^*

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.

1:30 p.m.: "A Lazy Afternoon" @ Saving Gigi

I started off the day at Saving Gigi, which is such a friendly spot that I never want to leave once I'm there. They were hosting a daytime show that was put together by Exclaim!, You've Changed and Kelp Records, with sets from Pink Moth, Marine Dreams, Adam and the Amethysts and The Weather Station (playing new songs!). Cozy times, but once it was done I had to drag myself out of there to get down to Sonic Boom for one of my most-anticipated festival moments.

7:00 p.m.: The Inbreds @ Sonic Boom

In the grand scheme of things The Inbreds may not be bigger than, say, Pavement — but while I didn't feel the need to see the latter on the reunion circuit last year, there was no way I could resist nostalgia's siren call of the 90's CanAlt duo. I saw 'em a handful of times on their original run, but not during any of the few previous times that Mike O'Neill and Dave Ullrich had gotten back together again, so the last time I'd seen the pair on stage together was back in '96.

No surprise, then, that there was a little rust as they led off with "North Window". O'Neill (who's been around town the past couple weeks playing the six-string while promoting his new solo album) especially looked as if he was trying to remember how he wrung the sounds he used to pull from his capo'd + chorded bass. But regardless, the massive endorphin release from hearing it had me grinning — and I briefly thought I was just going to start laughing like that guy who broke his hip.

By about the third song, though, the muscle memory was taking hold and things were sounding pretty steady as the pair joked on stage, tried to remember where they'd recorded the stuff and played selections from all four of their albums.

There's still some goddamn excellent songs here and while the "hits" were represented ("Drag Us Down", "Amelia Earhart ", "Any Sense Of Time") the band dug a little deeper too, making me think I should pull out and revisit Winning Hearts, their final album from '98, which seemed a bit disappointing at the time. The whole thing left me thinking I should drop everything and rewrite my Saturday night plans so as to be able to see their full set at Lee's. And if you don't have Kombinator and It's Sydney Or The Bush, I note that you can grab 'em electronically from drummer Ullrich's Zunior digital music site for $5.55 apiece. Essential stuff.

Listen to a track from this set here.

11:00 p.m.: Last Year's Men @ Silver Dollar

Dan Burke has a pretty solid record with his now-standard triple-night headliner format, bringing in unknown bands to anchor his programming at the Silver Dollar. So even though I knew nothing about Chapel Hill's Last Year's Men, I had them down as a must-see band. For a Friday night with a pretty stacked lineup, it was less-packed than I woulda expected when I arrived with the band already tearing through their set. But the crowd on hand — including The Pow Wows, who had been playing in the timeslot before them — were whooping it up. Tearing through strings on borrowed guitars, vocalist Ben Carr was wrestling with a Flying V while bassist Montgomery Morris toasted Canada (and its beers) in a charming Southern accent. Musically, "tasty grease" is the genre here, and I have no doubts that they'll be drawing some repeat customers when they finish up their stand tonight.

11:45 p.m.: catl @ Comfort Zone

No need to kill time between sets when you can just duck downstairs to the Comfort Zone, where the 11 o'clock band was just starting their last song as I walked in. I grabbed a drink and walked past the crowd in front of the stage to grab a spot in the dark zone off to the side where catl launched into a frenzy as the last notes from the stage faded. When I saw 'em a month ago, the band were a little bit out of their element on a brightly-lit, high stage, but in the dark and on the floor it felt just about right.

It was here that I was really able to get the measure of how new drummer Andrew Moszynski was fitting in with the band, the loud snap of the backbeat helping to drive the band's dance party energy. "The Blues" is one song that you can channel and play all night long, and that's the elemental boogified frenzy that catl tap into with reckless abandon. Soon, that little nook off to the side was filled with moving bodies and it was all a quick blur until they turned things back over to the main stage with the night's headliner all ready to go.

Midnight: Johnny Dowd @ Comfort Zone

I generally only get down to the CZ for festival showcases, so I don't know when they spruced the place up a bit. But the old mural/sculpture that was behind the stage has now been moved to the side of the room (it was behind where catl were playing, over by the bathrooms) which opened up the space behind the stage, which now features pattered brushed chrome walls. Lit with purple spotlights, it's a particularly '80's look. I mention this because the sleek retrofuturism that evokes was a perfect backdrop for Johnny Dowd, who was taking the blues in directions it never went before. Backed with a drummer playing an electronic kit and a keyboard player, the musical accompaniment was often gothy/industrial, making this sound like some weird mutant direction that the blues went in an alternate universe. Sorta like the difference between Jonah Hex and Hex.

Dowd, who looked like an avatar of hard livin'/still survivin', brought a vaguely desiccated weirdness to the stage — the old fashioned weirdness, where all your fetishes were sought out in seedy back alleys and delivered in plain brown wrapping. Veering into talky sing-speak, there were songs here that were more Ministry than Muddy Waters — in the best parts, while Dowd intoned about cocaine, coma-fied women and other temptations, the music had me thinking about bands like Nitzer Ebb.

When that weird edge receded and the keyboard player switched over to a straight-up Hammond-y sound, it was less interesting and more like talk-show-band blooze. But at a festival where there's a lot of twenty-year-olds labelling their bands "experimental" because they once heard a Radiohead album, seeing a senior citizen belting out a song called "Hot Pants (I Need a Spanking)" which sounds like Public Image covering John Lee Hooker, well, that's fucking next level shit.

Listen to a track from this set here.

1 a.m.: Monster Truck @ El Mocambo (upstairs)

Coulda stuck around CZ for the guaranteed good times of some bands I already knew, but decided to zag for a random adventure, and found myself heading up the stairs to the El Mo's "legendary"/dowdy second floor, another space that's usually off my grid outside of festivals. Walked in with Hamilton's Monster Truck taking the stage.

There are some people who might go to watch a monster truck show "ironically". This band is not for them. This is genuine, chug-groove, raise-your-beer rawk. Metal in that Led Zep/Soundgarden lineage, the band (who I could hardly see on the low stage past the packed-in crowd) included yowling, shirtlessness and surging keyboards driving things. Which is to say it appeals to the headbanging crowd rather than the moshing crowd, and while I'm a member of neither, I hew more towards the latter's music. So this wasn't particularly my sort of thing. But it was okay, and I enjoyed it enough that I stuck out the set, even if it was more in a casual hang out at the back sort of way rather than close-up, ardent observation.

2 a.m.: DZ Deathrays @ El Mocambo (upstairs)

I was also sticking around to check out Australian visitors DZ Deathrays, even if ninety per cent of those that were cheering on the previous band had split. That meant there was a lot of elbow room to enjoy the Brisbane duo, whose self-chosen genre of "party thrash" about covers it all. There's a lot (a lot) of DFA1979 in their DNA, and singer/guitarist Shane Parsons prefers a lot of harsh digital distortion, but the constant push from drummer Simon Ridley kept things moving. Parsons also made a couple moves down to the floor, setting up a loop and leaping down from the stage to engage in some mild chaos. This is pretty projectable stuff — you could imagine huge crowds singing along to songs like "Cops/Capacity". Good fun, and presumably you could catch these guys on their way up for a fraction of the cost of a big reunion show by a band on their way back down.

Listen to a track from this set here.

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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.