Gig: The D'Urbervilles / Forest City Lovers

The D'Urbervilles / Forest City Lovers

The Theatre Centre (Summerworks Festival Music Series). Thursday, August 13, 2009

Celebrity encounter! Frank Chromewaves had sent out a call for audio from Joe Strummer's 1999 T.O. gig, something that I happened to have in my stash, so as Frank was walking by to head into the Theatre Centre, I accosted him and passed the material along and chatted a bit. A class act, natch.

The word on the street was that the night's set wasn't just going to be one band followed by the other, but more of a collaboration. More details were scant but theorized over. Such time-passing diversions were again required, as we were left sitting around outside in sultry heat well past the doors time, watching the building crowd for this show slowly block the ongoing panoramic entertainment of Queen Street. Once we were granted our ingress, the reason for this night's delay was apparent: the stage had been split in two and angled out into a V, with a drum kit on each. On the floor in front, two sets of gear were set up in near mirror-image. Grabbed a spot to sit at the base of the first riser as the crowd — by a good chunk the largest I'd seen so far at the Summerworks gigs — filled in.

Forest City Lovers didn't keep us waiting long once the crowd was in place. Taking their place on the stage right half of the setup, the crew launched into a short set of their delightful pop, animated by Kat Burns' shyly smiling vox. A good way to start the night, the crowd sitting down and adjusting to the underground gloopy warmness.

At the end of five songs came the switchover. Kyle Donnelly (a member of both bands and pulling double duty) started a bass riff while the rest of FCL started snapping their fingers like the Sharks challenging the Jets. Drummer Greg Santilly appeared behind his kit, pummeling out his beat, and suddenly the rest of the D'Urbs flung themselves out, stage left, and into "Spin the Bottle", as if picking up the West Side Story challenge and banishing the Sharks off their turf.

When I'd last seen The D'Urbs at CMW I was left with a sense of astonishment at how powerful a rock'n'roll machine the band had become, and on this night I'd say I felt that even moreso. The band played five songs — including two new ones — during their half of the set, and at the start, the switchover was so quick that the crowd stayed put sitting down. It only took a couple guys moving up once "The Receiver" started for the open space on the dancefloor to be filled up with sweaty, dancing people, and suddenly I was about two feet from vocalist John O'Reagan. The set ended with "This is the Life" and a new song — powerful stuff all around — and the band announced that they'd take a short break before reconvening, both bands combined, as "The Family Band".

Listen to a track from this set here.

I was interested as the full seven-piece joint band came out to see how the two sounds would combine, and wondered to myself whether FCL's more delicate edges might get overwhelmed by the D'Urbs' rollicking energy. As it shook out, the bands'd put enough thought into this to avoid that pitfall, and managed to put the extra hands into more texture rather than more volume. Which isn't to say that this wasn't muscular — we're talking about a seven-piece, two drummer combo here, after all — but it generally meant at least two people on keybs, plus Mika Posen's violin enriching the sound. Things really hit their stride and felt like a true collaboration in the middle of the set, when John added background vox to a lovely version "Watching The Streetlights Grow" that built up to a beautiful coda, followed by a funky party version of "Dragnet" that had John and Kat trading verses. The set had been announced as a birthday celebration special for Out of This Spark honcho Stuart Duncan and must've felt like a treat indeed. The bands, though dripping in sweat, were clearly having a ball and have to be congratulated for putting something like this together. I'd seen these two bands share a stage before¹, but seeing them working together like this was a whole other thing. One to be remembered. Although the crowd would have gladly stayed for more, the band returned to the stage only for a final bow before sending the crowd out to the cooler outside air.

Listen to a track from this set here.

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¹ At their joint CD release party at the Tranzac, March '08.

