NXNE 2008
This year’s North by Northeast (NXNE) festival marked a bit of a change for me. To begin with, it was my first trip outside Montreal since I moved here last month. Second, I’ve needed some time off; the two weeks that elapsed since I left RNAO and joined the CEC weren’t exactly relaxing. So I was looking forward to returning to something familiar and check out some bands I really wanted to see and hopefully discover some new ones.
The people who program the festival always do a great job; there is always tons of great music to be heard and if you aren’t into what you’re hearing, a quick walk down the road to another club will probably take care of that.
The Midway State - Reverb Thursday at 9 p.m. They reminded me of Coldplay with an early ’80s pop influence.
NQ Arbuckle - Dakota Thursday at midnight. NQ Arbuckle were by far my favourite local band when I lived in Toronto. Mix smokey bar room melancholy, some rollicking east coast folk with a dash of Springsteen thrown in and you have my lazy approximation of the band’s sound. They just released their third CD, X OK, on the always reliable Six Shooter records.
Maybe it’s just me, though, but the beer at the Dakota always does a number on me. I had a couple of pints of - heh - Labbatt 50 and I was done for the night.After their set, which was composed largely of material from their new album, I stood at the corner of Dundas and Ossington thinking “This sucks, how did I get so drunk. Now I have to go home.” So I didn’t get to go down to the Horseshoe to see White Cowbell Oklahoma like I had planned.
I made a note to myself to stay away from the Labatt 50 when at the Dakota. Some would say that staying away from Labatt 50 is a good rule in any event, but sometimes live music goes better with cheap beer.
The Priddle Concern - Reverb Friday at 9 p.m. This is the project of ex-Treble Charger guitarist and sometime Broken Social Scene collaborator Bill Priddle. I always liked Priddle’s contributions to Treble Charger records the most. His writing was more subtle and more melodic than his bandmates’ and was really the sound that made the band as good as they were.
Not to get too off-course here, but I remember having a conversation years ago with a label rep for BMG, which was their label at the time, who proudly informed that me the new Treble Charger record was “going to kick Blink 182 out of the water.” This was from an industry person I really respected and so was disappointed because I didn’t think that was going to be a case. Treble Charger was a pop band, not a pop-punk band and shoe horning them into a genre where they didn’t really belong may have been one of the reasons why they never caught on the way they should have. It was around this time Priddle left the band. I’m not saying there was a correlation or anything, but I’ve always wondered if the change in the band’s sound and image had something to do with it.
At any rate, he is still playing dreamy Beatles influenced pop with obscure lyrics and he still sounds like Al Stewart, the guy who sang “The Year of the Cat.”Oh, and you can stream his album in its entirely on his website.
Hugh Cornwell - Dakota Friday at 10 p.m. “Why don’t you people shut up? I mean, if you want to talk, why not go outside and have a fag?” This quote from a frustrated Hugh Cornwell pretty much sums up the shitty crowd he got for his set at the Dakota. It was terrible, even for the Dakota, where one chick once told me that she didn`t care about the music, she was told it was the place to be. Fine, but when you`re a musician and a legend like Hugh Cornwell is playing a small venue you shut up and listen, not brag loudly to your buddies about your `sick Pro Tools set-up“, which is what some shithead with an ironic mustache was going on about while one of the men who helped build the punk/new wave scene in the late `70s presented a clinic on great songwriting not more than 10 feet away.
At the beginning of his set Cornwell said he was going to touch on all the points of his career, with some early Stranglers numbers, which pleased a couple of guys in the front to no end, and I thought that was awesome - there should have been more fans like that to see his set. He also played some of his less familiar solo stuff as well as some material from his new album, called Hooverdam. BTW, his new is available as a free download. I’ve been listening to it at work and I really like it.
The Pack AD- Sneaky Dee’s Midnight Friday. Another shitty crowd who did not give a shit about the display in front of them. Maybe The Pack AD were too intimidating for the loser hipsters and frat boys who stumbled into Sneaky Dee’s on Friday night. Singer guitarist Becky Black channels Janis Joplin’s mournful, angry bluesy howl in a way that is absolutely chilling.
Vicious Guns - Bovine Sex Club Saturday 9 p.m. I was held up buying steak skewers at Taste of Little Italy so I was worried I would be late or miss their set, but they were starting fashionably late when got to the club. Their bio makes much of the fact that the two members are a couple and that they like to compete on stage, but I didn`t see that at all. What I saw was a couple of people having fun playing melodic challenging music with lots of sequencing and heavy beats.
Fred - Kathedral - Saturday 10 p.m. I was at the Katheral to see menwhopause, a band from New Delhi who is apparently huge in their native India, but what I got was a bunch of white guys (and girl) from Cork, Ireland with an extremely charismatic lead singer who led the sparse crowd through their set of fun pop that reminded me of the New Pornographers without the melancholy.
Redd Kross - Lee`s Palace - Saturday 1 a.m. Redd Kross had their work cut out for them. It didn`t help that on Saturday they were almost a half-hour late starting. “Fuck these rock star assholes”, I said to myself as I looked at the clock on my cell phone as the time approached 1:30.But they did not mail it in as I expected. They played full on for the entire hour they played; they went to the vaults and dusted off their early classic “Annette`s Got the Hits“ and also played their only single that could remotely be considered a hit (”Jimmy`s Fantasy”) with a new arrangement.
A cute moment occurred in the encore when singer Jeff MacDonald brought a camera out and asked for the crowd to pose for a picture because his teenaged daughter didn`t believe his band would draw anyone in Toronto. So we all stood and cheered with our hand in the air while he took the picture.After all, you gots ta help a brother out.
Update: This post was cleaned up for some light editing and formatting.
Update II: Boy do I ever hate the HTML editor in Wordpress. It insists on changing my code and the only way to get it to not do that is turn the visualization off completely, which means I have to hand code everything myself. Pain in the you-know-what.