Choke at the Virgin Mobile Mod Club

Breathing pop sensibility into jagged and polyrhythmic song structures, Choke has built a career defying generic conventions. Vastly underrated during its salad days, the Edmonton, Alberta band played with aplomb to a packed house at the Virgin Mod Club after more than half a decade out of the spotlight.

The band tightly wound their way around tracks from their better-known, later material (the anthemic “Breathing Won’t Come Easy” incited a massive sing-along with the audience), and played hearty renditions of songs that date back to the 1990s. The banter was light, the crowd had fun, and it was a fitting return to the spotlight for an influential Canadian act.

The only issue staining the set was odd corporate sponsorship. The band stood idly by as a representative from a prominent liquor company took to the stage to announce that they were giving the crowd “a hundred shots.” It was a long, uncomfortable 10-minute gap that tainted an otherwise entertaining evening.

Grade at the Virgin Mobile Mod Club

If you grew up listening to pop-punk with a gruffer edge and screamed vocals, chances are you were hearing touches of Grade. With Under the Radar dropping on Victory Records in 1999, the Burlington band combined the moodier styling of Jawbreaker with harsher vocals to create a loud-soft dynamic that came to influence everyone from Thursday to Silverstein.

Sounding as good as (if not better than) they did over a decade ago, the Ontario quintet played through all of Radar and the earlier Separate the Magnets EP. Though sound issues affected certain parts of their set (at times, all the audience could hear were drums and vocals), it was a fun and uplifting experience.

From the heart-on-sleeve pronouncements found in “The Inefficiency of Emotion” and “For the Memory of Love” to the driving power chords in “Symptoms of Simplifying the Simplistic,” it was an energetic performance that meant a lot to everyone in the room. It isn’t every day that you get to see a great band return with such force after years of inactivity.

 

Mac DeMarco

Montreal’s own Mac DeMarco wowed the Sneaky Dee’s audience at his first CMW performance last night, playing a full hour set ripe with acerbic renditions of tracks off his critically acclaimed 2012 album 2, and riffing through covers of everyone from Weezer to Limp Bizkit (you read that correctly).

Though they experienced technical problems early in the night, Mac and his crew quickly warmed to their eager audience with energetic (and characteristically goofy) interpretations of most of his small catalogue. Early highlights included his time-tested “Rock and Roll Nightclub,” and the newer track “Cooking up Something Good,” but it was a particularly funny cover of Weezer’s “Undone (The Sweater Song)” that worked the crowd into a frenzy.

It is always a blast seeing the Sneaky Dee’s concert space sway to and fro with a sea of bodies. Mac and his bandmates fed off the good vibes, and while they were playful in their instrumentation, they were tight, proficient, and most importantly, they were fun.