JAMES STREET SUPERCRAWL, various Hamilton venues, Friday to Sunday (September 11 to 13). Rating: NNN
At first it was manageable. The rain, that is. Hamilton’s Spruce Invaders performed their brand-new concept album live on Friday, with Terra Lightfoot on backup vocals and wild doomsday megaphone interjections between songs by a man in a yellow raincoat. Lightfoot, too, felt the hometown love, peppering radio-friendly cuts from Every Time My Mind Runs Wild with doo-wop vocals and confident, smile-inducing guitar solos.
But when Victoria’s Frog Eyes hit the stage Saturday afternoon as a dramatic guitar and drums duo, it was raining again, and the weather was beginning to test the mettle of music- and arts-loving Hamiltonians. “It’s okay to feel weird,” singer Carey Mercer told the small, damp crowd during a short speech that somehow landed on bringing down capitalism.
People braved the wetness to hear weird shit like GUH’s recorder-guitar-trumpet interplay and the caffeinated pop of the Elwins (“I’m so glad we caught that,” I heard one fan say). But the better bets were indoors: talks, film and comedy at Mills Hardware, for instance, or perusing the shops, galleries and cafes on James Street. There was also a mysterious curtained booth in which you could visit a “non-psychic.”
By mid-afternoon the rain got heavier and more heartbreaking, forcing some stages to close early and curtailing Polaris short-listers Viet Cong’s wonderfully heavy set, which ended dramatically as the sky turned a deep pink-orange. But Hamiltonians are hardy: a crowd packed in at one end of the Crawl to catch a fall fashion show complete with a runway show by local Blackbird Studios, while at the other the Sadies and Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings drew large, resilient crowds.
Not at all Supercrawl’s fault, but it was a bummer to see such interesting, free programming (Daniel Lanois, Hayden and Michael Feuerstack played on Sunday) get washed out so thoroughly.
music@nowtoronto.com | @sarahgreene
