Thursday, June 18th was day 2 of the venerable 15-year-old North by North East (NXNE) Music Festival.

Spiral Beach, Burning Brides, Black Lips

My compatriot and I were making our way to Yonge and Dundas Square for the first of 3 nights of free concerts thrown by the festival at the square.

Though the concert at YD Square had been going on since 6pm that night, we were making a fashionably late arrival at 9:30pm. Unfortunately, that meant we missed the powerhouse and up-and-coming Toronto band Spiral Beach, who had kicked off the show at 6pm. As we arrived, the band Burning Brides were just finishing up their act, and there was already a slow-growing trickle of people arriving in anticipation of the Black Lips’ show at 10pm. We left to grab a quick bite to eat (sorry Burning Brides, food more important) and by the time we had returned the Black Lips show was already underway.

The crowd had, in the half hour we were gone, massively doubled, and the indie hipster quotient had definitely become dominant, as evidenced by the amount of flannel and thick black rim glasses. YD square looked great packed with the huge lit panels of multicolour Pepsi ads amongst an assault of other ads, a random collection of video, static, and three dimensional cut outs of commercialism against the pitch black night. During the show, YD square almost achieved the pseudo-Times Square vibe that it tries so hard to be (which will probably become even stronger when CityTV moves into their new studio overlooking the square).

On our return, The Black Lips were blasting out their Beach Boys-vibed punk rock and had a couple of girls partying on stage. At first I thought they were dancers with the band, but apparently they were just some random girls who had climbed up onto the stage. The band’s reaction was to encourage some guys to come up and join them, though none took up the offer.

The Black Lips’ sound makes them literally the perfect band for a Sunday afternoon beach party, fueled with illegal alcohol. They were definitely a good choice by NXNE to headline night one at YD square. Their sound is very SoCal punk with a lot of energy, speed and rawness that a lot of the so-called “punk” on Much Music sadly lack. As the night progressed, the band moved more away from the laid-back sunny tone they started with and more into darker heavier songs. My compatriot likened it to the idealized beach party getting rained on, complete with lightning in the background, with everybody being too busy partying to notice.

Experimental Dental School

Next stop in the night was Sneaky Dee’s to see Portland, Oregon’s Experimental Dental School which had made the list for name alone. I had never heard of them before and I wasn’t alone on that count considering Sneaky Dee’s was only about a third full at most. Transit problems meant that I got there just in time for the last song, which was unfortunate since the band was definitely worth the trip. Experimental Dental School is a duo consisting of a guy named Jesse Hall on lead vocals and guitar, and a refreshingly kick-ass girl drummer named Shoko-koko. Their sound is atmospheric, trancy, hard, fast and full of distortion with ghost-like vocals overlaying the instrumental onslaught that creates a dazed motion drag experience. Even for the one song I was present for, it was obvious the crowd loved them. There was even a small, but dedicated, mosh pit.

You Say Party, We Say Die!

Name draw and constantly hearing about them brought me to El Mocambo next, to hear You Say Party, We Say Die! As expected, there was a sizable crowd in the first floor of the Elmo despite 15 minutes to go till show time. This was impressive considering the common NXNE close-timing people employ to manage to see as many bands as possible. The five piece have a fast, spastic energy and are all great performers. Everyone but the drummer sings, creating a layered and celebratory feel that approximates the party in said name. The lead singer, Becky Ninkovic, reminded me a lot of Karen O from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and it was more than the form-fitting black unitard and bob cut hair she was rocking. Becky has a similar engaging presence, flailing dance moves, and evident passion. She often had a look of ecstasy on her face as she belted out the songs and the rest of the band were equally committed. This is a band that definitely loves their job.

All the songs were new off of their forthcoming album and the highlight was definitely the song, the name of which I didn’t catch, where the band screams out “shut out the world” repeatedly in the chorus. It was easy to imagine the band playing the song in a boarded up room screaming at the world to keep it out. The crowd was definitely consisted mostly of adoring fans as every song ended with a loud rupturous applause and cheering. The band had a lot of banter with the audience. The drummer, Devon Clifford, pretended to have found a hidden guitar under his drum set. One of the keyboardists asked the crowd, after mentioning their new album, to not download it. Obviously this was met with cheers in general and several voices yelling that they still would.

Japanther

1am brought me back to Sneaky Dee’s for Japanther who also have a great name but were highly recommended by friends as well. The crowd at the venue had more than doubled since Experimental Dental School and were milling around waiting while the band set up. The band unraveled a banner and then set up two phone handsets on mic stands, which totally threw me for a second. It all made sense when they started blasting away very fast, frantic, low-fi punk with their voices filtered by the phone handsets to produce a speaker phone quality, also reminiscent of airplane pilot announcements. Each song was backed sporadically in the intros and endings by found noises and sounds played on a cassette player, jammed and spliced together to give a TV channel flipping effect. Japanther-like Dental School are also a drum and guitar duo, but the former was psychedelic and dramatic, creating a dense drugged out ambiance. Japanther has the vibe of your best friends’ wicked punk band that can’t be truly appreciated except in a sketchy dilapidated basement packed to the rafters with people.

Appropriately, the crowd consisted of a mishmash of scenes, including a guy in 3D movie glasses reacting to the band’s barrage by almost immediately delving into a massive mosh pit. The already shaky and deteriorating Sneaky Dee floors basically bounced with each beat and several audience members tried their luck at crowd surfing with varying results. The duo are more or less split evenly on the vocal duties with perhaps interestingly the drummer being slight more of a lead and giving off a laid-back, casual feel. Through the entire show the band embodied the essence of their declaration that they were just kids with dreams that came true. The quick 2- or 3-minute punk songs are everyday stories about friends and girlfriends and the stupid shit you did last Thursday. Some are even sweet like the song where they scream out that they’ll “love you no matter where you spend the night.”

Youth Brigade

The last stop of the night was at the Bovine Sex Club. For those who have never been, it lacks cows entirely and instead has a landfill aesthetic with random junk bolted to all the walls. It was a fitting venue for Youth Brigade, which, ironically, were the oldest band I saw that night. The band is a rag tag four piece of crusty old punks in the tradition of Black Flag, who were overwhelmingly drunk and wasted long before they started. The Los Angeles-based band, who had two members from Toronto apparently, encouraged the crowd repeatedly to get drunk as well, while insulting each other in a friendly way. Expectedly, the crowd was heavy with leather jackets and studs along with the occasional hipster, and packed the entire front section of the very narrow Bovine. The music was fast, loud, aggro punk that was at times political with the requisite anti Bush song. At some points it was even literary, with the lead singer disgruntledly informing the crowd of his English major past as they jumped into a song about Jonathan Swift.

Overall, the performance was one of camaraderie, enhanced by the crowd of dedicated hard core fans who knew all the words and were mostly really drunk as well. At first I thought they might be too busy drinking to mosh (yes, in retrospect I realize that’s a ridiculously idiotic statement), but soon the crowd was moshing, though not as hard as at the Japanther show, with beer splattering everywhere. I almost got impaled by a counter at one point as the crowd surged and I was thrown against a wall next to a fallen NXNE banner. The band ended their show with a sing-along number, though to be honest people were singing along throughout the show anyways. They even invited people onto the stage to share their mics, which resulted in the small stage being swamped. As I left, my final memory of NXNE night 2 was that of a few of the Youth Brigade crowd spraying beer into the air and at each other — a fitting way to end the night.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 28th, 2009 at 10:14 pm and is filed under Arts, Entertainment, Events, Music, Review, Wish You Were Here. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.