Canadian Music Week is kinda like North by Northeast’s poor cousin—while the latter takes place in sun-drenched early summer, nobody wants to schlep around to the clubs in the late February slush. That said, this year’s slate of CMW showcases was better than most, featuring several current buzz acts armed with great new albums. Here’s The Varsity’s take on the best of the fest.Thursday, February 27Broken Social Scene @ the eye Weekly showcase, Phoenix Concert TheatreBroken Social Scene is the best fucking thing to happen to the local indie scene in a long time. Founded by indie veterans Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning, their musical experiment has moved out of the basement and grown into an ever-expanding art-rock orchestra featuring some of the best players around. For their bravura CMW performance, BSS decided to forego their usual improvisational mayhem and treated the audience to a relatively faithful run-through of their recent surprise smash album. Some were wondering how the band would be able to fill the cavernous Phoenix, but once they began to play to the full house of more than a thousand, it was obvious that they need a room that big for their expansive sound, a dense, layered assault of beautiful noise. In less than a year, BSS have gone from being a rambling, shambling, ambient mess to a lean, mean art rock machine. This is a band that’s the total sum of its parts, and with the entire extended BSS family (including members of Stars and Metric) in tow, there were enough star turns for everybody. Guest vocalist Leslie Feist tore up the stage, she and Stars’ Amy Millan dressed in vintage white like new-age ABBA girls. A complete brass section and front line of five (!) guitars created a euphoric cacophony of sound, hurtling their way through everything from electro-pop to country-rock.BSS make playing music with your friends look like the easiest, most fun thing in the world, like a big musical group hug. Drew, who likes to say that each of the group’s shows is its last, remarked early in the set, “This could be our peak.” Hardly. It’s all uphill for this band from here.
Acacia/Alexis on Fire/T.O.E./The End/Explode the Airwaves – KathedralThe last time I saw Acacia, they sounded like Neurosis. Now they sound like bad Tool or Linkin Park. Alexis on Fire benefited greatly from the show being switched to all-ages, as the teens went nuts for the band’s tight, melodic hardcore, but apparently those kids had homework to do, because the joint pretty much cleared out after that. Obviously the CMWs aren’t known for their logic, but whoever scheduled this bill set the rest of the bands up for a fall. Energetic performances by tech-metal monsters The End and post-hardcore outfit Explode the Airwaves were wasted on a small group of their friends, while T.O.E. was just a waste. Why are three guys in their mid-twenties still playing pop-punk? That’s what children play, dudes. —Ryan KennedyFriday, February 28King Cobb Steelie, 11 p.m.Guelph groove merchants King Cobb Steelie have never been The Next Big Thing, though they were working with beats and samples long before it became trendy. Though things have been quiet in the Steelie camp since their last album came out two years ago, these veterans came out to show the youngsters how it’s done. Opening with the title track to their excellent Mayday album, they established a slinky groove with live percussion augmenting looped samples. Though sorely missing the female guest vocalists that gave Mayday its ethereal sound, it’s a feat in itself that the band is able to re-create the layered textures of their albums in a live setting. Their live show brings out the dub aspects of their sound in a more immediate way with a heavy low-end bass assault. The noticeably excited crowd had hoped to hear more new material, but the set was comprised mostly of songs from Mayday, though the politically-charged old favourite “Rational” (introduced by frontman Kevan Byrne as “Death to David Frum”) was met with enthusiasm. Armed with an arsenal of effects pedals, KSS’ live sound is surprisingly heavy, far more rock than the beats they’re perhaps best known for, so a poor vocal mix left Byrne struggling to be heard over the thunder of his bandmates. KSS’ songs tend to sound the same after a while, so the 40-minute set was just the right length to appreciate what they do. They keep pushing the parameters of what could be a very limited sound by refusing to stay within the musical box, a lesson most of the other acts at CMW could do well to learn.Stars, 12 a.m.It was appropriate that fey Montreal/Toronto combo Stars kicked off their set with “Comeback,” seeing as they’d just been on the same stage about a week earlier for their CD release show. This time they played a little rougher, a little harder, as if they had something to prove—this wasn’t the friends-and-family love-in of the last show, but rather a tougher festival showcase. But the crowd lapped it up anyway, egged on by diminutive singer Torquil Campbell, playing the loopy frontman with enthusiasm as always. Campbell looks like he has so much fun onstage that it’s hard not to be utterly charmed, and co-vocalist Amy Millan is a perfect foil, even though her soft, sweet tones were somewhat lost in the mix. Drawing from both their recent Heart album and the previous Comeback EP, Stars rocked out a little more than usual, leaving behind the gentler new numbers in favour of some of their older electro-tinged material. “Death to Death” soared on a squall of guitar noise (Millan aided by Broken Social Scenesters Kevin Drew and Andrew Whiteman on guitar), while the duet “Romantic Comedy” was fun and sprightly. Campbell introduced their final number, “Time Can Never Kill the True Heart,” with its march-like percussion and wall-of-guitars midsection, by adding: “Neither can George Bush.”Saturday, March 1Tangiers @ Chart Magazine showcase, Horseshoe Tavern, 11 p.m.You’ll be hearing about local quartet Tangiers if you haven’t already—Chart magazine’s well-planned CMW showcases are always packed, but this was beyond ridiculous. Everyone was there to see if the latest offering from the venerable Sonic Unyon label could live up to the hype, and Tangiers didn’t disappoint. Born from the ashes of former local faves Deadly Snakes and the Killer Elite, their dynamic Hot New Spirits album was the talk of the festival. Tangiers have been lumped in with the usual suspects for their garage rock sound, but let’s see the spoiled-brat art-school mopes in The Strokes conjure up this kind of raw energy. Post-punk, new wave, call it what you will, but really, it’s just plain ol’ rock and roll, played with a winning ferocity. Cool haircuts, too.
Photograph by Simon Turnbull
