musicvice.comBack for its 17th year, the annual North by Northeast (NXNE) festival and conference brought over 600 bands to Toronto over the course of five sweltering days in June.
One of the most anticipated shows was Toronto’s own Fucked Up playing a free show at Yonge and Dundas Square, a large public space smack dab in the middle of the city. Not a minute into the first song, singer Damian Abraham was over the barrier and into the sea of pulsating bodies at the front of the stage. It’s a common occurrence at most of their concerts, but it didn’t translate particularly well to an outdoor show with thousands of attendees. Abraham was barely audible, hardly visible, and the throng of photographers standing on the barrier documenting the proceedings meant you couldn’t even see the rest of the band on stage. It could’ve been the performance of the festival, but the spectacle got in the way of the music.
The Thursday night lineup at the Horseshoe Tavern was particularly strong, featuring a slew of up-and-coming Canadian acts. Montreal’s Suuns had the crowd moving the most with their brand of minimalist, dark, intense rock, while No Joy operated under the “less talk, more rock” principle, launching into their set without an introduction, forgoing banter, and leaving without a word. Usually the failure to acknowledge an audience works against a band, but when you play the hazey, shoegaze music No Joy does, it becomes part of the aesthetic. The music did the talking anyway.
Elsewhere, Chad VanGaalen played a gloriously sloppy set featuring tracks from his new album Diaper Island. Even though the band made up the set list as they went along, fumbled through opening chords of less familiar songs, and went well over the allotted 40-minute set length, the crowd ate up every minute of it. And who can blame them? The new songs are some of his strongest yet and the rarity of his tours helped with the goodwill.
