The theme of Osheaga was once again weather as the music festival rolled into its third and final day. As the concurrent Lollapalooza festival was suspended in Chicago due to rain, the storm clouds in Montreal gathered ominously over Osheaga’s five stages intermittently delivering on that potentially disastrous promise.
That made for muddy thighs and slippery walkways, but it also diversified festival fashion as neon ponchos, umbrellas and rubber boots replaced bra-shirts, tanktops and boat shoes.
Luckily, the skies stayed closed for Santigold and Tame Impala, two acts seemingly built for midday festival stages. Some sun even peaked out for Santigold’s mood-perking set, providing an apt backdrop for her outfit changes, costumed horse dancers and crowd invasions. The music almost seemed secondary to the spectacle, but her genre-jumping hip hop/R&B/rock/new wave tunes never failed to induce a smile. Australia’s Tame Impala, meanwhile, hearkened back to the glory days of festivals, playing long, drawn-out psych jams against the slowly greying sky.
Osheaga employed a guy on the main stage areas whose entire job was to wield a hose , spraying the hot crowd with cold water. That was certainly refreshing when the sun got oppressive, but he displayed questionable judgement, going rogue on the front of the crowd as the skies threatened to open up. And they did open up, right as the Shins launched into Caring Is Creepy. That seemed almost too perfect for a band who, as loosely described by Natalie Portman as “life-changing,” rely on moments of transformative emotional grandeur. Teamed with the sped-up nostalgia cycle, the drench worked in the band’s favour, turning their profound nonsense of recent yore into heartstring-tugging pleasure-seekers while their newer songs, though not remarkably dissimilar, read like more generic indie folk tunes performed by an entirely new lineup of hired players and a noticeably grey-bearded frontman. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.
But so are, well, actual drugs. And as the last day drew to a close, it was easy to spot those that were partaking. France’s M83 played right to the altered and made the unaltered feel as if they were. They shared a timeslot with populist rockers the Black Keys on the secondary Green Stage, but M83 only know how to play headlining sets. Their synth-washed epics are nothing but a series of grand crescendos, and their big, shameless rock star moves only enhanced the feeling of ascension. Crowds of people literally ran from the bleachers towards the stage out their breakthrough hit, Midnight City, and the combination of exhaustion bliss and saxophone soloing made it feel properly like the culmination of Canada’s most travel-worthy festival. (That they had a few more tracks was a fact ignored by many).
Until next year, Montreal.
