Bands I saw:

Thursday
Angry Agenda
The Fiend
Girlfixer
Shortbus Window Lickers
Geoffey Oicott
Pete Bentham and the Dinner Ladies
Menace
The Old Firm Casuals
Off (sorta, I didn’t like them so I left after a couple of songs)
Menace
The Meteors

Friday
The Creepshow
The Restarts
HDQ
The Stupids
Bouncing Souls
Peter and the Test Tube Babies (sorta, the room was packed and my feet were killing me so I sat in the bar area)
English Dogs
The Business
GBH
The Exploited

Saturday
Marching Orders
Tower Blocks
999
Control
The Boys
Reazione
Have Nots
Newtown Nuerotics
Pennywise
Deadline
Vice Squad
Subhumans

Sunday
Barnyard Masturbators
Mangled
Dragster
Crashed Out
Goldblade
Glen Matlock and the Philistines
Citizen Fish
UK Subs
Sick on the Bus
Slaughter and the Dogs
The Adicts
Jello Biafra and the Guantanamo School of Medicine

I’ve already written about this. The only thing I have to add is that I’m looking forward to seeing what they come up with on their next record. As mentioned, new singer Zoltán Téglás has a serious set of pipes on him and he could do some real damage on a Pennywise record.

4. GBH  - Foufounes Electriques, Montreal

They never disappoint. Played all the classics and a bunch from their new one.

3. Public Image Ltd – L’Olympia, Montreal

John Lydon said on his website that this was the best PiL show he ever played (Scroll about halfway down the page). What he managed to do with the current incarnation of PiL is fuse the different sounds they worked with over the years (disco, pop, commercial pop) and made it flow evenly from one song to the next.

Clocking in at three-hours, they covered all the best of their catalogue, from “Flowers of Romance” to “Death Disco” to “Rise” to “This is Not a Love Song” leaving no-one able to say PiL didn’t satisfy.

Here is them playing “Flowers of Romance” and other songs at this gig:

2. The New Pornographers – Higher Ground, Burlington VT

I didn’t take a vacation last summer and really needed to get out of town for a day or so, So when I saw the announcement that the New Pornographers were playing only a couple of hours away (on a Friday night, no less) there was no way I could not go as I missed them when they played in Montreal earlier in the summer.

While I was disappointed at first that Neko Case couldn’t make it, that was an extremely small part of what was an excellent show. Part of it was that South Burlington is a nice quiet town that reminds of some of the small towns on Vancouver Island.

The people at the show were really friendly and the New Pornos played a set that concentrated on their new record Together, yes, but also went back to “Body Says No” from 2000s Mass Romantic. Good vibes all around. I had an awesome time.

And proving that there is nothing you can’t find on YouTube, here is them playing “Crash Years” at this show:

1. Asexuals – Cabaret Juste Pour Rire, Montreal

I jokingly told some co-workers that I had waited 25 years to see this show. And in some ways that’s true. Sure, I have seen the Asexuals play a few times back in the day, even interviewed them a couple of times, but to me it was the “other” Asexuals, the more straightforward alternative rock band a la the Replacements then the speedy yet progressive hardcore band when John Kastner was singing.

The band concentrated on their first two records. Storming out as expected to the title track from Be What You Want, and then jumped right in to “Contra Rebel”. I was happy that I finally got to hear songs like “Where Were You?” and “Contemporary World” in their proper live setting.

Finishing their set with a cover of “Young Man in Transit” by the Nils was a nice touch. It seemed like a tribute to one of their contemporaries in the early Montreal hardcore scene, who will unfortunately never have their own moment the way the Asexuals did on that night.

Here is a video of them playing “Ego Trip” at this show.

Honorable Mentions: Ripcordz at the Katacombs, Grinderman at Metropolis, The Soft Pack at NXNE, NQ Arbuckle at the Horseshoe.

Sam McPheeters captured all this in a huge article on the man formerly known as Doc Dart.  McPheeters, a veteran of the scene himself, having been the frontman for the highly influential hardcore band Born Against in the early ’90s, and a columnist for Maximum Rock N Roll and the former editor of the fanzine Dear Jesus, is an excellent choice to tell Dart`s story. Having been an important  and controversial voice in the scene himself, McPheeters is one of the few writers from the scene that could relate to Dart, now given himself the unusual name 26, in a perceptive, yet sensitive and unjudgemental way.

He traces 26`s roots from when he was a young bank executive working at his family`s bank, to his dismissal and starting the Crucifux in his late 20s. What it most striking is the juxtaposition between the descriptions of the notoriety of being in a popular punk rock band and the life he subsequently fell into, which, frankly, sounds about two degrees removed from Unabomber territory.

If nothing else, this article made me depressed. This is a story of a man who is clearly unhappy, possibly mentally ill, with an unhealthy need for confrontation for its own sake.