Gig: Still Life Still / Kids on TV

Still Life Still / Kids on TV

The Theatre Centre (Summerworks Festival Music Series). Sunday, August 9, 2009

Subpar rock'n'roller I am, I have it as a rule of thumb to avoid Sunday gigs, so as to finish off all the chores and get to bed nice and early to start the new week all fresh etc, etc. But still, sometimes you have to break the rules to free your heart.¹ So, heading out in the middle of a beautiful/mildly terrifying thunderstorm, I ducked out during a break in the driving rain and actually made it down to the Theatre Centre a bit earlier than I'd planned. Fortunately A. arrived on the scene not long after me, so we chatted while we waited for the doors to open — mildly late, as seems to be par for the Summerworks course.

A sparser crowd on hand, not surprising given the Sunday/lousy weather situation. The night was designated a fundraiser for Sketch, an arts program for street involved and homeless youth — a cause that Kids on TV have supported in the past. On this night, we got an eight-song set again showing off their newer material and a couple old tracks. The crowd (except myself and A.) seemed largely to be there for Still Life Still and were hanging back on the seats as KoTV took the stage. Thank goodness there was an intrepid front-stander to lead the charge to the stage, although after a bit the music started to draw more people onto their feets and some dancing ensued. Adding to the multimedia spectacular, most of the songs came with flashy new video art. The disco-y "Dazzler" impressed even more in this setting and was a rockin' good time. "Poison" was beset by the same electro-gremlins that had visited Miracle Fortress on Thursday² with the sound system cutting out in the middle of the track. The band gamely took a mulligan, and when the sound died again, persevered with one more re-start and managed to get through the track³ The set ended with "Breakdance Hunx" and its attendant party breakdown — stretching her mic cord to the limit, Roxanne took to the seats to bust out a verse and John hit the dancefloor to show off his breakdancing skillz. A ripping set wherein the band overcame the technical issues and a crowd that was not necessarily there to see them.

Between sets, A. decided he wanted to be alert at work in the morning and split for home. Fortunately, changeover entertainment was provided by Masta Myst, a young rapper who has honed his craft and done some recording at Sketch. That filled things in well enough until Still Life Still were ready to go. My previous encounters with the band had left me mostly ambivalent, but I was still willing to see if there was something there to interest me. The crowd, on the other hand, were right into this, and there were plenty folks dancing and singing along straight from the get-go. It's an A&R reality I'll readily acknowledge — if it comes down to whether a band impresses me or impresses a dancefloor full of girls, I know which I'd use as an indicator of future success.

Fighting against shock-inducing rented gear, the band put together a respectable set. All things considered, SLS' decentred sound should be right down my alley — no obvious frontman, vox shared around, and instruments melding together into a smeary haze. But somehow it seems this galling limitation must not be persevered in — sometimes it feels that the band is occupying its patch of musical real estate a bit too securely. A couple "new" songs — newer than their as-yet-unreleased album — are generally cut from the same cloth. I suppose in the end it's just that what they have doesn't quite hook me in, but, truth be told, I did enjoy this more than my previous encounters, and felt like three or four songs really connected. This is already a capable live act, and I can only imagine some road work concomitant with the new album will only sharpen that further. Whether this gets them to the point where they're too successful for random women to just wander on stage mid-set to get some pictures of them remains to be seen, but I do reckon we'll be hearing plenty about 'em this fall.

Listen to a track from this set here.

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¹ Marge: "You got that from a movie poster."

² Weirdly, it's been the electronic acts, with their DI'ed gear that've been having all the bad luck with the fusebox, and not the rockers with their amps and whatnot.

³ This supremely catchy little number will be featured on the soon-coming Friends in Bellwoods II comp — start making your plans to get your mitts on a copy!

Gig: Miracle Fortress / Karkwa

Miracle Fortress / Karkwa

The Theatre Centre (Summerworks Festival Music Series). Thursday August 6, 2009.

After a pleasant evening of patio sociality, headed over over to Queen and Dovercourt for the first show in the Summerworks music series. This musical adjunct to the theatre festival's stage offerings is now in its second year, and after seeing a couple generally satisfying shows last year, I'd been planning to take in some more this time round. There are some problems inherent in putting on a rock gig in an active theatre venue — mostly in getting the PA set up after the day's last stage performance — and some first-day roadbumps were indeed evident, leading to a nearly half-hour delay in getting the doors open. Fortunately I was in an upbeat frame of mind and had conversational line-neighbours to pass the time. Once everything was cleared and the soundcheck complete we were let in to the performance space. Ended up being a good-sized crowd, the place full but not feeling packed with a generally mixed crowd, the venue attracting both a few young folks and also some skewing older who looked relieved to be seeing a gig outside a bar.

The Theatre Centre is the less-grandiose venue underneath the Great Hall — a horseshoe-like U ringing the main space below with stage, a flat area in front, and about six rows of chairs on risers. Managed to snag a spot in the first row of chairs and settled in to watch Karkwa¹, a band I was totally unfamiliar with. Casual queries in the queue lead to the relevation that that were a Montréal band that sang in French, but not much else info, so I was going in with a blank slate. The music turned out to be a not-unpleasing sort of britpop, reminiscent of some of those bands trying to present a sand-down-the-edges version of Radiohead to the masses.² Which is to say that I found their forty-five minutes enjoyable enough, but not so much that I was going to fling myself out of my chair to get any closer to them. The audience as a whole seemed to be of a similar mind, giving warm applause, but generally staying passively seated.

There were some hints of musically interesting touches, like a two drummer setup, but it never really led to any explosive moments. Strictly mid-tempo or less, it hinted a few times at a nicely swooning type of vibe but wasn't ever quite all the way there. Of the lot, highest marks for keeping things engaging go to keyb player François Lafontaine, who added some interesting textures that gave the music some barbs. I have nothing bad to say about this band, although I don't reckon their music will really stick with me. Might work well for Radiohead/Coldplay-loving types who want some stolid cancon in their rotations.

After the set's conclusion, headed down to the floor in front of the stage to chat with some familiar faces while Miracle Fortress set up. Another band I was less than fully versed in — I'd listened to Five Roses a bit in '07, and'd mentally filed it as something I'd enjoyed enough that I'd meant to come back to it, but in fact I had not — nor had I gone out of my way to see what was a generally well-regarded live show. Although often expanded to a full band for live performances, tonight we were getting Graham Van Pelt in solo formation, with a notebook full of new lyrics, a case full of electronics, a guitar and a single, naked light bulb.

Pressing the button on a trusty Roland 404, Van Pelt launched into his set, featuring high falsetto vox and a dance style that implied heavy exposure to the video for Talking Heads' "Once In a Lifetime" as an impressionable youth, combined with a charming, aw-shucks Owen Wilson-like stage persona. Much of the set was composed on new material that, while enjoyable, brought to mind the soundtrack of every movie I rented or saw on TV in 1986,³ which might simply have something to do with the sequencer-heavy nature of the tracks in his one-man-band incarnation. What might have been the best of these songs featured a bit of "live rock indeterminacy" when, thanks to some in-house electrical demon, the beats disappeared mid-song, creating an unintentional bridge that Van Pelt still managed to nicely recover from. With it having been so long since I'd listened to the album, the new material seemed as inviting as the older songs that the fans in the audience welcomed warmly.

My earlier thoughts about Talking Heads were validated when Van Pelt covered "This Must Be The Place" for the one-song encore. An enjoyable set, though I wouldn't say it knocked my socks off. The gig also kept me up later than I was expecting, which might explain a slight sense of sleepy diminishing returns by the end.

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¹ The name unilluminatingly translates to "because what", if memory serves me right.

² For a few days after this, I was humming vaguely-remembered tunes from Keane's first album to myself, which is the sort of post-Coldplay kinda vibe that I got from Karkwa.

³ It has seriously been a while since I thought so much about Devo's contributions to the Doctor Detroit soundtrack.